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/

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

Stumbled across a great little web app to share bits of code. Snipt is really simple to use and quickly share code with co-workers and the world. It’s geared up to being used with Twitter and produces a short url of your code.

Check out the great piece of PHP code we found in the source of a site the other day, This Array

As the day that no one trusts anyone draws to a close I thought I would share some of the best April Fool’s announcements/pranks that I came across on Twitter, my feed reader and the web.

Today saw the launch of the Skype iPhone app. I’ve installed the app and so far I’m impressed. A few initial calls to people in the office all worked really well. I have just try to call friends in America but sadly even the iPhone app doesn’t get round the fact they never answer the phone! The only downside is that I will now be subjected to those spam Skypers, who regularly send messages wanting to know me better, wherever I am.

VOIP has always been a very controversial subject as far as the iPhone is concerned. Until now the only way to use Skype was to brick/unlock your iPhone. So this is really a great milestone as Apple finally back down to mainstream VOIP usage.

Sadly the app can only be made whilst connected to WIFI and not on 3G or other data connections. This isn’t because of call quality (as 3 have been allowing Skype enabled handsets on their network since 2007) but O2 protecting their call revenues, again.

Skype’s next platform will be the Blackberry in May.

I didn’t realise the credit crunch was hitting Virgin Media that hard until I went on their new site.  I had a double take when the page loaded and I was met with what is essentially a red version of the BBC  homepage. Whilst the site does look good it certainly won’t become my news and entertainment portal of choice. It offers nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before.
It’s fair to say that the BBC has always been a benchmark for good web practice and BBC type elements are common place across the internet but none as blatant as this! After a suggestions by @ojwestmancott I had a quick look at the source to check they there were no  references to the BBC!
Hopefully Virgin Media will pass on the money they have saved back to us the humble broadband customers!

Today is the newly created ‘Ada Lovelace Day‘ (AdaLovelaceDay09), to celebrate women in technology, and I thought it apt to look question why in over 5 years of professional web development I have never encountered a female developer. Given the fact that there was only a handful of girls on my computer science course at university this didn’t really surprise me. And then I started to look a little deeper…

As part of AdaLovelaceDay09 people have pledged to blog about a ‘woman in technology who they admire’ . The blogs are really starting to rack up and some can be viewed on the mash up. It’s well worth a browse through as it’s true, women in technology do tend to disappear beneath the radar.

I found some stats to suggest that roughly 25% of web developers are female. However, we all know that 99% of statistics are made up so we’ll take that with a pinch of salt! After a quick Google I can also see that there are a shed load of websites out there dedicated to female developers and designers. The internet is such a huge part of modern day life and it’s use is widespread across genders, ethnic and socio-economic groups, so why does this not knock on to the people behind the web?

I would be really interested to hear from female developers out there on their experiences of the industry.

Listen to any track for free right now. Surely this is either highly illegal or too good to be true. I couldn’t believe it either until I was sent an invite to participate in the private beta of Spotify, the online music service. With it’s iTunes like interface searching and playing music is only a simple search away.

Is there really such a thing as a free lunch?

Like a radio station Spotify pays royalties to the artist for each song that is playing through the service. At the moment the revenue model to pay for this (and hopefully make a profit!) is based on adverts. Every 20 minutes of playing tracks you are met with an audio advert from Spotify’s partners. In the early days these have been quite annoying with only a couple of partners on board. As more partners are added the adverts seem to get more bearable and is a very painless way of getting free music.

The other option is for users to subscribe to Spotify Premium for £9.99 per month. This will allow them to listen to unlimited music advert free.

Shaky beginnings

During the beta programme there has been a couple of wobbles in the service due to record label and international restrictions which have lead to a large tranche of music being removed from the service.

The other high profile event was the reports that the Swedish based company had had a massive security breach before Christmas and users login details have been lost.

What next?

Spotify is starting to get some high profile publicity including some interest by the BBC [LINK] so it is only a matter of time before it takes off. I believe that Spotify is really going to revolutionise the way we listen to music and will be the biggest step forward since the mp3.

Can’t wait to get involved?  Spotify is still in beta but you can sign up at their site. The music catalogue is growing rapidly and hopefully the full release will be soon, so watch this space!