Vodafone business partnerships manager Jason Rigby has U-turned on his decision to leave the network after 12 years.

Rigby was last week expected to take up his new post as commercial director of b2b service provider Alternative Networks one of his clients.

However an 11th-hour appeal by Vodafone sales head Ken McGeorge to urge him to stay succeeded.

I think they realised the role I had of dealing with service provision is quite specialised. That knowledge base doesnt exist elsewhere in Vodafone. They would have had to recruit externally to replace me and were probably going to have to pay someone else more than they were paying me he told Mobile News.

Theyve offered me the role of head of service provision although its actually the same job. The clincher for me to stay was that I have two young kids settled in school in Newbury. It was worth disrupting that for a move to London when their was a big difference in the packages but not now that the packages are the same.

Alternative Networks chief operating officer Ben Marnham was philosophical about Rigbys decision not to join the company:

We were surprised but its a competitive market and a business reality that happens from time to time he said.

Were headhunting for a new commercial director not necessarily from the telecoms industry. I know it was a difficult decision for Jason to make and that he decided to stay at Vodafone for personal reasons.

Jason and I have a close working relationship. In fact Im having lunch with him next week. The fact that hes not joining us doesnt affect our plans.

Marnham has recently put together a new management team at Alternative Networks with ex-Orange Thailand marketing director Rupert Townsend in a similar role.

Listed in the 2000 2001 and 2002 editions of the Sunday Times Virgin Atlantic Fast Track 100 league table Alternative Networks claims to be one of the UKs fastest growing companies. It provides telecoms services for around 3000 small firms.

The company has offices in London Manchester and Bracknell. It was founded in October 1994 by friends Chris Wilson and James Murray and is described as Britains largest independent reseller of telecommunications services.

Qian Fu Changs Outside The Fortress Besieged which was a big seller in full book form has been cut down to 4200 characters and will be distributed as 60 chapters of 70 characters each.

Qian sold the SMS rights to the tale which is about illicit love among married people for 11100.

The publishers have high hopes for its success: China has 20 million mobile phone users who last year sent 220 billion texts – more than half of the total number sent across the globe.

Indiano Communications of India Vertica Media of Malaysia Greenbay and Quartel of the British Virgin Islands Litmus of Florida and Fast Way Holdings of Croatia received the hefty fines as well as being barred from operating in Britain by Icstis which regulates premium-rate services.

All six firms used Smile Telecom of Bury Lancashire as their British agent. A spokesman for the firm said Smiles only involvement was to put the companies in touch with operators providing premium-rate numbers.

The companies sent out text and voicemail messages telling the recipients that they had won up to 5000 and urging them to call a claims line.

But when recipients called the 1.50-a-minute number their prizes either never turned up or they received vouchers with conditions attached that made them worthless.

It is the second content deal that Orange has struck with a Premiership football club following its partnership with Chelsea FC (Mobile News August 9).

Content includes MMS club alerts live match commentary interviews with club representatives match highlights competitions text voting post-match reviews and travel and ticket information.

The Orange brand will also appear on hoardings and match-day brochures at the City of Manchester Stadium the teams home ground. Man City shops will sell Orange phones and airtime as well as value-added services for fans.

Mark Hird vice-president of Orange multimedia operations said: We provide services for all our different supporters anyway but were now looking to team up with Premiership sides to provide fans with exclusive content.

He went on: Weve been speaking to a lot of Premiership teams and putting across our vision about services and the way that mobile is going. We have no target number in mind. The final number of clubs will be determined by whether or not they share our vision.

Orange has said that it had no intention of sponsoring football shirts however.

The mobile industry is touting MMS as the solution for moving photos around the networks said Simon East chief executive of Cognima a firm that develops value-added applications for mobile phones.

However he revealed that test images sent over Vodafone Orange O2 and T-Mobile were reduced in quality from 1152×864 pixels to just 160×120 pixels.

Easts comments should be seen in the context that it wants to promote Cognimas Snap a service that enables megapixel images to be uploaded from camera phones to online photo albums without loss of quality.

Until consumers can send high-quality images MMS wont fulfil its revenue-generating potential he claimed. Unless you have Bluetooth and understand how to use it there is no point in having a megapixel camera phone.

He went on to criticise Bluetooth as being complicated and claimed that operators dont make any money out of it.

The industry has raised consumer expectations with camera phones and MMS as it did with WAP but the user experience isnt there yet he said.

Reduction in picture quality can be minimised if the default MMS photo setting is changed. But even after switching to the large MMS setting on the phone megapixel images are reduced by a factor of four to 576×432 pixels.

Rob Bamforth mobile analyst at Bloor Research commented:

Photos sent via MMS are sub-standard in quality even in large mode.

For users who have bought a megapixel camera phone it will be extremely disappointing.

Everyone is talking about MMS in terms of revenue he went on.

The infrastructure might be there but its not that easy to use because the functionality is compressed into a very small space and hidden – both at the front end in the handset and at the back end with the networks.

He went on to claim that while MMS was not dead there are problems with it that need to be looked at.

It is a mechanism. Not an application he said. The user doesnt care about mechanisms. The industry has lost sight of that. The customer wants applications and will pay for them. MMS is always going to be fighting against the next bigger pixel size. It meets a need but sending pictures between phones is not a huge need.

Its not a terribly interesting use of a camera. Just one in 10 photos are actually sent between users.

Jansen joins from global business and consumer telecoms firm MCI and will take control of direct indirect and wholesale sales channels.

Jansens role will be to bring TTGs fixed-line business in the Netherlands closer to its Dutch mobile business.

Our fixed-line business doesnt sell mobile services to fixed-line customers. We want to leverage both those businesses so that we are selling mobile services to our fixed line customers in Holland said Andy Smith group director of mobile distribution at TTG Europe.

Jansen began his career with oil company Q8. He has worked with MCI as direct sales manager and senior manager for Benelux.

The deal gives Vodafone access to Beckhams personal image rights in forthcoming advertising campaigns and highlights of his matches with Spanish club Real Madrid.

The new sponsorship deal will run for a year and expands on the Beckham-themed content that was available through Vodafone live! under the previous deal. Vodafones original sponsorship deal with Beckham lasted two years.

Vodafone claims that neither press speculation over Beckhams personal life nor the criticism he received following his performances at Euro 2004 have detracted from his value as a marketing asset.

He didnt get great press during Euro 2004 but there is much more to David Beckham than what the media write about him said a Vodafone spokesperson.

Davids appeal for us is that he is much more than just a high-profile footballer. He is a global icon with enormous appeal in the Far East. It is quite unusual for someone of another nationality to be the centrepiece of a very successful advertising campaign there.

Vodafone is spread around the world and Beckhams appeal reflects that.

Vodafone has also given away thousands of 3G handsets and offered a money-off deal to test its 3G Vodafone live! portal pending full commercial roll-out later this year.

The trial which takes place in London Manchester Birmingham and Glasgow is said to be the largest in Vodafones history.

Initial trial handsets are the Sony Ericsson Z1010 and the Samsung Z105 which Vodafone says is exclusive to its portfolio.

Weve done very small scale trials in the past but they have consisted of only a few hundred users said a Vodafone spokesman.

This is the biggest by some measure. It will be the last thing we do before the full commercial launch of consumer 3G services he added.

It involves rigorously testing products and services so that we have a good idea of what customers like and dislike before the launch and can change things accordingly. It is to make sure that what we think we are doing right we are in fact doing right.

Vodafone says that triallists will consist of some Vodafone staff and some existing live! customers taken from a cross-section of the companys customer database.

Triallists have received a free handset for the duration of the test and will get money back on their phone bill at the end of each month.

Vodafone will cover all customers extra usage so they are not left out of pocket. The trial will continue over an extended period of time until Vodafone is satisfied with the services.

Vodafone has not yet received any feedback because the trial is still in its very early stages.

Other sponsors include a number of City Councils and development agencies.

As part of the three-year sponsorship agreement T-Mobile will become mobile supplier to the Tour of Britain. It will provide WiFi access in press rooms and there will be T-Mobile hotspots along the route.

Specific areas of the route such as the start line and the 1-kilometre-to-go banner will also be decked out in T-Mobile corporate colours.

The 16 teams involved include 12 commercially sponsored international teams and four UK teams.

The race starts in Greater Manchester and Lancashire followed by stages in Yorkshire the East Midlands Newport and South east Wales. It climaxes on September 5 in Londons Westminster.

Tim King founder and managing director of 2sms.com is so confident his new SMS product called Team Data will become thestandard way of collecting informal information within an organisation he reckons he could sell his company for 1000 times its earnings giving it a value of 100 million.

Weve already had a number of approaches this year said King.

I have told each of them that I want 1000 times earnings. I have said: Come and see me in a years time and I could sell at a tenth of your present bid or I could sell at 10 times. Im an entrepreneur and Im going to take that risk. Thats what I do.

2sms.coms main service is called 2sms. It allows business customers to send SMS messages from their office to staff mobile phones via a web-based account. Customers can track messages and management can monitor traffic and data.

The company last week launched a second product Team Data designed to cut down on inter-office paperwork. Instead of sending out bulk e-mails to staff questions are posed to staff on the Team Data website. Respondents are notified of the questionnaire and its deadline by text message

2sms.com became profitable for the first time last year It has 1500 clients in aerospace finance government healthcare IT retail telecoms and transport. The 2sms service is distributed by BT Openworld and by O2 as O2 businesstxt and is resold by various IT services companies.

(Full story next issue)

Virgin Mobile launched BITES last week. It offers users the chance to fill spare moments with its Bite-sized boredom busters such as a picture game called How Bizarre! in which customers guess the original gender of transsexuals.

Virgin Mobile says its BITES portal which replaces its Virgin Mobile Extras service is a gossip magazine-style entertainment service and is better focused on consumer demands than any of its competitors portals.