Children In Need 2010 - £500k+ by text!

Charlie and Paul and some of the
Children in Need Team at BT Tower

Well this blog is one year old, and this is my last post as an IMI/WIN team member, but a great one to end on.

As many of you would have been aware we were assisting Children in Need with text donations this year. Charlie and I were in the BT Tower on Friday evening till the show finished at 2am, supporting the Children in Need team with live updates on the donations. On Friday the text to donate service was mainly used to support the outside broadcast events, with promotion on large screens at the venues - we got a steady flow of donations amounting to around £90,000 during the evening. 

Saturday afternoon at 5:30 the BBC showed a highlights show of the best bits from Children In Need (available on iPlayer, here, for next week or so). As all the call centres were now closed this show just featured text donations. There was a promo (top left) through out the show, plus calls to action by JLS. This show saw a massive spike in donations, with the platform handling 1000+ donations a minute at peak. The total raised shot up to over £450,000 and adding in the money raised during the One Show in the run up IMI/WIN will have assisted in collecting over £500,000. Which I think is a pretty fantastic total that everyone at IMI/WIN should be very proud of, thanks to the many people that helped support the event.

Out and about and need to record at home?

If you have Sky TV you can use one of the best mobile apps out there - Sky Remote Record. The application is available for a variety of platforms, including iPhone, Android and Symbian, but is even supported via SMS.

With all the methods you do need to register for the service on the Sky.com. If you have an iPhone you will need to visit the iTunes Store, but for other devices you can simply visit http://p.wecomm.com/sky on your mobile.

To record a program just select a genre, I chose Entertainment. You are then presented with a view very similar to the normal Sky EPG. In the pic I have turned my phone to landscape to get a fuller view.

Choose the program you would like to record by clicking on it, you then get a summary of the program. On the summary page you simply click on "Record". This request is sent from the app to Sky, they then send it to their satelite and then down through the satelite tranmission to your set top box.

And that is, great user experience. But even if you dont have a whizzy phone you can even record via SMS, see below.

I am not aware of other providers doing similar, but I am a Sky subcriber, so if you have Virgin / BT Vision etc let us know via the comments.



To Set Up a Recording via SMS
Compose an SMS in the following format, separating each section with a full stop: Programme title. Channel (name or number). Date DD/MM. Time HH:HH e.g. Lost. Sky1. 18/02. 22:00

Send this SMS to 61759 (61SKY) if you are a UK customer, or 53759 (53SKY) if you are an ROI customer

You'll receive a message to let you know your request has been sent to your Sky+ or Sky+HD box. Each confirmation using this method costs 25p/€0.50.

PayPal Mobile payments growing in the UK

Apparently more than one million people in the UK have used PayPal to make a payment or send money from their mobile phones. Month-on-month mobile transactions on the service were up 20% in July and August this year in the UK, with customers making an average of five mobile transactions a month.

PayPal had already said that it expects to see $700 million of mobile payments go through its system globally this year.

PayPal currently has apps available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices.

What's the noise about HD Voice?

What is it?

Orange HD Voice provides clearer calls by cutting out background noise. They say its the biggest revolution in phone calls for 20 years. It should be particularly useful to radio stations, improving the quality of remote interviews, and providing an invaluable service to those working in noisy environments.

How does it work?

HD Voice uses Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband (ARM-WB). Currently only a small part of your voice is transmitted on a normal mobile call. HD promises to use a lot more of your speech. Instead of transmitting the whole waveform, intelligent algorithms look for consecutive sections of speech that are similar, then, if two sections are alike, the redundant information is stripped out, allowing the signal to be compressed.

When can I get it?

HD Voice has been out in Germany for a while and is now available throughout the UK on the Orange network. It's free on HD Voice enabled handsets that sport the HD Voice logo (above). Nokia and Samsung have been the first to launch, with the Nokia 5230, X6 and E5, and the Samsung Omnia Pro - ok so not many yet, but more will launch soon.