Need to check your bank balance whilst in Tesco? Need to buy cinema tickets whilst on the bus? Well now you can with MoBank which looks to be the first real contender for universal UK mobile banking.  At the moment the app is only available on the iPhone (and iPod Touch connected by Wi-Fi) for now but they have plans to release app on other platforms soon. All the major UK banks have been covered though although at present you can only register one card at present.

So what can you do with it?

The app allows you to check your bank balance and recent transactions on the move so you don’t have to go to a cash machine or login to your internet banking. MoBank also allow you to use the app as a quick and easy payment device for any of their partner merchants. At the moment this s limited to Interflora, Vue, Thorntons, Waterstone’s, Just the Flight, The Trainline, Game, Deliverance, TicketWeb and Domino’s with the promise of many more coming onboard soon.

Pricing

MoBank have put into place a simple pricing structure; pay as you go (PAYG) and a lifetime unlimited use plan. With PAYG you pay £2.50 for every 5 transactions and £1 per month for one or more balance lookups. Therefore it seems a no-brainer to go with the £15 one off payment for the unlimited plan.

Security

My initial concern was one of security but MoBank do well do allay fears on their website.

• Card details protected by 4 digit PIN
• No payment information or PIN is stored on the phone
• All transactions occur on merchants websites
• If you don’t sign in for three months then MoBank will delete your details
• “bank-grade security and compliant with Payment Card Industry standards and ISO27001 for Information Security Management. A Digicert 256-bit SSL certificate is used to secure all transmitted data.”

It is also reassuring that it is a paid service because it not only gives MoBank more accountability but also allows them to invest in improving and evolving

Is it going to take off?

With the promise of lots more partner merchants and functionality (e.g. topups) the future looks very promising.

I have seen very little publicity for MoBank (apart from the occasional Spotify advert) but this is definitely my top tip to watch over the next few months because with the right marketing it could be huge. However, there may be some downsides. Do I really want to know how little money I have whilst out on the town?

More information on their website

Having spent a lot of time on Facebook over the last few days I have noticed a growing number of appearances of Fan Check in my ‘Highlights’ section. I was intrigued to see what this was and why so many of my friends had been tagged.

Fan Check is a Facebook app that claims to be able to calculate your top fans by who has visited your profile. The app then creates an image with your top 20 friends in and tags them. This image then appears in the ‘Highlights’ section of friends you have in common to advertise the app.

It all sounds straightforward and like another vanity checking feature of Facebook. However, anyone who knows even the slightest thing about Facebook’s privacy policies will know that this app is seriously flawed. There is no way for a 3^rd party app such as Fan Check to know who has been looking at your profile. There would be a massive uproar if Facebook gave access to such data. So how do apps like Fan Check get the data? They simply compile a list of 20 of your friends.

The viral nature of such apps is huge, but what do the developers gain? Well there has been lots of speculation that the app is infact a virus. The virus supposedly acts by displaying the following message when you click on the app (located at apps.facebook.com/fancheck).

“FanCheck is adding new features and new capacity. This could take a few days.
Please become a fan, and we’ll send you an update when we’re back online”

The claim is that when you click to become a fan your Facebook account becomes ‘infected’. However, this is highly unlikely and nothing has been reported to security sites such as Symantic or McAffe. A Facebook app it’s self cannot do any damage to your computer (as long as you don’t click out from it to malware sites).

The second stage of the problem this is that spammers have jumped on the back of the fear and a vast number of malware sites. A Google search for “facebook fan check virus” will return a vast number of these malware sites.

The message is simple, if a Facebook app claims to be able tell you who has been viewing your profile is a scam and should be avoided. Also don’t search for “facebook fan check virus” and visit the results.

UPDATE: 09/09/09

The app has now been updated and the message has been changed to

“This application ranks your friends based on how often they interact with your Facebook wall. Interactions counted include wall posts, comments, likes, gifts and other public items posted to your wall. In accordance with the Facebook Privacy Policy, we do NOT count page views or private messages.”

The option to become a fan has also been removed

Next Friday (17th June)will be crunch time for many Twitter users in what has been said to be the next millennium bug. Each Tweet is assigned a unique identifier which started with the first Tweet, “just setting up my twttr”, from founder Jack Dorsey kicked things off with an id of 20 (the first 19 were used for testing. Each new post since then has incremented this id by one. With a sudden explosion in the use of Twitter this number has rapidly risen to over 2 billion.

The problem is that identifiers are stored as a 32-bit integers which allows values up to 2,147,483,647. The number of Tweets is rapidly approaching this number and it is anticipated that it will be exceeded on Friday 17th June at 17:26:08.Is it a coincidence that it falls on the same day as the iPhone 3G S?@dcaunt thinks not.

So what?

Whilst Twitter have hopefully taken steps to solve this by just using 64-bit integers many third-poarty apps could have problems. These problems could be anything from Tweets being displayed in the wrong order to not being displayed at all.

With so many thrid party apps, from desktop programs liek Twhirl and TweetDeck to the many many people who use the Twitter API it is inevitable that there will be problems.

The official advice from Twitter is simple “A friendly reminder: we’re nearing the http://www.twitpocalypse.com/. Ensure you are storing status_ids as unsigned integers.”

Or will it be simply like the Millennium Bug and be a lot of hype for a minor issue?

View the countdown timer at http://www.twitpocalypse.com/

Back in April Virgin Media wrote to me to tell me the exciting news, all their 2meg broadband customers would automatically be upgraded to 10meg. This sounded too good to be true so I read the small print and it said that the price plan would also be upgraded by £2 per month to just short of £20. It didn’t look like I had a choice and I was quite pleased at the prospect so I was quite looking forward to it.

I followed the instructions in the email and switched to online billing (as after May paper billing would incur an extra cost!). May came and went and a few speed tests later I was running shy of 2meg. Checks of my new ebilling showed that my price plan had been upgraded though and the extra £2 per month was being taken.

I have just finished on a 50 minute call to various Virgin Media staff in various countries. It didn’t start too well when I was asked by the automated system which type of music I would like to listen to whilst on hold! Of course I chose pop and sadly they only have one song ‘Love Story’ by Taylor Swift. After 8 loops this started to grate.

After finally getting to speak to a ‘human’ I was told that accounts are not automatically upgraded and you have to do it manually by visiting a web site. The reasoning was that they needed to check that my modem was capable of 10meg speeds! I followed the link and was asked to sign in with my Blueyonder email address. I have never used Blueyonder for email so couldn’t sign in. I even though I might be able to use my Virgin ebilling login but sadly not. I had to then be passed to technical support for them to reset address to allow me to login. Logging in was then simple and my relatively new Virgin modem passed the test, surprise surprise.

I finally managed to get a promise that the connection would be upgraded in the next 24 hours (better than the month I was initially told) and got a whopping £4 refund for the charges I have already paid for the 10meg service I haven’t got.

It is appalling that Virgin Media will quite happily automatically start charging for a ‘new improved’ package without actually delivering. Bring back Telewest

Anyone who is affected by this upgrade should make sure they go to http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/gofaster/ and request the upgrade and then get onto customer services.

Perhaps it’s time to change my internet service providings!.

Hilarious rap and even better dance moves with Swine Flu Skank. Much more entertaining than the official government videos and the advice is much more memorable. Just Catch it, bin it, kill it and do the swine flu dance

With the whole world is on the brink on panic about the Swine Flue pandemic I have stumbled across a light-hearted game in which you must save the world from killer pigs.

The game was launched on 27th April 2009 when just 9 people played the game. By the 3rd May this number had soared to 3.2 million. This game is certainly proving to be a lot more virilant that swine flu itself!

heyzap.com – embed games

Visit Swinefighter site

I picked up a message earlier asking if I could forward someone a mobile number I had. Before I had my iPhone I have always had Nokia phones where you can simply send a contact via text as a business card. This can then be easily saved in the recipient’s phone. Sadly Apple don’t like to make things easy. The following procedure had to be taken:

Equipment: iPhone, Pen, Paper, 5 minutes

1.       Go to the main iPhone screen and tap the ‘Contacts’ icon

2.       Search or scroll to the contact whose number you want to send

3.       Take you pen and paper and write down the number

4.       Return to the menu and open the SMS application

5.       Compose message

6.       Search or scroll to contact you want to send number to

7.       Select body and use numeric keypad to copy the number from your piece of paper

8.       Tap send

Hopefully the recipient will have a phone that will let them save a number from the body of the text otherwise they will have to write down.

Saving a number someone has sent to you:

1. Open the text message
2. Tap the number in the message (which should be blue and underlined)
3. You will now be asked if you want to call this person. Tap ‘Call’
4. Quickly hang up the call as you don’t really want to talk to them
5. Go back to menu and go to phone app
6. Select ‘Recents’ and you will see the number you have just called
7. Click the blue arrow to the right of the number
8. You will now get options for that number. Tap to ‘Create new contact’
9. Enter contacts name and save
10. Answer the phone to that person asking why you have just ‘pranked’ them

Thanks Apple you make my life so much easier

I’m starting to think that these are actually more entertaining than the full shows

Episode 4

Episode 5

Been following the Mexican Flu (or Swine Flu) pandemic with great interest from a medical point of view but also how it is being covered. Stumbled across a great Google Maps representation of all the cases so far and their outcomes. We seem to be doing ok in the UK so far but only time will tell.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

As the world goes crazy for Twitter Slate V offer some light relief with their mockumentary about the new nano blogging environment, Flutter. with ‘Flaps’  limited to just 26 characters (a full alphabet set) you can really cut down the amount of time it takes to read and write ‘Flaps’. The service is likened to a hummingbird with it’s wings flapping so quickly, much faster than a regular bird tweets.

“I think a lot of people don’t have time to Twitter. It just takes too long to compose a message with 140 characters, and then you start getting bombarded by a few tweets and it’s like hundreds of characters that you have to read.” , CEO Zak Ryman.