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Jaiku looks cool... wait $300/month for "presence?"

Submitted by Richard Smith on July 15, 2006 - 4:25pm.
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Jim has blogged about the irrationality of data charges in Vancouver. Here is a real-life example:

A very cool little application called Jaiku just popped up on my radar today, courtesy of pasta & vinegar.
I've mentioned that blog before and it continues to impress. 

Anyway, I read through Nicolas' posting and thought - this is something that could really catch on! What it is, essentially, is "presence management" for your mobile phone. You know how cool it is that you can see whether your IM contacts are online or not (with little green dots or whatever)? Well, this puts that same feature onto your phone. 

How does it do that? Simple - small data blasts whenever you are using the phone, that go back to a central server. Pretty much the same way that MSN or iChat does it. How much does it cost? Ah, here's the rub. The Jaiku web site mentions that it uses about 10mb of data per month. Not much, you think? Well, check on Fido's data plan page, and see what you think. 

Best case scenario? You have the 25, 50 or 100Mb plans and aren't using 10MB each month, so you don't notice the extra data... other than the $50, $75, or $100 a month that you pay for that privilege. 

Worst case scenario? You don't have a data plan or you are "over" in your data plan and have to pay 3 cents per kb. 3 cents? That's not much, is it? Well, you'd be surprised.... That's $30 per megabyte. And if you use 10mb, that's $300. Incredible, huh? For comparison, a typical Shaw or Telus account provides for 40 gb for $40 a month. That is 40 thousand megabytes (40 million kilobytes) for $40 or .00004 cents per kb. 

In other words, data over the air is 10 thousand times more expensive. (Have I done the math correctly here?) I suspect that services like Jaiku - as cool as they are - won't take off in the short term. 

Jaiku seems to realize this is a problem, even in Europe where they are based (it is a Finnish company) and they recommend an unlimited plan.

But would you want to run the risk of a plan that just runs running over? At the chance that it could hit you with a $300 bill? 

No. I didn't think so. 

...r

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Submitted by Andy Smith (not verified) on November 13, 2006 - 12:48am.
While I agree that it is currently economically unfeasible in many places, I think that is only a (short) matter of time before the giant evil gsm megacorps get a healthy dose of VoIP fear and lower their rates to sensible levels. Here in Holland we're already seeing the beginnings of this from T-Mobile.
Submitted by Richard Smith on November 16, 2006 - 10:21pm.
I would like to think that we will, someday, have a competitive infrastructure market, and one of those "players" is wireless. Perhaps, in the long run, it will be something akin to wimax, or wifi with wimax backhauls (more likely, in the short term), and then a lot of the gsm nonsense goes away. We get new problems, of course, but they are the sort of problems that computer folk have been dealing with for a long time and using Moore's Law to their advantage. I just acquired a UTStarcom WiFi phone (SIP VoIP). It is not exactly a replacement for a cell phone, but it has some interesting built-in possibilities (like presence management for free... the jaiku "feature" that could rack up a $300 bill).
Submitted by Richard Smith on November 24, 2006 - 5:57pm.
More on mobile presence, in a follow-up post from Pasta and Vinegar, with concerns about the phenomenon from Janne Jalkanen and Niko Nyman. 


Janne thinks presence is redundant because everyone is online all the time. This is silly, of course, since presence management - done properly - isn't just "presence" but a description of the quality of that presence: am I on the phone, have I made any calls recently, am I texting, have I marked myself as "away"? That's what people get from MSN/Skype/iChat - insight into the "callability" (do I want to bother them?) of the other party. 


Niko grumps that the mobile presence services "suffer" from Metcalfe's Law (which posits that the value of a network is some function of the number of nodes - usually a pretty high order function such as "squared" (although see some math from Andrew Odlyzko on why those numbers are usually a bit high)). 


His real complaint, that people don't really care about presence, may have value, but I don't see how that is related to Metcalfe's law. What he is really saying is that he doesn't think it will be popular. I guess that is possible. Like MSN isn't very popular, either. 


None of these things will be popular if they aren't automatic - that's why MSN automatically changes your status depending on what you do on your computer - and if they are automatic then they can cost you a huge amount of money. 

So they won't take off while the costs are out of proportion to their value. That's the real drag on their uptake. Perhaps we should watch their use in England's "3" network users.