Those of you already using your giffgaff SIM, will be familiar with the Newcastle tone as the ‘voice’ of giffgaff, whenever you pick up your phone messages. Our voicemail system was recorded with Tom Oldham, who also provided the voice over for our ‘What is giffgaff?’ film.

Our objective was to provide a voicemail that was positive and straightforward, both in tone and language. We initiated the project back in September and recorded all of the speech during 5 separate sessions. The starting point was to review a framework of prompts and really develop the language and terminology to make it feel much more human and conversational. Because the prompts are recorded as separate sound files, one of the biggest challenges was to ensure the tone of each prompts flowed naturally together. There were some amusing out-takes from the sessions, where Tom has added his own good humour. We’ve left a few in, for the keen-eared amongst you. My favourite one is “Sorry, I don’t know how to break it to you ... but that PIN’s incorrect.” Hopefully that’s one that you won’t hear too often!

What may surprise you is the depth and complex nature of all the different prompts on the system. Many people only hear the prompts related to listening to voicemail, but there are a number of additional and helpful features in the system. For example, if you’re going on holiday and won’t have your mobile switched on all the time, you have the ability to set up a temporary message so that any callers know you won’t be available. Very handy so your friends and loved ones know you’re not intentionally ignoring them.

But I think we've got an opportunity for our voicemail system to continue to evolve, in the same way giffgaff does, through its community. Perhaps we could introduce recorded greetings from our members in some way. What are your thoughts?

I’d be interested in your views.

Hello, I’m Glyn. I don’t actually work for giffgaff, but I’ve been working with the team for about 9 months now, helping to develop the idea, the brand, and trying to work out how to do people powered marketing.

I hope you’re enjoying the service. I’ve been dogfooding, and it’s all gone to plan so far. The SIM arrived quickly, and activated easily. I needed some new APN details to get data and MMS working on my HTC Magic, but I found those straight away on the forum and they worked. And I’ve enjoyed great service since, including streaming Spotify over 3G with all that lurvely free data.

Anyway, I’m not going to bang on about my experience. Instead I wanted to use the opportunity of Christmas to talk about something at the heart of the giffgaff idea.

The idea for giffgaff was sketched out, as all the best business ideas are, on the back of a napkin. There were eight principles (we must post these here soon), and right at the top of the list was one word: Mutuality. But was does mutuality mean in general, and what does it mean specifically to giffgaff?

Wikipedia says that “a mutual (organisation) exists with the purpose of raising funds from its members... which can then be used to provide common services to all members of the organization.”

Mutual organisations are built on the principle of the common good. And they include mechanics like having a say in the direction of the organisation, and earning money back.

Now, mutuality as a concept goes back a long way. I’ve worked with The Co-operative in the past, which can trace its history right back to the Rochdale Pioneers – an early mutual organisation, and the first to pay a dividend. And just the other night I was doing the traditional yearly festive viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life, with the plot centred around the Building and Loan Association – what we know in the UK as a building society, and mutually held.

For most of the last twenty years, it was easy to think that mutuality was a concept from the past. Headlines were dominated by Headlin building societies de-mutualising and becoming PLCs.

But now mutuality is resurgent. The Co-operative is growing, acquiring Somerfield. Fairtrade (global sales increased 22% in 2009) is built on grower co-operatives. People are using the co-operative way to self-organize anything from local veg. box delivery schemes to childcare. And, perhaps most excitingly of all, mutuality lies at the heart of several web 2.0 ideas.

In his book Here Comes Everybody (one of our ‘bibles’ when we were developing the giffgaff idea), Clay Shirky talks about how Flickr makes possible things that institutional companies cannot achieve. And it does this through a particularly modern form of mutuality. There is an ‘acceptable bargain’ between the members of the Flickr community – that I upload my photos and can in return use yours (with some rights reserved). And the brilliant technology takes away most of the friction in that sharing process.

That’s the kind of ‘modern mutuality’ upon which we based giffgaff. It’s not worthy or outdated. It doesn’t even require much effort. But the more you put in, the greater the reward.

Currently our mutuality is manifested in several ways:

·         You sign up to a service with people powered customer service, and in return we give you the UK’s lowest rates.

·         You help out with marketing, recruitment and service, and earn payback.

·         You help us with business decisions and, hopefully, we all have a better service as a result.

But that’s just the start. We’re constantly thinking about new ways to put mutuality at the heart of giffgaff and, as always, would welcome input from you.

Right, back to the mince pies. Have a great, and mutual, 2010.

Xmas is now on us so I’m hoping that you’ve all bought your presents and are not doing a late, mad dash around the shops, especially with the weather we’ve had for the last week or so.

It’s amazed me how the UK always seems unprepared for handling the snow when it comes each year, but equally warmed by the numerous stories of generosity and people managing to find ways to get home to their friends and families.

The big news at giffgaff this week is the launch of our friend pack, which will give you 500 payback points for each friend who tops up a SIM and an extra £5 for them, when they do. Send them to your friends, send them to yourself and give them out. After all, Xmas is a time for giving.

… Merry Xmas from all of us at giffgaff …

Now that we're all covered up in snow and struggling to sing Mariah Carrey's "All I want for Xmas is youuuuu", we thought it would be nice to give a Xmas surprise to all our members. Since its now time for meeting our family and friends, we thought you'd appreciate if we made it easier for you to get your mates on board giffgaff, and for you to earn a whopping 500 payback points for each ones that joins!

If you've already ordered and activated your SIM, you can send/give a SIM card to your mates. Once your friend activates the SIM, you'll earn 500 payback  points. There’s no limit to the number of points you can earn, so the more friends you get onboard giffgaff the more you’ll get back at payback time in May. To start with, you can order up to 5 individual SIM packs at a time, as each one gets activated you can order another one.

You can either arrange SIMs to be dropped to your mates doorstep (let them know it’s coming) - or you can enter your own postal details and hand it to them when you next see them. And as a special treat for your friend taking your advice to sign up to giffgaff, when they top-up £10 to activate, we'll put an extra £5 credit on their account to get them started.

So, your mates will get £5 extra credit – and you could earn yourself unlimited payback points to turn into cash in May, plus you’ll get to talk to and text each other for free.  Merry Xmas giffgaffers!

If you are already registered head to spread the word to benefit from this offer

Hitting the streets for some last minute Christmas shopping, or planning to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales? There are some really useful apps you can install on your mobile, that help make sure you get the best of the bargains on offer.

One example is RedLaser (for iPhone), a barcode reader application that turns your phone’s built-in camera into a kind of supermarket scanner. Whilst you're out and about, use the app on your iPhone to scan the barcode of the item you’re interested in and it cleverly looks up the item online. It then automatically compares prices on Google, giving you the information you need to make sure you’re getting a great deal. Very handy if you’re out doing the Christmas or New Year’s shop. We think it works well with a giffgaff SIM and free data

Happy shopping!

Last night the giffgaff team had a lot of fun (and a fair bit of food and alcohol) at our launch party in Camden. It was a real celebration of the work that the whole team have achieved over the last few months, culminating in the launch of our network on November 25th.

The theme of the party was to dress up from head to toe in one of our pixel colours - vibrant purple, bottle green, burnt orange or sunny yellow.

Everyone was really impressed with the amount of effort people went to with their outfits. Amongst the costumes at the party were fred flintstone, a banana, 3 christmas trees, a trio of pantomime dames, a Buddhist monk, a tellytubby (i believe it was ‘la la’?), and even a group of 10 Hare Krishnas (complete with hand cymbals). Judge the outfits for yourself by checking out a few of the pictures below. We certainly didn’t envy their journeys in on the tube! Let us know your favourites.

We were also lucky enough to meet one of our very own forum contributors! bigfatbball2 was at the party and the team were really excited to meet him. We hope you had a great time.

There are definitely a few sore heads in the office today, but the post-party curry lunch has certainly helped people feel a bit more human.

A BIG thanks to all our friends who made it such a good night and to everyone at the Camden Arms, the DJ and the excellent band ‘Fake Tan’.

I hope you’re enjoying your own Christmas festivities.

Rob

Tool Hire is going great guns with 20 hires last week, including the Gimp who spent Saturday on a massive pub crawl with loads of dressed up Santas.

We’ve had a Poo Handler in Rainham, Kent, the Cuddle Monster at the seaside in Brighton, the Photo Booth snapping Christmas shoppers in Covent Garden and the Caricature Artist crafting master pieces in Central London. Happy Feet was hired out and was completely ambushed at Hyde Park Corner where there is clearly a need for socks!

We’ve received some great videos to date including Amazing Phil’s ‘Captain Stress Relief’ which has been viewed over 55, 500 times! We’re expecting lots more so keep the videos coming.

So if you need Captain stress to release you from the Christmas shopping, Get involved guys, to remind you of the carrot – you’ll get free UK mobile calls, texts, and web for a whole year. Please we have 5 lots of £5,000 to giveaway to the best videos.

Hire one at www.giffgaff.com/tools

Christmas is just round the corner, and in the same way that turkey’s don’t vote for it I suspect that bankers the nation over won’t be voting for Mr Darling after his pre-budget report on Wednesday. Nevertheless, we didn’t want that to spoil the fun for our gallant tool hirers so we rushed our latest tool out just in time and took it down to Westminster  – you can see our City Spanker in action here. 

We’ve also been getting on with the serious business of planning logistics around the holiday period and have now set our day for last orders to guarantee delivery before Christmas – its 4pm on Monday 21^st December.

And finally in today’s brief blog, a quick apology for those of you waiting for our “Send a SIM” feature to be released.  We’ve had to postpone the release to next week due to a few gremlins that were lurking in the website code – sorry about the delay – we’re sure it will be worth the wait.

Now that we have safely launched, it’s time for me to say goodbye and hand over the reins to the new permanent CTO.

I joined giffgaff just over eight months ago when there was little in place except the gaffer and a slide set full of ideas.  Since then it’s been a whirlwind of activity which resulted in the full launch last week.  I’ve very much enjoyed working with the guys here, our partners and suppliers, and  especially with you: the giffgaff community.  It’s been really satisfying to build the site from scratch and then see all of you come together in the way that you have.  There’s been some brilliant ideas like ‘people powered call centre’ from bigfatbball2 and ‘SMS the forum’ from andymorris.  These will really help shape the future roadmap, so keep them coming.  

I’m very pleased to announce that the new CTO is Nigel and from today he will be on the forums using the giffgaff_cto login that I have been using up until now.   There are lots of things in the pipeline and I know he is very keen to get your views on what you like and what you don’t.

For me, I’ll be continuing my business as an independent consultant working with a number of clients across the UK.  I also have a couple of my own projects which I can now dedicate some time to so watch this space……

Goodbye giffgaff and good luck.  It’s been a real pleasure.

Chris