Shocker: People Want Breaking News, Not Old News On Their Phones

from the and-the-hits-just-keep-on-coming dept

Tue, Sep 13th 2005 5:17pm — Carlo Longino

Hutchison Whampoa's "3" operators around the world can always be relied upon for an interesting anecdote. Whether it's a UK executive calling people nuts for wanting to use the Internet on their phones, their crazy promo offers in Italy, or their parent company's boss' cunning use of the Jedi mind trick to deflect criticism, it seems like 3's always up to something. The latest is the revelation from 3 UK's CEO that mobile users are more interested in breaking news coverage on their mobile phones, rather than archive material. Wow -- apparently people would rather know what's going on when they're getting news from their phones than search through old material. The guy also tried to take a shot at the incumbent UK networks, saying their 3G networks will cannibalize their 2G networks. Um, isn't that the idea of an upgrade? It shouldn't come as a surprise if 3 sounds out of touch. After all, they only just realized maybe walled gardens aren't so good after all.

2 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

dorpus, 13 Sep 2005 @ 8:04pm

Should Airplane Passengers Get News About Flight R
The airline industry avoids showing movies that include air crash scenes, so passengers won't get excited.

Should airlines censor news of bad behavior on other flights, so passengers won't get the wrong ideas?

An executive of a major Korean firm was arrested by British police for terrorizing a flight. The executive's bad behavior began even before the flight, when he cut into line and started a fight with a foreigner. Shortly after takeoff from Inchon, he took his socks off and washed his feet in the crew galley where food is prepared. The man then sprinkled water on another passenger, earning a reprimand from the crew. When a stewardess went by his seat, he stuck his foot out and tripped her, then made a sexually harassing comment. Later on, he threw his socks at the food cart and knocked over a liquor bottle. When the flight attendant told him to stop, he threatened to harm the attendant with a razor blade from the plane's bathroom. Flight crew then arrested the man and took him to the crew galley at the back of the plane. The executive then took all his clothes off and pissed on the floor.

The executive was arrested by London police and sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. Flight crew say the man was not drunk (making the below illustration inaccurate). A spokesman for his company says the man has a history of mental problems. (Which is why he got promoted to executive, of course.)

http://japanese.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2005/09/14/20050914000006.html
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
cro, 14 Sep 2005 @ 1:20am

Not particularly surprising
We've been trying to become a content provider to 3 for more years than I care to count. What do we offer? A 'Breaking News' service related to computer games. OK, so we deliver it via premium SMS rather than video clip, but the basic response we've been getting since day one is 'our customers aren't interested'.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]