August 26th, 2008
Many of you know that Senator Obama announced his VP via text-message push on Saturday. Regardless of anyone’s political affiliations, this was a watershed moment for mobile data in that something so newsworthy was communicated through the phone.
I have been thinking about other watershed moments in mobile data here in the US, and I couldn’t think of any specific events. Only close calls:
- American Idol SMS voting? A great introduction to TV interactivity through the phone. But in the end, as only ATT subscribers were allowed to vote, more than half of US mobile phone users were left in the dark. It has been reported that most people voted via their 1-800 number line.
- iPhone 3G browsing? A very impressive offering, which is selling like hotcakes. Yet, even if they triple sales expectations, they still will have fractional phone market share across the U.S.
Which brings me back to this VP announcement. Until now, mobile has always been thought as merely an extension or sidenote of any project (i.e. Dial 1-800-XXXXXXX to vote… or for ATT subscribers, text IDOL to XXXXX). But this time it was different. Every TV and Internet news organization was highlighting the fact that this mission-critical VP announcement was to be delivered via a messaging push to the phone. Moreover, this mobile service was available to the mass-market (more than 50% of the country). It is true that the VP announcement was also available via email-alerting, but that fact was hardly mentioned in the press. I believe that is because there is a implicit “immediacy” association that the phone mobile carries (which email, for the most part, does not carry)
Fortunately, the service received generally good reviews - (for example, this WSJ article). Also, Nielsen Mobile estimated that an impressive 2.9 million users in the US received the message. Surely, this means more political announcements via messaging. More likely, this is the tip of the iceberg for many other mission-critical data services to finally emerge for the mass-market via their mobile phones.
Posted by Sach at 5:48 pm
Tags: barack, obama, SMS, text message