Getting Airtime
I work for a large company in the mobile technology industry. You know, phones, masts, bits of cable.
I think it’s a very exciting time to be in this industry right now - because all of the bits of metal, radio waves, electronics and software are coming together to enable some fundamentally different and exciting ways to communicate.
Nonetheless - I don’t live in London. I live in a two horse town in the middle of Berkshire. And from the point of view of ‘mobile social networking’, ‘location based services’, ‘mobile web 2.0’ and all the other gumph, I might as well live in outer Mongolia.
Why? Because none of my peer group actually use any of this stuff!
So I have taken it on as a personal mission in life to get my most luddite of friends, family, colleagues and neighbours to adopt a mobile service beyond basic calling and texting, and feed back the results to my dear readership of precisely 0. If nothing else, it will serve as a good record of the realities of reaching a mass market audience for a service, very useful for the inevitable time when I strike out from behind the corporate comfort firewall and launch my own business.
One of my favourite sites for tracking news in this space, by the way, is SMS Text News. The editor has an impressive ability to go to places like the Maldives and pretend he is doing some work ;-). In relation to my future entrepreneurship, I’ll be tracking this initiative and seeing what can be learnt.
