Dipping into the Blogpond

I’ve been reading a lot about predictions for internet trends in 2007 (e.g. Ben Barren). I’m suffering recently from information overload, so many sites, so many gadgets & gizmos and widgets. It’s all good fun, but a little too easy to get sidetracked from actual “productive” work.

Somewhere I stumbled upon (no pun) the new dot mobi domain. This has me intrigued and excited. I have a Blackberry, which predominantly functions as a mobile email device for me – I’m sure I don’t use it anywhere near to it’s capacity. However, sometimes (because I really don’t get out much!) when I’m out and about I need to find a phone number or address of a business. So I’ll go to dLook (disclaimer: my website), which I can navigate around ok, but probably only because I’m so intimate with it. It really hasn’t been designed with mobile functionality in mind – not with the graphics, adverts etc.

Yellow have done this. I subscribed for the service (to check it out), and I have to admit that it’s quite good. But for us, it really has to go into the category of “value added services”, as there would be no obvious revenue to be gained. Sure it’s a bonus for our advertisers, and an added functionality that might help build loyalty.

But for Telstra, they’d get additional “user pays” revenue from those customers subscribed to the network (i.e Telstra Mobile customers). Yes, to the detriment of their directory assistance, but the additional downloads may well contra that.

I imagine that the other (charging exorbitant rates) “directory assistance” services would be not too pleased about this functionality. For Example Optus charge $1.10 per 124YES call plus standard mobile rates for the duration of the call, and Vodafone charge (from what I can gather) $1.30 to $3.50 connection & 65c to $1.75 per 30 seconds for their “123 Ask Us Anything” service and $1.10 to $2.60 for the standard 1223 Directory Assistance (depending on the plan) so the WAP option is probably an economical option for the savvy searcher.

So the next move for dLook – investigate the .mobi possibilities.