Image by fatboyke (Luc) via Flickr

I am in the Belgian city of Brussels at the moment, which means that my mobile phone is ‘roaming;’ off my UK network and being charged a scary amount of money to access data. Travelling to Europe is less scary than going elsewhere in the world, as I’m ‘only’ charged about £3 per Mb here. That’s half what I’d be charged to use data in the United States, but is still an obscene amount of money for my mobile phone company to be extracting from me.

There are plenty of excuses made about termination fees and cross-border this, and intra-jurisdictional that, but at the end of the day a very small number of large telcos are getting away with what is essentially a scam. Much of the time, I’m actually connected to the local network of my own mobile phone company, rendering many of their excuses even more pathetically irrelevant than they might otherwise be.

Still, this post isn’t meant to be a complaint about mobile phone companies. I have every faith in the European Commission, and its power to bring more pressure to bear in reducing those charges. I just wish they’d get on with it.

What this post was meant to be was a complimentary post about a new startup that’s attempting to do something about this. And there’s a cloud connection, too.

Enter Onavo, a startup that uses a small app (iPhone only, for now) to reduce the amount of data you consume when roaming; thereby lowering the size of the bill your mobile phone company sends you. The company claims reductions in data consumption of “up to 80%” in optimal circumstances. I’m not seeing that big a saving, but mine is still significant.

Basically, when you turn Onavo on for a trip and start roaming, the company’s servers step in and start compressing images etc before they are delivered to a mobile carrier and — via the mobile carrier — to your phone. Compressed content means smaller content, which means less bandwidth used, which means smaller bills for me. Should you happen to find affordable wifi, Onavo gets out of the way and the uncompressed content again becomes available to you.

If you’re going to be travelling, have an iPhone, and want to give it a try, the company has given me some invite codes to share. Simply visit www.onavo.com/codata using Safari on your iPhone, and the first 100 will get into the beta programme. It’s working well for me, and might for you too.

Onavo is not paying for this post; they let me into the beta programme, I found it useful, and now I’m telling you that I did.

And the Cloud connection? Onavo’s co-founder is Guy Rosen; he of the Jack of All Clouds blog, and those invaluable State of the Cloud graphs. Speaking of which – aren’t we due another one, Guy?

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• Tighter regulation of mobile data roaming casts shadow over Barcelona from Brussels (robbratby.com)
• EU wants to bring down mobile phone roaming charges (newsinfo.inquirer.net)

And then things went quiet.

Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings and beta invites. That all ends today, as the iPhone app is now out of beta and available this morning from Apple‘s App Store. Versions for Android devices and the Blackberry are coming along close behind, and the company has big plans for building upon what they already have.

I got my hands on the app earlier this month, and put it through as many of its paces as I could from 3,000 miles outside the US market for which the current app and data are optimised.

I’ve written up the results of my play (and my conversation with Siri’s other two co-founders) for ZDNet, and look forward to trying it for real on my next trip to the States.

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