Mobile Toilet

'SatLav', 'Down the Toilet' and 'Council Caught Short' are all likely headlines for London's Westiminster Council's 'text a toilet' scheme.
Whilst some people are criticising the initiative as a waste of resources, I think it's a great idea.
Finding a toilet in central London is getting increaingly difficult and it's a service that is of obvious and genuine benefit.

Users text 'toilet' to 80097 - using a location, the service identifies the nearest public lav. The 'SatLav' system charges 25p for each text.

As well as the council's 40 public toilets, the locations include the Greater London Authority, London Underground and some major department stores.

Westminster City Council said that the location service is designed to cut down on the amount of "street urination".
The council said: "Up to 45,460 litres of urine is at risk of ending up in the city's streets and alleyways through irresponsible and antisocial behaviour," Lovely!

Whilst I doubt that the average Saturday night drunk will pay 25p to text this, the service will be useful all kinds of other people.

There has been some debte amongst mobile developers of the take-up of location-based services. So far they have been quite limited. However, there are specific applications, such as the SatLav that can prove to be of benefit. Our messaging system txt4ever will include facilities to set up and manage mobile location services.

On a side note, the best public toilets in London have to be the ones on Baker Street, next to Westminster University. They have flowers, classical music and are spotlessly clean.

Paypal Mobile

After some months of chasing I finally got to email someone at Paypal Mobile about how we can integrate their product into our SMS/Mobile Content Management system.

Unfortunately they are not remotely interested. I was told that:
"Paypal Mobile is focussed on the retail sector for real products and macro payments, rather than mobile content, text messages or downloads."

OK, fine, so how about using mobile phones to pay for these 'real' products then?

I was told:
"We can only take payments via a website. WAP payments will not be enabled until early 2007 at best." And I believe there are no plans to allow payments by SMS.

I find this all very disappointing. Developers such as ourselves are looking for mobile payment systems that don't have the costs and problems of network based PSMS. Here are Paypal, with the ability to provide a killer application for mobile payments but they're not interested.