Madonna is clearly pretty sharp when it comes to music, invariably surrounding herself with cutting-edge producers and collaborators for each new album (before dumping them for people even more cutting-edge the next time). But it seems she’s also pretty savvy when it comes to mobile, or at least her management are.
See, Madge’s next album is out soon. It’s called ‘Hard Candy’. And to say it’s being promoted heavily to mobile users is an understatement. She started by signing a deal with Vodafone here in Europe.
It involves distributing seven tracks from ‘Hard Candy’ during the week leading up to its release on 28th April - one a day - for Vodafone customers to download. They also bagged an exclusive on her new single ‘4 Minutes’, and will have a dedicated Madonna mini-site on Vodafone Live.
But that was just the start…
Continue reading ‘Is Madonna the most mobile-friendly popstar ever?’
Loudly informing loved ones that you are ON THE TRAIN will soon be much clearer - or it will if you are on one of the 52 Virgin trains that are to receive signal repeaters to boost mobile reception.
Repeaters grab 2G & 3G signals, boost them and retransmit them. Virgin plans to roll out repeaters on all 52 trains running its London to Glasgow route by November this year.
The ability to chat on the train might come at a cost though - a survey by Vodfone into business users phone habits reckons that around 70% of people have discussed business in public on their mobile and around 15 % have spoken about confidential business information over the phone.
On the flipside, a worrying 26 % claim to have followed up on evesdriopped business leads.
It’s good to talk, but maybe it’s better to text?
If you are a big Madonna obsessive, now might be the time to switch to Vodafone as it and Warner Music International (WMI) have partnered in order to deliver seven tracks from Madonna’s new album, Hard Candy, to Vodafone customers ahead of its official release on April 28th.
As of April 21st one track will be lifted from Hard Candy every day and made available to download on Vodafone Live! for 24 hours until the full album is released seven days later.
Vodafone customers in Spain, Portugal, Germany and Belgium will also have exclusive mobile access to Madonna’s new single, ‘4 Minutes’, effective immediately. All Vodafone customers in the participating territories will have access to a Madonna mini site via Vodafone live!, packed with ringtones, ringback tones and SMS tones. No details on pricing but we are guessing that at least some of the content will be free, perfect for budding material girls and boys. Come on, you must have known that a badly shoehorned Madonna quote was coming?
It’s not like Vodafone’s new branded phones are going to be turning any heads for their looks. In fact they are not going to be winning any prizes for their feature set either as both the 227 and the 228 sport the shallow accolade of a ‘color screen’ and not much else.
But that’s ok because these are cheap and cheerful bottom of the rung handsets that do exactly what they say on the tin; i.e. you can use them to make phone calls on the move – it’s a cunning sort of devilry that we here at Pocket Picks are somewhat enamored with. Both are free on a contract and are available now across Europe.
(Via engadget)
MoConDi, the Italian firm behind viral mobile marketing service MeYou reckons it’s set for substantial growth as it readies a wider European launch.
The company reckons it’s attracted 1.3 million subscribers on 3 and Vodafone in Italy. Good news considering it’s soon launching across Europe and the US.
Basically, MeYou is a recommendation-driven platform that operators can offer through their mobile internet portals to drive traffic among like-minded users, who can send recommendations to each other.
MoConDi has gone on record claiming that 64 percent of its users send recommendations to mates, and 24 percent of these actually result in a purchase of content.
If true, these figures are highly promising for MoConDi. No wonder operators are keen to take it onto their services.
[Via Mobile Entertainment]
It’s about time we got an independent price comparison website for mobile phones, and now we’ve got one – courtesy of Phones Limited.
The site is working with over 20 online retailers, dealers and the UK network operators – like likes of The Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone - to compare datafeeds before showing the best deal for any given mobile phone package, including line rental discounts, free gifts and cashback offers.
The system is quite handy because it calculates the overall expenditure over the life of contract, then links direct to the merchant offering the deal.
If this proves a success, then Phones Limited will take the system offline and offer the deals via national press advertising and other media outlets.
The website is already live and available here, so if you’re looking for a cheap online deal you know where to go.
Mobile payments provider Bango has claimed that Vodafone UK is the biggest operator for off-portal content sales, which must be making it a pretty penny.
Bango measured all its content providers using its service and saw mobile internet traffic grow fastest on the networks themselves, after they all started embracing off-portal browsing.
Bango claimed that Vodafone benefited from being one of the first operators to offer an easy billing interface to help consumers buy content with their phones.
Other drivers for rising revenues from mobile web use include putting a search box on operator portals for off-portal content, introducing flat rate data charges and higher payout rates for content providers, to encourage them to post stuff on the mobile web.
So what does this mean? Us consumers are set for even better value mobile internet rates in coming years as the operators fight amongst themselves to rival Vodafone’s apparent dominance. And that can only be a good thing!!
Vodafone’s 2007-2008 Symbian roadmap has been leaked and while we already know about the 2007 releases, more interesting is the two new Nokia handsets in Vodafone’s plans.
has show two new Nokia devices – the Liam and the Dora, scheduled for launch in Q2 this year. Both have built-in Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA and 3.2-megapixel cameras. But they do have differences…
The Liam is a QWERTY device with a 2.4-inch screen and is smaller and slimmer than the Nokia E61, which it’s going to replace. Meanwhile the slider Dora succeeds the Nokia E65, with a 2.4-inch screen and quad-band connectivity.
The devices sound (and look) pretty interesting but really, the names! Please Vodafone or Nokia, sort them out before you release these handsets – who’d want a handset called a ‘Dora’?
O2 has finally caught up with its rival networks in refreshing its Active mobile internet portal.
The new-look site will according to O2, ‘for the first time’, look and feel the same regardless of whether its being viewed on a 2G or 3G handset. ‘First time’ for O2 at least, as Vodafone and others have been doing this for ages.
A useful personalisation feature is that the user’s most visited sites will be shown at the top of their homepage, with content viewed tailored to suit their browsing habits. For instance, if someone likes football and browses a lot of news, results and transfer stories, then these will appear at the top of their homepage.
It sounds interesting and we’d love to hear about user’s experiences, because if sounds like O2 owners will finally get the browsing experience Vodafone offers with its Mobile Favourites service.
Vodafone has started letting its customers upload content to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube – direct from their handset.
The operator, finally facing up to what its customers want to be able to do on their handsets, has opened up its service so that users can upload pictures and videos to their online networking site.
To do this, users must click on My Communities on Vodafone Live! and download the app, choosing which of the four services they want to upload content for.
At the moment, only Nokia N95 8GB and Sony Ericsson W910i users can do so, but expect this list of handsets to get bigger.
It’s the first time Vodafone customers (Or indeed almost any mobile users) can do this, so expect a rash of rival operators all announcing similar services in the coming months.
[Via Pocket Lint]
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