Posts by tim

A little word from the people behind it all...

Don't worry 'Anonymous Coward', you haven't ruined anyones business plan by doing a whois lookup! The first line of the story reads..."A new service from WDSGlobal will send your mobile all the configuration settings it needs....."

I'm personally involved with this project and the story / comments don't really tap into the real value. Let me make a couple of points:

1) The service has been engineered largely to support mobile app companies that need to offer data configuration services to their end users. Typically, many of these companies lose 30% of potential users because the target handset is not correctly set for data. However, traditional hosted config services are expensive for these sort of companies and this provides a model to offer supportative configuration and pass on the cost of running the service to the end-user. This will be delivered through forthcoming APIs - and is not immediately clear through this initial direct-to-consumer site.

2) You can retrieve some settings from a variety of sources (not all!), but many users don't. We want to offer a convenient and fast way of retrieving settings without any manual text entry. We also run call center support services for operators and OEMs and nearly half of all tech support calls we answer relate to data configuration. It's not easy for everyone. Indeed, many don't even make it to tech support - they simply abandon the service.

3) The service is charged for via PSMS. It's cheaper than a ringtone and most other mobile content so it depends what value people put on setting up their phone for services such as email. Yes, you may be able to get email settings from your carrier but I'll bet it's only a handful. We support email settings from over 4000 email providers - no one else does that.

4) There's a growing army of foreign market handsets entering networks that have not been sold directly by the carrier (asian oem devices for example).These typically are not supported by the operator config service / customer care.

I'm pretty confident that we can configure a handset faster than most can manually search and enter a configuration or call their carrier support line. Again, it's about the value that people place in the service - it's convenient, fast, easy etc. We also deliver settings (for email) that people just won't be able to retrieve OTA from their operators etc.

Thanks for listening.