Sales & Business Development Manager
Dependant on experience
UK - London
Social aggregation meets app store, with support from Samsung and Nokia at launch
Those well-sourced rumours in the UK press earlier this week were, yes, well-sourced. Vodafone has unveiled its new Vodafone 360 initiative, which it describes as "a suite of innovative, new internet services" for mobile and PC.
Social networking is a big focus, drawing on Vodafone's acquisition of social contacts firm Zyb last year. The service includes a new 'connected address book' - Vodafone People - which draws in contacts from users' phones, Facebook, Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger, with Twitter to be added soon.
The service will also aggregate social media, including status updates and new content from social networks - mirroring the attempts being made by Motorola with its MOTOBLUR Android interface. Users can choose to share their location and content (photos for example) with friends.
However, mobile entertainment is also a big part of Vodafone 360, which will include apps, games, music and mapping services available for mobiles but also PC and Macs. The operator says a catalogue of more than 1,000 apps will be available at launch via something called the Vodafone Shop.
One intriguing aspect: non-Vodafone users will be able to access parts of Vodafone 360 too, although details of exactly what and how have yet to be revealed.
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Samsung is on board as the launch partner with two handsets that will be exclusive to Vodafone, using the LiMo Linux-based OS. Unveiled today was the Vodafone 360 H1 handset, with a 3.5-inch multi-touch screen, 16GB of memory, Wi-Fi and a five-megapixel camera.
This, and Samsung's still-secret second 360 handset, will be available in eight European countries by the end of this year: Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Other countries will follow in 2010, including India, France and Russia.
However, Vodafone says that four of Nokia's Symbian smartphones will come preloaded with the 360 service at launch too, while "part or all of the service" will be downloadable to more than 100 other existing handsets.
“Vodafone 360 is the first service of its kind to offer customers the benefits of a truly integrated mobile internet experience that gathers all their contacts and content, all around them, in one place,” said Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services at Vodafone Group.
“The beauty of Vodafone 360 is that all the services work together and they are easy to use."
This screams "fail" on so many levels.
Voadfone 360, I wouldn't be surprised to see an Arcade element called "Vodafone Live Arcade", or a music download portal called "vTunes".
I think this will be yet another great disaster for us all to watch with, at first, great excitement, then shortly after, terror and sickness as we're unable to turn away from the inevitable slow-motion train crash. And then we'll all derise and moan about how crap it is and how difficult it is to get apps onto and how the business model sucks and blah blah blah blah blah.
Sorry if I'm not excited, but its yet another example of how the Operators are failing to grasp what it is their customers actually want. Provide me with a cheap/free but cutting edge phone, give me free txts and cheap calls and then stand back so I can explore the device, browse the web and get decent content from the places I want to.
Saying that, good luck V360, you'll need it.
What a lovely worded article; it sounds like there's so much potential for us possible content providers and yet from experience it will only be available to companies who have an "apple pie" scheme in place and I don't mean that in the sense of iPhone etc.
Was there any mention of the business model for content providers during this glitzy press conference? I cannot see it reported anywhere. Can we expect the usual scraps after Voda, aggregators, HMR&C, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all their mates have sucked out the max amount of dosh?
Well then ! So whats in it for content providers / app developers ?
Not much I would venture outside the closed circle of VF partners already in place.
As nobody really seems to know what 360 is all about it does not bode well for new CPs / Developers hoping to find a place within the hallowed walls.
It will be interesting to see this pan out , well sort of, but these operator run spaces will always be just that,operator run and controlled with all the hoop jumping and bullshit that comes with it
for new innovative CPs.
Yawn.
