London Ninja

There isn’t much need to write much more on the topic of Pay As You Go mobile services. I already talked about using it to call your family and friends at home for cheap and making sure to get 25% off your Skype credit top up. Well, they officially cemented their position in my hall of fame this month byoffering an amazing deal:

For every top up of 10 quid , you receive free for 90 days:
1. 600 texts (5 quid only gets you 25 text messages)
2. Unlimited In-network calling
3. 150MB of mobile Internet
4. Unlimited Skype use
5. Unlimted Windows Live Messenger use

With this kind of a deal with no commitment, there is absolutely no reason to go on contract unless you’re using an iPhone…in which case you should just PayPal me 20 quid just because…and I mean per month. I take it as a sign that mobile services are so commoditised and competition so fierce that you need to push the envelope to steal market share from your competitors. In this case, the nimbler 3 Mobile wins on Value and Simplicity. Yeah, Vodaphone offers free twittering, and O2 has the iPhone contract but for the cheap-arses, which is supposed to be most of us in this recession, 3 is the hands down winner.

One of the things that I have come to be quite efficient at is booking a flight in Europe. This is generally done 1-2 months in advance. No more than that. Yeah, this is not like planning a trip from the US to Europe, where you book flights months in advance. This is more like planning a trip from San Francisco to LA. Except it’s a lot more fun…let me show you how I do it.

The best way is always to go to Skyscanner and literally select the option to fly from London to anywhere in the world. I previously gave an overview of the Skyscanner service but I can’t explain how much fun it is to say give me a location to fly to anywhere in the world instead of me choosing the destination. Skyscanner rocks.

Since the European flights will be the cheapest, they will show up a the top. These prices are from 5 minutes ago. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the pricing of European flights from London….these prices are fo real, yo…AND these are OUT OF POCKET PRICES. Yeah, sliced bread, flowbee, or even the overly-reinvented wheel has nothing on this.

The page is telling me I can go to Italy for 5 quid. I don’t know what kind of a world we live in but 5 quid return from London to Italy sounds absurd. If we dig in, we do see limitations to this price. It’s only offered on certain days in July and there are heavy fluctuations in pricing all the way from 3 to 106 each way. I don’t know about you, but I’m flying on the 3 quid flight. This is usually the bit that takes the most time, is finding dates that work and costs me less than 30 pounds return (5 if I can find it)

After you select the flights, you are taken directly to the airlines where Skyscanner gets an affiliate commission and companies like EasyJet or my favourite RyanAir get their sale and I’m on my way to eating ravioli tartufo in Italy.

I wrote previously about how Skype is a great way to keep in touch with friends at home. If you use Skype to call internationally via your 3 SkypePhone, it allows cheap phone-to-phone internationally calling in addition to free mobile-to-pc calling. The problem was that you had to top up your Pay As You Go plan (with 25% discount)every 3 months to continue using Skype of the phone. While 3 months was a step up from 1 month when the 3 SkypePhone was introduced, it was still something to consider. Recently, however, 3 has announced that as long as you have credit on your 3 account, you can use Skype. That means cheap international calling for cheap! You could literally put 10 quid on your Skype phone and use Skype on your mobile for a year including calling international phones, free PC calls, and Skype chats. Nice one!

My mates ODJ and Koko are visiting London for the next week for my birthday week. Since this is their first times in London, I decided to call upon my British friends for the best way for them to experience London and have found a nicely devised pub crawl. This was the brainchild of my mate Giles, who mapped out all of the Sam Smith’s pubs in London for a 20 pub crawl. There was one other option, the Monopoly Pub Crawl, that we considered but while it sounds interesting, it is 26 pubs and a bit too much to drink from 10:30am to 10:30pm. Also, a Monopoly board without Boardwalk and Park Ave is not real Monopoly as far as I’m concerned. Park Lane and Mayfair are the most expensive properties? WTF?

I grew up watching 007, hence I’ve always been a fan of Sean Connery. As such, I have developed a nice British accent, although it is closer to Monty Python than Tony Blair. As a matter of fact, it’s probably more Sloth than Tony Blair. (I hope the Sloth reference doesn’t reveal my age too much.) The BBC posted a story on How not to do an American accent a while back.

I used to scour the different budget airlines including RyanAir and EasyJet for cheap flights to different places in Europe. That is until my friends Joe and Stacy showed me the light. That light is Skyscanner. It basically does all that work for me. I can pick a set of days and it tells me what locations are under 50 quid. I can choose a location and it will give me the chart on prices.

The best thing is that it encompasses a whole bunch of different airlines. It’s something that Travelocity and Orbitz in the US sort of attempt to do but pretty much fail at. I book all of my travel through Skyscanner. The only drawback is that its prices aren’t updated automatically. Some of the prices are 3-5 days stale, which means it’s not good for last minute travel deals.

I finally got a new mobile. I had an old mobile that I was using here the past 6 months that has been excruciatingly old. It’s fat, slow, and just plain fugly. Texting was never fun on that thing.

In continually pursuing the easiest way to contact friends and family at home, the opportunity came up over the Christmas period to get a 3 Skype Phone, an innovative integration of 3G and Since becoming a Brit and foregoing the debaucle that is American presidential race. Hussein Osama, Hilary, Romney, Giuliani, Ron Paul?…I will allow anyone seeking refuge a week on my futon to get out of America…but I digress….phones…right. I’ve been using Skype extensively to talk with some friends and my family and it’s been great. In particular, Skype video chat is pretty amazing. I even purchased a shiney new webcam to get better quality video and so I don’t have to use a headset when I talk. I also broadcast live streaming video in nothing but my knickers for a small monthly charge to subscribing members.

The 3 Skypephone is basically a phone that allows you persistent connection with Skype and full phone integration to be able to call and receive calls with anyone Skype for a low monthly cost. Introduced in October, it allows one to IM/talk with anyone else that is on Skype for £10/month minimum top up on your Pay As You Go plan. That £10 is used for minutes and texts. That’s great. I mean, if you have a Windows Mobile or other platform that supports a Skype client, you already had this functionality but you also probably pay a lot more than £10/month for your service.

I just activated the Skypephone today and gotta say it is a nice change to actually have a phone that can do stuff like take pictures and play mp3s. The Skype part also works very well. You just sign in to your Skype account and you can IM/call anyone that’s online. Since this is the way I chat with my folks in the US, it’s a nice service to have. They are supposedly going to bring in SkypeIn and SkypeOut features to allow you to call and receive international calls with cheap Skype rates. You can even use it to call Londonninja Inc to subscribe to our streaming video feeds. It’s worth every pence, mi laddy.

I had previously wrote about electronics in the UK, which I am sure many are familiar with. It’s pretty simple, you go to Walmart and purchase that travel voltage converter next to the section with the Foreman Grills and fat ladies with strollers. You then browse through the electronics section, muttering how dated some of the stuff is at these type of stores.

That was what I had been using for a while but there are some serious limits to how usable those damn converters are.

1. You are not supposed to leave those plugged in for extended periods of time.
2. You are not to exceed a certain watt. If you do, it will melt down and kill you.
3. You have to attach it to an adapter, which then makes your contraption quite unsightly for your imaginary friends.

This is what most people live with….but the Ninja-style does not rest. I present to you the Voltage Transformer:

Ex-pat Holy Grail

The voltage transformer is a constant voltage converter you can leave plugged in. You can also plug in an American power strip to allow you to plug in American devices without messing with adapters. I have one 6-outlet surge protector and another extension cord from that for my bedroom. I purchased a 500W model, which means you can’t surpass that number at any given time. Since I do not have my electric bull plugged in, I am well below the limit. I have my PS2 (yes, old skool), cordless phone, laser printer, computer speaker system, and everything else in there now. All the devices that would have blown the Walmart converter into smithereens(hadn’t used that phrase in some time, so had to look it up) now work just fine. Bloody brilliant…and it’s like $30 + tax/shipping in America. ZOMG.

In business terms, we like to say things like “reach out to X”, “mitigate the risks of..”, “core competencies”, “deliverables”, “big crocks”, “bloody dillweeds”, and “needle-movers”. Let me add a few more: “long cock tail”, “quick win”, and my favorite: “low-hanging fruit”…where was I?

Ah yes….so in business terms, I would call the voltage transformer an absolute “needle-moving big rock”. I would almost go as far as saying it has changed my vida loca. Lovely. Now time to go pick off some “low hanging fruit”.