Free" Cell Phone Service
Free sounds good, right? Who wouldn't want free cell phone service? Mosh Mobile is promising just that and more. Buy a phone and away you go. With their "plan", you get unlimited calling, unlimited text messages, unlimited internet access...
There's a bit of a catch.
Mosh Mobile is ad-supported, meaning that you're going to get text messages at random that are targeted ads. But you really have to want to get into their service. You see, you can't sign up for Mosh yourself, you have to be invited by a friend who's already a user (even their website puts it as "All the cool kids are doing it") and then go through an application process...which is pretty much an ad survey to find out what demographic you fit into and what ads to send to your phone.
"OK", you're saying, "I can put up with a few ads for free phone service. After all, I can just delete them when they come in." Mosh is a step ahead of you.
Your ads come complete with tasks or trivia questions for you to deal with. They may ask you to visit a website and tell them what color the background is, or what a new product is called, that sort of thing. You'll only have a set amount of time to fulfill each task, usually around 48 hours. Miss three tasks in a month and you're warned. Fail to correct it and you're cut off.
Thus, you see where the invite system is already the first indicator that a user is going to be a good...well, user. By getting invited, the user either knows someone who's hyped the service or is motivated enough to seek someone out who can invite them. (Yes, these guys took a page right out of Google's playbook) Curiously enough they publicly discourage buying an invite, saying that they'll delete anyone they've found selling an invite and whomever bought the invite.
Looking at their website it's abundantly clear who Mosh is going after...kids. They're trying to get these ads and brands directly into the brains of kids who are going to made to feel special by the invite scheme and partially by their own branding. The ads fully bypass everything else and hit the kid in what is likely to be his most personal product...his cell phone.
Now, Mosh is saying they're not going to sell your info...but let's face it, they don't have to. They're essentially an ad company who's found a new delivery method. They don't need to aggregate your demographic info out because companies are going to pay them to target their ads to you.
Aside from the obvious, there are other things that scream badness to me with all of this. One statement on their website that gets me is, "Funding information for this venture is currently private". Why? Because Conglomerated AdCo doesn't have a hip enough sound to it?
In a lot of ways this is just the "logical" progression from what Yahoo and Google have been doing for years now. Targeted ads based on user supplied data. Previous ventures of this kind, like ad-supported internet service, really didn't take off because of failures in the technology. People discovered early on that their ad-delivery could be circumvented or ignored pretty easily on their computers. These guys are pretty slick, they've got the phones locked down to do just what they want and a method to insure that their ads are at least being digested. These guys are almost assured at least some limited success. The real question is: will it catch on?
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