I saw a business pitch last week for a company offering mobile marketing solutions [sic] via bluetooth. Now I find this idea quite exciting and a friend who works in marketing says this is all go with advertising billboards bluetoothing passers-by with personalised ads or extras. The company I saw, quoted a remark made by someone senior at Edelman who said that mobile phones were more exciting now than when the internet took off.
This took me by surprise. Frankly, unless this quotation was itself a bit of advertising I find it a tall order to believe. I am not an expert on all things mobile, or even the internet, but the web seems to offer so much more to so many more people. Sure, mobiles are mobile and now have exciting 3G content and services but so much of it appears, at least on the face of it, to be derived from/or require connection to the internet. So wouldn’t it be better to say that mobiles are now an exciting amd diversified part of the web? An add on? How long before Google buys a phone company?
Anyway, I digress… the point I wanted to make was that the Edelman remark seems to jar with concerns of mobile providers, if the comments by Anthony Hilton in a recent PR Week are to be believed. Hilton says that among the round of new year surveys, financial journos were being asked their views on the future of the mobile market by at least one major phone company. He asks why this is, saying that the previous worries about the cost of 3G licences are pretty much redundent in the City?
The real reason, Hilton suggests, is that the phone companies may be getting twitchy about the impact of Skype and other VOIP services on mobile phone use. I must admit that if Skyping offers a better quality, cheaper phone service through our computers what else would we need our phones for?
I may post an interesting story relating to Skype if I can remember it…!
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