Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Sunday, May 20, 2007
3G reality check
3G operators scrabble for killer apps starts off with 'Mobile operators around the globe are busy rolling out 3G services and upgrades, dreaming of a day when users casually make video calls and download movies, allowing companies to reap several times more revenue per phone', that I'd like to counter with a few words of advice for operators:
- People won't use video conference. They will do a lot of multimedia downloading though, of course mainly of music and videos. The cost should be for the content, not for the download, and content must be DRM-free and in popular formats (read: not 3GPP).
- The costs need to be realistic. Operators are in the falsehood of believing that consumers will actually invest much more in total mobile fees than today, and also that any new service will/must generate revenue. The latter hasn't been the case on the PC-accessed Internet, and neither will it be for mobile. Most services on the Internet are driven by advertizing and have no revenue from the actual service, which leads to...
- Advertizing is a very viable revenue stream also on mobile. Reap the benefits from that instead of leaving that huge pile of revenue to others.
- Services don't need to be advanced to be useful. Just look at Twitter (and SMS...). Twitter's problem is rather that they don't have any visible revenue stream. Not even advertizing.
- There are tons of service providers that want to go mobile if it only had been easy and quickly profitable. Enable them to do that. That would also generate a lot of revenue for you. That includes enabling location-based services.
- Realize that you can become the ISPs of the future, something that scares the sh*t out of many people, including me.
I know many in the industry would cringe at operators getting revenue from advertizing etc, but I'm giving advice to operators here, so sod off ;).
