Thanks to everyone who stuck around until the late, late hour of 22:30 to watch me talk! The Oxford Geek Night was a lot of fun and I’m sure we’ll be back again.
The presentation I gave worked through Karoosh and explained how we managed to put together a complex price comparison site in a relatively short amount of time using open source software such as Ruby on Rails and Twisted. You can see the slides that I used here.
Rumour has it I’ll be having a bit of a chat about the technology behind Karoosh at the 9th Oxford Geek Night on 22nd October at the Jericho Tavern, which is, rather unsurprisingly, in Oxford. Should be a giggle!
I’m going to be discussing what’s cool about Karoosh from a technological point of view, working from our data harvesting through to our lovely front end.
Three have recently announced that they plan to offer unlimited on-network calls and texts for just £15. Moving away from the cross-network minutes/texts template is pretty interesting, and while a lot of people won’t benefit from this (and, as such, I expect most price comparison sites will overlook it) some people will find that this plan is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.
Until now our system hasn’t compared SIM only plans. They’ve been on our to-do list for a while because they’re competitive and exciting, but we wanted to make sure that the plans we supported were up to scratch before we added more. Yesterday, I decided that now was the time to expand our horizons, so I began the task of adding 9,000 plan and bundle combinations to our already 38,000-strong database.
We’ve always expected our plan space to grow as the industry expands, so we’ve written the whole system with that in mind. I managed to throw in SIM only plans from 5 operators in just one morning, including grabbing a coffee or three, checking my newsreader, and double- and triple-checking all the rates to make sure that they’re perfect for our customers. They were up on our staging box by lunchtime, and that’s where they’ll stay until we’ve tested them both by hand and using mind-expanding statistics to ensure that they’re perfect.
The new plans aren’t available on the alpha yet, but if you’d like to know when they are and have a chance to test the future of mobile tariff price comparison, drop me a line at mac@optimorlabs.com and I’ll hook it up for you.
At Karoosh we’re more interested in tariffs than handsets, but unless you’re trapped in a box you’ll have noticed that it’s an exciting time for mobile technology. Google’s Android is approaching fast (and might even be enough to make me think about T-Mobile after playing with the emulator), the iPhone continues to be all the rage in spite of the fact that the tariffs available for it offer pretty much no value, and Nokia’s N95 and N96 are holding their own on the non-touchscreen market.
As if all that wasn’t exciting enough, Vodafone have got together with Dell to launch their rather shiny new Netbook. The concept of mobile broadband isn’t new, but this is the sexiest it’s looked to date. Built in 3G instead of a dongle and a sleek Dell design is sure to be enough to win over some of the market, even if it’s not the best deal going (Orange just about beat it). Oh, and in case you’re not aware, while the Vodafone website says they’re available on the 14th October, they’re actually out now in shops. Thanks to Mobile Industry Review for that bit of news.
According to the ever-trustworthy blogosphere, it looks like Netbooks are the new hotness, and they’re not going away any time soon. With mobile phones getting bigger again and laptops getting smaller, perhaps we’ll all be getting netbooks with our next contract.
My God, it’s full of graphs!
If you’ve not done a bill assessment on Karoosh, now is definitely the time. Each bill assessment now comes with an extra helping of graphs that break down exactly how you have been using your phone over the last few months. We’re working on expanding these to talk about what your plan costs you, comparing your current plan to what Karoosh forecasts, and plan showdowns. More about these in a future post.
This week also sees a flock of updates to our plans. Since the recent Vodaphone upheaval they are looking much more competitive, but Three are still dominating the pack. Alexei is currently looking to formalize exactly how full of win Three’s tariffs are (using the power of maths), but I’m guessing it’s at least a seven.
Finally, there are a lot of small tweaks to the overall usability of the site. We’ve been getting kind folk into the office under the promise of usability wine and grilling them about how the site makes them feel. Overall I think it’s a big improvement and the site is beginning to shape up quite nicely.