Free mobile calls have arrived


by Ian Ball - Date: 2007-04-11 - Word Count: 336 Share This!

Blyk is a new European mobile operator, aimed primarily at young people, that does not charge for calls or texts, but instead makes its money through advertising. It is scheduled for launch in the UK in mid 2007.

When subscribers sign up, they will have to provide basic demographic data, and their subsequent mobile usage will be tracked, including analysis of times and dates of calls and patterns of internet behaviour, so they can be sent targeted advertisements.

Details of a person's location will not be stored, but can still be used to deliver advertising to a certain person at a certain time. I suppose if someone was in the region of a cinema for example, they could then be sent an ad for the latest films.

Ads will be delivered via SMS and MMS text message, and there could also be a banner advert at the top of a browser window when using the internet. There is a possibility at a later date of adverts appearing while using applications such as messaging.

It's not the first time that the idea of mobile advertising has been raised though, with many of the opinion that Google's recent interest in the mobile sector is related to their desire to expand their lucrative Adwords platform into the mobile sector.

Operators such as O2 and Vodafone have plans to trial mobile advertising as well.

The propsect of a free mobile service does bring to mind the Free PC offerings that appeared at the start of the dot.com revolution, that paid for themselves by bombarding users with adverts every time they used them. This particular model failed because people disliked the adverts and disliked disclosing personal information, and because advertisers quickly realised that people were learning to read around the adverts.

Personally I get so frustrated when I get a text message only to find its a network promotion, that I think I would avoid mobile advertising. It could be a useful option for university students however?

02

Ian Ball is an employee of the mobile phone shop Dial-a-Phone.

Related Tags: mobile phones, mobiles, mobile phone shop, mobile, o2, 02, free calls, blyk

Ian Ball is an employee of dialaphone, the mobile phone shop and specialist in O2 mobile phones. Click here for the latest 02 deals. Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

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