BillMonitor

It’s true!  BillMonitor is out of beta.  With our latest release we’ve added the ability to search for handsets, so finally you can compare tariffs that give you the phone you want.  Try it out, it’s awesome.

In addition to that exciting development, we’ve added the iPhone and tweaked the internal cogs and gears to get everything running faster and smoother.  We’ve also changed the way that the front page looks to make our best features a little more obvious – drop by our uservoice page and let us know what you think.

Oh, and by the way, you can now become a fan of us on Facebook!

Oh, wow, BillMonitor is public!  It’s been busy here at the Optimor offices but I’m proud to announce that our public beta is now ready for your consumption.

We’ve got plenty of exciting features for you to check out:

• Automatic bill monitoring – we’ll analyse your phone bill and show you exactly how you could save.
• Self assessment – estimate your own usage and we’ll tell you which mobile tariff is best for you.
• Graphs help you to understand exactly how you use your phone.
• Over 48 thousand combinations of tariffs and bundles available.

Of course, if you were one of the lucky ones who saw the alpha, none of that will be new to you. Here’s the new bits that’ll blow you away:

• Select from over 200 handsets and jump straight through to the operator websites to purchase the tariff of your choice.
• Personalised results pages give you the information that matters.
• SIM only plans – more plans for us means better results for you.
• Region support – travel around Europe a lot?  That’s cool, we can handle that.
• Uservoice – an awesome feedback system so you can tell us what you want to see on the site.
• For the tech-heads among you, we are now running our maths in the Amazon Cloud.

So what are you waiting for?  Get stuck in and grab a recommendation from BillMonitor now.  Keep an eye on this blog too, we’ve got plenty more cool stuff coming up.

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.

Welcome to our new blog.  Here we plan to let you know what we’re up to and give you the chance to let us know what you think of the stuff that we’re doing.

New to Karoosh?  Here’s the spin:

Karoosh helps you save money on your mobile by simplifying the overwhelming choice of mobile tariff plans and additional services. Karoosh’s accurate and personalised recommendations help you make smart and confident mobile purchase decisions.

Because people’s mobile calling habits change frequently and somewhat unpredictably, Karoosh uses predictive and data mining maths from Oxford scientists to anticipate your future needs, recommending the best tariff plan and services early enough for you to enjoy maximum savings. Karoosh sorts through thousands of tariff plans, add-ons and services to find the most relevant ones for you.

Sounds exciting, huh?  Right now the Karoosh private alpha is live, and we’ve got a limited number of invites to give out.  Do you want to be one of the first people to see the future of mobile phone price comparison?  Drop me an email at mac@optimorlabs.com and I’ll get you on the guest list.