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December 07, 2004
blah.com
I recently stumbled across blah.com (http://www.vzw.blah.com/about_blah.htm) which is a service started in Rio de Janeiro by Telecom Italia Mobile and apparently makes exlusive deals with wireless carriers around the world to offer this service. The incentive for the wireless carrier is that the service is designed to persuade people to send more text messages with that given carrier. It's not exactly clear from the website what all the services are, but basically you can submit a profile, look up others all over the world with specific interests/characteristics (social networking-style), and connect with them to text message, play a networked soccer match against the person on your phone, and so on. They even have global rankings for these cell soccer players on their website. I suppose it's sort of a facilitated global pen-pal system for the 21st century. It already seems to be effective at getting people to sign up and send text messages, as they claim 3 million registered users internationally, over 16 carriers in 10 countries, and they really play up such diversity on the website. Of course in the US, they only offer it to Verizon customers, so it seems to me like a good way of both providing a cool value-added service to persuade people to choose Verizon (or whoever the local carrier is) as well as pay for more text messages.Posted by at December 7, 2004 02:31 AM
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