BillMonitor

We’ve just released our September update! Although this release was mostly about shifting around some of the cogs and gears behind the scenes in order to make it easier for us to expand our monthly bill tracking features in the coming months, we still have a couple of new features to talk about.

First off, we now support full monthly bill tracking. You can sign up and have the system automatically build your personalised assessment each month, instead of having to resubmit it manually. This is just a baby step towards something much more powerful that we are working on, but signing up now will start to build a much more accurate recommendation as you continue to use the service. The system will still use your last three monthly bills for the moment, but we will be crafting some powerful new algorithms to stitch them together and create a complete tapestry of your usage.

Coincidentally, if you are looking to get a new contract this Christmas, now is the perfect time to sign up with BillMonitor. By the time your contract ends you’ll have enough data to get a great forecast for your next purchase.

Secondly, we are currently running a trial of a new version of the homepage. If you are lucky enough to be picked at random by our testing software you will be presented with a slightly reorganized front page. Feel free to drop us an email to feedback at billmonitor.com with any comments on either design.

This morning we’ve added Virgin mobile contract deals into Billmonitor! We already carry every major carrier, and now we’ve added Virgin contracts into the mix.  We’re really excited about increasing the amount of the market that we cover! Virgin doesn’t have a large market share in mobile but the deals they offer are great for the right person, so we’re sure that some of you will find them to be valuable addition to our mobile deal comparison service.

We’re having a little technical trouble at the moment, however, so we’ve had to temporarily remove mobiles.co.uk from our offerings. We’ll get them back in as soon as possible. Without them, we’re down a few options, but don’t panic: while we can’t offer you as many places to buy them, we still offer the same range of tariffs

We now cluster similar plans together on our results page in order to provide you with an even better spectrum of deals. You’ll see this in the form of a button beneath certain plans offering you a selection of similar tariffs. These might offer you a different set of bundles that we consider to be interchangeable or they might offer you a different allowance of minutes/texts that won’t alter how much the plan costs you under your specified usage.

With our latest update, it’s now possible to select the gift of your choice when purchasing a mobile phone contract from a store that offers them. This brings us up to 17 million deals! Who knew that the mobile phone contract market was so complicated?

Gift selection

When you find a plan that offers free gifts, you’ll see an option to choose between any that are available next to the buy button. We automatically pick the one that is likely to save you the most money on your bill by default. But if you’ve got your heart set on that PlayStation 3, you can search for it specifically using the filters at the top of the results page!

Gift Filter

Don’t forget, however, that buying into a contract because you want a Wii may not be the most efficient way to use your hard-earned cash! We don’t take the value of the extra into account when we rank each contract, so you can be sure that our results will not be tainted by these deals. We aim to get you the cheapest possible mobile phone contract first and foremost – that’s one thing that makes us different and we intend to keep at it.

We’ve just updated the plans in the comparison engine to include some interesting new mobile deals. Orange have introduced 36 month (!) contracts. Whilst these may seem like good value – as little as £4.89 per month including a mobile – being locked into a 3 year contract could prove costly. The deals have quite small allowances (as low as 50 minutes) and the cost of calls outside that allowance is very high (20p/min) so if you want to call more than a little between now and 2012 you’ll be paying though the nose. On the other hand this deal sounds great for my gran, who needs a phone for emergencies but hates the hassle of topping up a pay-as-you-go phone.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been thinking hard about how to make it as easy as possible to get the handset you want from BillMonitor. Often on phone sites we found that it was too easy to get caught up in slightly different versions of the same handset, so we stripped all that complexity out and trimmed down our list of phones.  When you’ve searched for the handset you want, you’ll be able to pick between the different styles and colours as much as you like by clicking on the handset by the plan you’re interested in.  We’re really happy with the way that this works and we hope that you will be too.

This opens up a whole load of exciting new stuff for us, like searching by colour and offering the best prices from multiple retailers.  It’s a big step forward in our aim to map out the whole mobile market!

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!

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.