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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, October 29, 2007

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Some of the newspapers here in the UK are getting energised about a story that the mobile operators are going to adopt voice-recognition and text-recognition applications – allegedly developed by Motorola – to scan traffic on the network and use it to send targeted advertising. Apparently the principle is that if you send an SMS to your friend saying, “meet me for a pizza” the network will parse the content of your message and will use the information it has about your current location to send you adverts about pizza parlours in the neighbourhood. Wow.

Of course, the daily papers made a big fuss about the intrusion-on-privacy aspects of this, and elicited a hasty response from the operators that this would of course be an opt-in service. What they didn’t spot is that this is one more sign of how desperate the operators are becoming.

We have a headlong rush to high-speed data capability on the mobile net, with HSPA, LTE and (/or) WiMax around the corner, yet the operators – who will ultimately fund it – have utterly failed to find any sort of business model that the mass market user will pay for. The market that makes voice and SMS calls and not much else, that is. Here’s the thinking;

- “Can we interest them in location-based information services?” - “Apparently not.”
- “What shall we do?”
- “We’ll push that information to them whether they want it or not. They will love it, they just don’t know it yet.”

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