Right then here is the second of Hotwire PR‘s pre-MWC checklists (here’s the last one) that will be useful (or potentially stressful reading!) for anyone working in public relations and marketing for brands.

News: MWC is a crowded and noisy event with all brands vying for attention. What is your big news for the show and do you have any customers willing to support your claims? Customer references speak volumes when it comes to coverage.

Perfect your pitch: With media and analysts receiving hundreds of calls in the run up to MWC, why should Rory Cellan-Jones @bbcnews speak to you? Decide on three key messages for the show that will make your company stand out from the crowd.

MWC Show Daily: The freelancers and editors writing for the Show Daily will soon be announced. The sooner the team receive embargoed press releases, the better chance you have of inclusion so start sending now.

Social Media: With social media platforms often the first port of call for news and key trends at technology events, how will you be making use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Foursquare this year?

Have you got all your ducks in a row, yet? Don’t worry if you haven’t but you should definitely be turning your attention toward MWC now.

Hotwire is hosting a pre-MWC reception shortly to discuss all these issues above — and I’m going to be there to offer some perspectives from the blogger/media standpoint.The evening is targeted specifically for those working in marketing at brands and vendors. So if that’s you, please come along and say hello. It’s taking place at Zebrano Bar on Greek Street, Soho, on the evening of the 25th of January.

I’m really looking forward to the evening. Do please RSVP as soon as you can to Fiona (here’s her email).

Strolling through the streets of New York this evening on the way back to the hotel from a meeting I took a look at my BlackBerry and saw the familiar wind-up text from Vodafone. The message reads:

Just to let you know, you’ve used over 3MB of data which has cost you 3 per MB so far. Once you use more than 5MB in a day, the charge becomes 15 inc VAT for each 5MB.

I’ve written about this before. I don’t know why Vodafone make these messages so cryptic.

Shouldn’t the message read, “You’ve used 9?”

No. Of course not. That’s quite expensive. Much better to ease the customer into a false sense of security — to try and avoid too much bill shock. Indeed, the more confusion and the lower the perception of costs, the better.

It’s ridiculous. It’s not just an issue confined to Vodafone — Three, for example, is a lot more direct about the costs in their text updates. The fundamental issue is that the rates are still far too high — Vodafone’s team are obviously aware of this or they wouldn’t have felt the need to disguise and divert attention from them.

It’s a sad state of affairs, it really is. I decided to record a video — for posterity’s sake — of how I was feeling about it. I’m intending to be able to look back at this in years (5? 10?) to come when this is no longer an issue. I wonder what the marketplace will look like at that point. What will the phrase ‘carrier’ or ‘operator’ or ‘roaming’ mean in 5 years time? Or 10 years? It is realistically going to need a decade before I can stride between geographies without having to care too much about the resulting data costs?

If you’ve got 10 minutes and you’re in the mood for an outpouring of emotional geekish disbelief, click on and tell me what you think.

What’s your view: Will the roaming issues we know today have gone away by 2020?

[Note: Nigel on Google+ points out that Vodafone do offer a 'rest of the world' roaming deal -- 5 for 25mb a day and that is valid in the United States. Although this is certainly a lot better than this 3 per megabyte nonsense, my key point is the fact it's still crazy pricing. For instance 5 per day for my 2-week trip equates to 70.]

It’s time for the sixth post in our Operator Innovation series.

Last week I looked at the issue of SMS and how operators still have time to leverage one of their strongest assets — messaging and the phone number identity that underpins it.

This week I’m looking at added value — or semi-intangibles. I’ve often remarked before that operators need to get into the lifestyle business more. For large sections of the population, call minutes and text messaging bundles are a known quantity. Yup. Next. Move on. Is that really all you can offer me? More minutes? Double minutes? 3.5 extra minutes if I call between the hours of blah and blah? Double texts on a Tuesday if I top up with a fiver?

What if I’m a contract customer?

This is where it gets increasingly frustrating for certain segments of the operator market.

There’s a lot of people out there who define themselves as sovereign individuals. They might be contractors or perhaps self-employed. They are, fundamentally, business people. They’re either total entrepreneurs or they have a wild entrepreneurial streak that surfaces regularly. And they ‘speak’ brand. They have the best watch, the nicest suit — they research the best case for their iPad 2, they buy the highest quality accessories for their top-of-the-range Sony ultralight laptop or their Mac Air. They eat out regularly in nice restaurants. In the absence of religion or traditional class structure, they define themselves by brand consumption and allegiance.

And their operator is ignoring them. Chances are, the operator is busy trying to flog SIMs to the fabled 16p-annual-ARPU mass market, whilst totally ignoring the segment of discerning customers with large amounts of disposable income to spend.

I suspect that if you’re reading Mobile Industry Review, you probably fit into this sovereign individual category. You may well be an employee but I’m sure, at minimum, you have some level of entrepreneurial streak. Otherwise you’d be sitting watching Jeremy Kyle instead of reading this.

So please do run with me for the moment.

Ben Smith was describing to me his abject joy at discovering T-Mobile have apparently introduced a price plan ‘booster’ that, for 15 a month, offers unlimited BlackBerry data worldwide. He explains the full offering here.

“Really?” I asked, my excitement rising.

“Yes, really,” he confirms. He actually had to do a heck of a lot of confirming. He didn’t believe it. Neither did I.

But yes, it’s valid. Obviously there are some efficiencies to be gained from BlackBerries due to the way they manage and route their data traffic. RIM are ultra efficient with data consumption on their devices.

This price plan ‘bolt on’ had me reaching for the phone. I am nigh-on almost ready to swap to T-Mobile as my primary operator for this, given how much I use my (BlackBerry) abroad.

But I haven’t swapped.

Not yet.

It’s not quite enough. It’s certainly almost there, but not enough to get me to switch. I’m ‘ok’ paying 2/day for 25mb in Europe to Vodafone at the moment.

This got me thinking. What would make me switch? What would it take?

I think I need more.

Sell me the lifestyle. Sell me the benefits. Let me feel good. Give me something that makes MY spend with T-Mobile look better than my friend’s spend. The fact I can’t easily differentiate operator choice between my peers is bad news.

I’d like the best. This segment really does 59 on a super-quality leather case for their iPad/iPhone/MacBook Air.

So what would get me excited?

Well, I traveled to Ireland last night. I popped into Heathrow Terminal 1 to take the Aer Lingus flight to Cork as I’m attending a wedding this weekend. I had some food at the ultra shit but very nicely appointed “The Goose” pub and waited for my colleague Rafe Blandford to arrive.

It’s at this point that I thought I should have ‘lounge access’.

Why doesn’t my operator offer me this? If I’m thinking about buying a global data roaming package, chances are I might also want to get airport lounge access too, so I can do some work. Or get a free mini can of coke along with a biscuit.

I’d like to explain to Rafe that my T-Mobile GlobalPlus+ price plan gets me and one friend into any airport lounge on the planet.

I’d feel good. Rafe would feel good too. And probably make a mental note to investigate that price plan for himself later on.

It does actually make sense — if you’re buying an international data roaming package, chances are you’d like that too.

But there’s more.

Why not sell me a Boingo Wireless account too? So that, thanks to being a customer with T-Mobile, I can get access to every possible hotspot on the planet as well.

Airport lounge access? That’s valuable.

WiFi anywhere? That’s valuable.

So when I’m looking down the price plan option list, why not add these on? These kind of semi-intangible options really do start making folk feel good. They represent (at minimum) a perception of value, even if you actually only go abroad twice a year.

I could definitely imagine paying a fiver or a tenner extra to T-Mobile each month so that I got access to their suite of GlobalPlus+ fancy sounding offerings.

All of a sudden, T-Mobile can start extracting additional cash for more than just minutes, texts and data.

I’d really like to see a lot more experiments in this regard. What about, for example, adding in Regus office support? Pay 100 per month and you get ‘planet-wide WiFi access’, priority airport lounge access and the ability to ‘touchdown’ at 1,100 offices worldwide?

Now it’s a real business tool for me, not just a commodity..

What do you think?

I picked this one up via Mobileburn — some organisations simply cannot afford to dance around with the iPad given the myriad of very real security concerns with it. That’s why there will always be some demand for a super-secure tablet such as the PlayBook:

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification means that the PlayBook is secure enough for government use. Of course, not having any standalone communications apps certainly might help the PlayBook get that certification.

via Mobileburn:BlackBerry PlayBook is first tablet certified by the feds.

Related posts:

1. PlayBook and BlackBerry working together: Very swish
2. A sub-300 BlackBerry PlayBook? Yes please!
3. It’s PlayBook Day Today in the UK! (More countries coming)

I’ve been looking at a whole host of mobile enterprise possibilities and one of the rather mundane areas is printing from mobile. I use the word ‘mundane’ there because frankly, printing isn’t that sexy.

But it’s something we all need to do now-and-again. Paper, unfortunately, sometimes is necessary.

So when you’re swanning around with your gorgeous iPad 2 or your all new PlayBook — or, if you’re using a smartphone — how do you print?

The answer?

We email it to a colleague. Or to a nearby secretary.

Yeah.

Rubbish solution.

Isn’t there something better out there? Well, I asked Carsten Mickeleit, CEO of mobile services firm Cortado, to give us an overview of their Cloud Printing solution.

First though, let’s get the background. Over to Carsten:

In terms of mobile, our view is Desktop as an App.

We deliver the full PC desktop experience to Tablets and Smartphones, but as a real application and not as a Windows screen. Our product is easy and fast to use, completely integrated with all the other device applications and your corporate environment.

One of our ‘Virtual Desktop Process’ offerings is Cloud Printing, which we built and are continuing to grow in co-operation with members of the Cloud Printing Alliance (the CPA).

Right, and you’re a big supporter of the Cloud Printing Alliance?

Yes, we launched the Cloud Printing Alliance with other founding members: Brother, Dell, Funkwerk, Konica Minolta, Kyocera Mita and OKI. They all signed an alliance agreement with us to bring true mobile cloud printing to the market.

How does your approach to Cloud Printing work?

Cloud Printing is a real technical challenge and we believe that we have the leading solution compared to most of our competitors who only have a very limited approach meaning their products are limited to a specific: printer, device, apps or documents, or to specific location.

We’ve created an application that allows you to print wherever you are to whatever printer you would like to use.

However, this is just the beginning for us with the support of the Cloud Printing Alliance members to complete the driver list, and the support of the device manufacturers to provide our app on their stores/phones/devices we are aiming to create a real impact in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.

We realise we cannot do this alone, so we do need the feedback of our users to be able to provide the best possible user experience.

We are working very hard to convince hot spot providers to host a printer in their network and offer printing to their customers and if we do our job right, mobile printing will be possible nearly everywhere and much more easily compared to a PC.

Well, bring it on. We’re looking forward to bring able to print stuff anywhere! Where can we go for more information?

You can find out more about our enterprise services (to mobile-enable your enterprise environment) at our site, Cortado.com and you can find out more about the Cloud Printing Alliance at www.cloud-printing-alliance.com.

Thanks Carsten!

Related posts:

1. Nokia reveals mobile ad alliance
2. Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, on Orange’s Social Life service
3. Star Alliance launches flight status alert service by text