Kik Messenger: One Feature Pack Away From Perfection

I've found that I'm now splitting my time quite a bit between London (where I live) and New York City (where OpenGamma's second investor lives, and where we're opening an office). As such, I've started facing some of the major issues faced by modern, fully-connected individuals dealing with multiple countries on a regular basis.

In Which Americans Fear International Dialing

So let's start with one very simple fact: Americans, as a whole, have a dramatic aversion to ever, under any circumstances, dialing a foreign phone number. Partially this is because they can call the entire United States, as well as Canada, without having to ever learn how to dial properly internationally. Partially this is a reflection that every US carrier (landline or mobile) will shaft you if you dare to dial a foreign phone number without planning very far in advance. Partially this is because except for a few key, international industries and roles within those industries, Americans just don't have to do this on a regular basis. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that for a massively large cross-section of USAmerica, international phone numbers may as well simply not exist.

Europeans are far more used to dialing internationally: we have to. If you had to dial internationally to dial someone living in the next state, you'd get more used to it. If I try to give out a British phone number to a French restaurant to reserve a table, I just say "country code 44" or if typing, "+44" and they know what to do. In America, you start with "country code" and before you know it, someone's asking you if you have a US phone number. If you don't, they just don't bother.

So if you spend much time in the US, you need a US phone number. Which I now have.

In Which Mobile Carriers Shaft You

So let's consider all the ways in which mobile carriers will shaft you, the well meaning international traveller:

• You'd like to place a call from your phone, physically located abroad, to your home country? That'd be an extortionate charge, thank you very much.
• You'd like to place a call from your phone, physically located abroad, to somewhere next door to where you're physically located? That'd be an extortionate charge, thank you very much.
• You'd like to receive a call on your phone while physically located abroad? That'd be an extortionate charge, thank you very much.
• You'd like to do something as daft as call a third-party country while abroad? That'd be at least double the extortionate charges as the ones before.
• You'd like to turn on data roaming and actually consume mobile data? Hold on to your wallet; you'd be shocked and horrified at just how much that's going to cost you. In fact, don't bother. For the price of a one-week trip, you can buy a throwaway smartphone and SIM if you're willing to use a second device.

For all those reasons, when I set out to get a US phone number, I made sure that it was on a smartphone (Android; separate blog post to come on a long-standing iPhone partisan learning his way around Android). This way I should, in theory, cover all my bases: iPhone + UK home number when in the UK (and phone/SMS roaming in case someone should call me from home); Android + US phone number when in the US (and phone/SMS roaming in case someone should call me from the US).

There was just one problem: trying to corral all my SMS conversations.

Enter Kik

Those of you on O2's shockingly horrifically bad (think: you have to get over the thought that your SMS messages will reach their destination in less than a few days, if at all) SMS service will feel me when I say that SMS rocks, but O2's provision of it is virtually unusable.

Given the amount of time that I spend abroad, and given how bad SMS is for O2 iPhone users here in London, I thought I'd give Kik a try.

Kik's a great service, in that it's Just Like SMS, with a few key advantages:

• It's instant. I've sent Kik messages between two devices next to each other, and they're very often delivered within the 100ms that defines human reaction time.
• You can see when they've been handed off to the recipient device, and when they've been read.
• It uses your data allocation rather than SMS allocation, which in this world of millions of free messages a month isn't that useful, but when you're abroad and SMS-ing people all over the world, it matters.

Basically, the best way to explain it is that Kik is Blackberry Messenger for any smartphone device, which is why RIM kicked it off the Blackberry.

So I got excited, and convinced the majority of the people that I text the most to get Kik.

Aside: The Dataficiation of Primary Phone Functionality

One of the most interesting things that I find about Kik and Skype and all manner of other services coming to smartphones is the conversion of functionality that used to be specific and dedicated to the phone networks to pure data-only plays. Phone calls? Skype/VOIP over your data connection. SMS? Kik. MMS? Facebook photo upload. Video calling? Facetime/Skype. All these things that mobile carriers built very specific functionality for in their networks are being very quickly replaced by equivalent (but superior) functionality delivered over the data pipe. I reckon it won't be very long before the first iPhone/Android phone (or carrier plan) that only works with data, and doesn't have dedicated logic for phone calls and the like.

Kik Shows Its Limitations

So I'm prepared. I've got my iPhone for the UK, I've got my Galaxy S for the US, I've got a bunch of people on Kik, I'm ready to go.

And then I actually try to use it in the manner I was intending. It doesn't work as I thought it would. D'oh!

Kik only supports a one-device-per-account model. Log in using your Android phone? It now gets all messages, and your iPhone gets none. And it only gets new messages. History? Nope.

Log back in on your iPhone? Your Android phone gets logged off, and you lose all the old messages you already had on your iPhone.

This is not what I had in mind, and as a result (it took me a while to actually figure this out) I just went back to SMS on my most recent trip to the states. At least then I've got history (though of course it's not across devices).

The Ultimate Feature Enhancement

So let's get to the meat of this long-winded tale. What would make Kik really solve my instant-IM-on-a-phone conundrum? Better support for multiple devices.

What does that mean in practice?

• I can log in from multiple devices simultaneously
• When I log in from a new device, full history of conversations is downloaded
• When a new message comes in, it's delivered to all logged-in devices (and the message has been read notification follows the first one on which I read it)
• When I send a message on one device, the sent message gets delivered to all other devices.

Here's the thing: I'm actually willing to pay (and pretty handsomely) for an enhanced version of the application/service that does this. You want to make it a paid-for enhancement? 100% fine by me. Just say the word.

So Kik team, ball's in your court. Great service, 90% of what I want, highly recommended in general if you live on one device, just that last bit needed to satisfy the multi-device, multi-national crowd.

Postscript

Turns out this problem has left many people I introduced to Kik leaving the platform. I raised it on the official Kik GetSatisfaction page. Let's see if they respond.

I'm Comin Back To San Francisco

San Francisco, Here I Come. At least for a visit.

Next week I'm going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area visiting friends and running errands that I've sorely neglected over my unexpected 2-year absence.

I'm already going to be meeting quite a few people down in the Valley, but if you've been lurking around here (or actively participating) and want to meet up, just lemme know (you can email me right through the blog I think, otherwise post a comment and I'll follow up) and I'll try to swing by and see you, particularly if you've got some cool tech going on!

Or cookies.

Murano Urban Resort: Don't Bother

My partner and I went to Paris to celebrate my 30th birthday recently, and while the last time we were there we stayed at the nearly (save the location) perfect Hotel Sezz, since we were there a new, and supposedly extremely chic, hotel has opened, the Murano Urban Resort. If you follow designer-trendy hotels, you've probably heard of it, since it's had a writeup in every trend-victim bible since it's opened. Here's my writeup on it:

• The location seems somewhat convenient
  
  That's what I'll say about that. It's on the outskirts of the Marais and near Republique, but quite frankly, Boulevard du Temple isn't the most scenic of Parisian locations, so unless you really want to be near Republique or the Marais, there isn't a whole heck of a lot about the hotel to like. But enough of my positivity, let's go straight into the complaining!
  


• The Rooms are Cheap
  
  Something that they don't show you in all the pictures of the place are that almost everything you see is made of plastic. Cheap plastic. Ikea-grade plastic. The bathrooms are almost half-done (like they ran out of black slate in the budget, so they just didn't go to the point of making sure that the rooms looked nice, they just stopped putting it up half-way up the walls), and not finished very well. It really looks like they blew the entire room-decoration budget on the fingerprint scanners (which don't really work), the mood lighting (all shades of pink), the B&O television/remote control (with nothing on you might want to watch in English), and the ashtrays (ironic given that ours was a non-smoking room in a non-smoking floor), and just had to make do with the rest.
  

  
  And yet the rooms are really expensive. For all that you're paying about EUR 350/night. Without a view.
  



• They've Joined the Cult of Dark Public Spaces
  
  I don't know what it is about design-victim hotels, but so many of them seem to have come to the conclusion that if dark is sexy, than pitch back must be sexier. Thus, much like the Sanderson in London, all hallways and public spaces are pitch black at the Hotel Murano Urban Resort. For example, if you get into the elevator, it's so dark that you can't actually see the buttons, which are not illuminated in any way. When you get to your floor, the hallway is so dark that I actually bumped into a wall, not realizing that the black-painted wall had a bend in it.
  

  
  To really mess with their guests, they've made sure that the central area of the bar/lounge (the one with the white sofa and the fireplace that's in all the puff-piece photos of the place) has a massive skylight, meaning that this white space is bathed with light. The hallway leading into there from the residences is pitch black (as are the upstairs hallways and the elevator). What happens when you walk into it? You're blinded. Painfully, painfully blinded. Thanks, designer! Way to think ahead!
  



• The Bar is Really Expensive
  
  You see pictures of the bar everywhere. Fair enough. But EUR 20 for a beer? Surrounded by other patrons who look down on you? And the staff who looks down on you even more (as though to say "how stupid are you to be drinking here?")? Is that a joke? Apparently not.
  

  
  And before I hear any of this "you just weren't cool enough," we were all dressed just as victimy and expensively as everybody else, it just seems that the bar exuded snobbery.
  



• Rooms Past The Bar
  
  In order to get to your cheap-finished, insanely-expensive room, you have to walk through the bar. Which means you have to run the gauntlet of the bouncer looking down on you thinking "who do you think you are coming to this bar?" just to say "I'm staying here" and go to your room. Which is part of the reason why I won't ever stay at a hotel in Vegas where you have to walk through the casino to get to your room.
  


• They locked us out
  
  At midnight (yea, we have reached the epitome of old age: at midnight on my birthday, all we really wanted was bed), we returned to the hotel room attempting to get in and go to bed. This is easier said than done, because rather than having keys of any form, they've elected to have fingerprint readers which don't really work all that well, so after both of us trying about 10 times to get into the room, I went downstairs to get the porter to let us into our room.
  

  
  This was when I basically hit the roof. Turns out that when Todd checked in, he put down a debit card for the deposit, and rather than getting authorization then, they just took the details to get authorization later. When they later tried to get authorization, Todd wasn't there, and they did a security check, and so there was a hold on the card until they could contact Todd. What did the staff at the Murano Urban Resort decide to do? They decided to remotely lock us out of the room, so that we'd be forced to come to reception to clear this up.
  

  
  The following morning when Todd complained, they did actually apologize and point out that this was not standard policy, and they made it up with a bottle of insanely cheap rose wine left in our room that evening, but quite frankly, the fact that they would neglect to do the card authorization when the customer was there, and then immediately lock us out of the room to ensure our compliance is so off-the-charts that I actually had to laugh at what poor service that is.
  

So if you're thinking of staying at the Hotel Murano Urban Resort in paris, don't bother. By the time you get there everything (already looking dated when we were there 3 weeks ago) will be looking even more dated and dirty and tired than it already was, they'll treat you like crap, and overcharge you for the privilege of staying there. Trust me, stay at the Sezz instead.