For those that haven’t heard, the tool hire site is open.  It’s our people powered launch initiative and we’re starting to see some great videos.

The first hire to have been completed and film uploaded was Roller Hockey Action Man.  There were no broken bones and the video is up on the site so we’re dispatching the first V.I.G. SIM card today.  You can check out the hire video here: http://tools.giffgaff.com/tool/12/Roller_Hockey_Action_Man

We’ve got 12 tools in total and by popular demand, all tools are out currently, but the promotion will last for 8 weeks so go onto the site and request your tool in order to get an email when it’s back in.

I’ve not introduced our drivers before – Ko & Gil http://tools.giffgaff.com/log/2009/11/Say_hello_to_Ko_and_Gil.../23, these are the boys that will travel up and down the country to bring the tools to the agreed location for making a film, thank you sat nav and Ko & Gil.  Our first hire made when Tool Hire opened was for York on Saturday.  No weekend lie-in for Gil, he was up at the crack of dawn with the Poo Handler suit in the back of the van.  Here’s the suit in all its glory: http://tools.giffgaff.com/tool/11/Poo_Handler

We hear that the hire was a great success and we’re hoping to be able to send a Very Important Giffgaffer (V.I.G.) SIMs out to the hirer by the end of the week when they upload their video.  So for clearing up some poo in a fun way, filming it and getting it on the site, they’re going to have free UK mobile calls, texts and internet for a whole year. 

The Gimp has been hired first for this Wednesday.  If you’re in Central London, look out for him.  He’s not too difficult to miss.

And finally, our claim to fame so far is that we nearly made it onto the Jonathan Ross show on Friday night with Captain Stress Relief, he’s been in the JR studio and was actually filmed with the big guy himself.  Unfortunately, we were pipped to the post by the Hawaiian Hula Chair which I have to say is very funny. 

We said we’d be people powered – and for those new to giffgaff, that means we’re involving our members in our business and rewarding them for their efforts.  True to our word, we’re people powering our launch.  We don’t have mega advertising budgets so we need our members to help make us famous –  if you’re handy with a video camera and have a sense of humour why not try hiring one of our tools from our tool site and shoot a film for us – this is giffgaff, so if you do a good job you’ll get rewarded with a V.I.G giving you FREE mobile calls, texts and web browsing for a whole year.  What’s more, we’ve got £5000 waiting for the five best videos. Check out our ‘how to’ videos to get a feel for it. Another way to get V.I.G is by helping other members answer their questions in the community. Click here to find out more.

Then there’s giffgaff payback, which is how we recognise and reward all the nice things members do to help us out.  With Payback you earn points for helping out giffgaff – you can get someone else to join, help another member with their giffgaff queries or help our marketing team with ideas, web site content or ad production. Each point is worth a penny and you can convert them to cash, mobile credit or a charity donation twice a year. Helping someone join giffgaff by giving them a SIM will earn 500 points (or £5) for the existing member – and there’s no limit to how many people you can sign up – anyone out there fancy a new career?

With the help of our members we’ll keep our costs down – and that means that we can offer great prices for our mobile service.  It’s sort of our vision to be the most honest and transparent mobile network and that led us to a competitive and simple pricing strategy for launch.  Calls to UK mobiles and landlines will cost just 8p per minute and texts just 4p.  We also wanted our members to feel the benefit of the giffgaff community growing – so we’ve made most calls between giffgaff phones free – so the bigger and more successful we become, the more free calls our members can make.

Call abroad a bit? With giffgaff you won’t get ripped off – we’ve chosen 36 of the most popular destinations around the world where it will only cost you just 8p to call a landline and 16p to call a mobile regardless of time of day.

Use the internet on your phone? Web browsing from your handset will be free at launch – we’d like our members to tell how they use the internet on their phone and how best to pay for it. Because we’re people powered we’ll listen, and do our very best to introduce charging that’s simple to understand, fair and great value for money in 2010.

In fact these conversations have started with our founding member community.  We’ve already seen great ideas on future pricing and mobile internet and our pricing will evolve with the input of those members.  We’d love to hear more though, so keep the ideas coming, we are listening.

I hope you like what we’ve done – let us know your thoughts one way or the other on our forum or order a SIM from our site right here – the SIM is free – all you have to is order your first £10 top-up.

And finally – you’ll have noticed that we haven’t taken “beta” off our site yet – that’s because we’ve lots of features to add to our website and mobile service to make them even better. Whilst we’re doing this we’ll keep you updated on what features are arriving when and asking you which new ones you’d like to see. Just visit the blog or follow us on Twitter.

Mike

After a frantic last week and a half, I’m very happy to be able to announce our launch date. Its been a huge task to build a mobile business from scratch in just over 8 months – but with lots of elbow grease, late night testing and Krispy Kreme doughnut eating by the giffgaff team, we’ve beaten our target of launching before Christmas by some way.

We’re keeping details of our launch pricing under our hat until next Wednesday but, as we’ve been discussing in our forums we will be launching with a free data allowance of 100MB per day – and will be asking our members to tell us how they think we should price it when we introduce charging next year.

We’re also going to be “people powering” our launch advertising by asking members to help make us famous, by hiring and videoing themselves using one of our helpful giffgaff tools – you can get a look behind the scenes at the team who are building these here. In true giffgaff fashion our intrepid video stars will get rewarded – everyone who posts a video will become a V.I.g. (Very Important giffgaffer) and get a special V.I.g. SIM card that gives them free UK calls, texts and data for a year.

Making sure our existing members are well looked after is as important as getting new ones for us, so we’re applying people power to that too. We’ve already got an active community on our forums and we’ve decided to give the most helpful forum members the chance to get V.I.g SIMs as well – look out for a forum post from Claire later on today to find out how this will work.  So if you’re naturally nice and helpful, get ready to contribute and earn your V.I.g. spurs.

So, the waiting is nearly over. If you like the what we’re doing you can order a SIM from next Wednesday here at giffgaff.com - we’re looking forward to working with you.

Our focus has been on our web shop this week – testing on the mobile service with our test SIMs has gone really well with no major outstanding bugs that we don’t understand or have fixes for.

So we’ve turned out attention to the web shop and all the ordering and provisioning processes that need to work to get SIMs to our customers and to enable them to activate. We’ve still got a couple of issues we need to work through – for the technically minded they’re to do with synchronous vs asynchronous transactions – and we have fixes and testing scheduled for the weekend. So by early next week we should be in a position to fix our launch date.

When we launch, in addition to our shop, the major change to our site will be our member service knowledge base and contact centre system. We’ve been working with a company called RightNow who provide a cloud computing solution for all of this – and its looking really good. We’ve also been putting it through its paces this week by completing the training for our contact centre staff who were dispatched back to Northern Ireland today to complete preparations for launch.

Now as a complete aside – In my previous job "dealing" with filesharing on the internet was a hot topic and its good to see its as hot as ever. Have a read through these two....

Think Tank -

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6898069.ece

Cory Doctorow -

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6896049.ece

Both take the same view that files sharing is inevitable and can't be stopped but draw very different conclusions on how it should be dealt with. Personally I think Doctorow hits the nail on the head with his digital updating of the King Canute story - if you're a record exec time to be very worried indeed!!

Mike

Let me throw some words at you ‘unlimited’, ‘free’, ‘for life’, ‘forever’ - these are just some words that are currently being used when communicating mobile promotions to you.

It would seem that in the street fight for customers, buzz marketing words have been stretched arguably beyond their meaning.  My favourite ‘free’ promotion (from an unnamed network) is free on net calls, which has a connection charge and a cost per minute, after a period of time.  I’m sure you will agree this is an interesting interpretation of the word ‘free’. 

Having worked in the mobile industry for a while I am constantly disappointed when I visit the supermarket.  As I gaze across the tea aisle the brightly coloured shelf barker informs me ‘Buy one pack of tea and get one free’, well that’s not good enough! In my world you buy one box of tea and for 30 days get an unlimited regime of consuming as much tea as you want – up to 542 tea bags, organic teas are not included and the purchase must be on a day that starts with the letter ‘T’.

The mobile market shouts a lot about ‘unlimited’ however it doesn’t really mean ‘unlimited’, it means ‘use lots but not too much…or we will get upset’.  Do you think that’s fair?

Having been responsible for launching ‘unlimited’ offers in the past, I personally think they benefit the customer, you have piece of mind, no bill shock or no worry of running out of credit and all we (the network), ask is not to go off the deep end with usage – happy days.  A network has recently introduced an unlimited offer which gives £500 worth of usage a month before you hit the fair use policy, are people really going to hit that limit….surely not.

I have seen examples of customers buying a massive ‘unlimited’ bundle and not using enough minutes or texts to make their money back but I have also seen customers go text crazy exceeding the value of the purchased bundle.

I was reading dijay_94 comment on one of the Forums which says ‘unlimited’ is not truly unlimited as it has a fair use policy.  This made me think, as an industry how should we talk about our value messages? 

I’m off for a cup of tea but let me know what you think…

Tom

Big week last week on the testing front.

We've had our test SIMs in and have been rolling out mobile services onto the live O2 network. Its gone pretty much as expected – some issues and bugs discovered as we moved from our staging environment to live but the great news that we’ve finished the week with SIM activation, voice calls, SMS and billing all working.

Also, we’re about to put in a major order for our stock of SIMs, just one more fantastic milestone passed that makes it feel that much more ‘real’.

Our launch web portal is also taking shape and we’re expecting a big update to that on Monday – the team have been working really hard to make sure we have everything we need for launch and have even been able to squeeze in a few additional features too.

So things are coming together – we reckon by Thursday/Friday we’ll be confident enough in our plan to be able to pin down a launch date and will be announcing it shortly thereafter.

Mike