Friday, March 23, 2007

The Problem with Vodafone Live!

location based services

Phone Handsets and Networks, posted: 23-MAR-2007 21:56

As someone who has a reputation for watching every penny, I find using Vodafone Live! to be very frustrating because I have to pay a fee for every little scrap of information that I take from it. Everywhere I turn, it's 50 cents here and 50 cents there, and before I know it I've spent a considerable amount of money for a short period of browsing.

With this in mind, it amazes me that Vodafone's clever marketing people haven't yet come up with the idea of offering Vodafone Live! subscription packages. These subscription packages could offer access to a combination of general information services such as news, weather, traffic, webcams, and maps for a discounted package price. This would make the whole Vodafone Live! experience more user friendly, provide better value for customers, and potentially increase revenue by compelling users to take advantage of services which they would otherwise not have used if individual service fees were incurred.

So, how about it, Vodafone?

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Comment by cokemaster, on 23-MAR-2007 22:01

The whole WAP racket seems to be something that isn't isolated to Vodafone or New Zealand for that matter... It would be nice for a change from the 'milking the captive market' that WAP operators seem to exploit.

Comment by Glen Barnes, on 23-MAR-2007 22:55

What bothers me most is that they charge you to get the movie times. Think about that...They want to charge you 50 cents just to find the time of a movie where you will spend $15 on a ticket. They should encourage everyone to chec the movie times for free to increase the conversion from browse to buy.

Comment by Dan, on 24-MAR-2007 00:07

Last week I finally got my Nokia 6111 working with wap/gprs etc. It was made much more difficult seeing I purchased it overseas and Vodafone NZ don't sell that model here so getting the configuration settings was a challenge.

But I got there, and now I'm faced with what seems rather pricey data rates on the casual data plan. I went to the Vodafone store and they said that you can't get any of the other data plans on Prepay so I'm stuck with these high prices to access Mobile Gmail (which is a great service btw)

I hope Vodafone pays some attention to these data based services at some stage as these are future. Just this week I was reading about a new Nokia phone/internet appliance that makes calls via Skype and not the phone network as per normal.

Author's note by alasta, on 24-MAR-2007 11:03

There's no denying that external WAP sites and Wi-Fi enabled handsets pose a threat to network operators' revenue streams. It will be interesting to see how they deal with this threat.

Comment by juha, on 24-MAR-2007 13:21

While I won't dispute that telcos are rapacious in general (TXT2Park which costs 50¢ each time on top of the usual SMS and monthly charges is a good example), I thought browsing Vodafone Live was free?