UnWired Nation: voice publishing

Posted on August 1, 2007
Filed Under All, Technology, Stanford Summit |

Unwired Nation’s CEO Indy Gill spent some time explaining to me ‘the world’s first voice publishing platform.’ The service, being unveiled here at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, allows any business - ecommerce sites, news and information services, social networks, et al. to reach opt-in mobile users at no cost. Their medium is the over 200 million mobile phones in use in the U.S. alone.

Cell phones represent a huge untapped channel for companies to communicate with users. The big question is how do you do that without annoying or otherwise turning off the customer? UnWired Nation favors an opt-in technique: for example, its first product, UnWired Buyer for eBay calls opt-in bidders during the last 3 minutes of an auction allowing them to choose to bid or not at the crucial moment. Ads that ride along on the phone calls provide monetization for the platform.  It will be very interesting to see if they can extend the concept to other users…

Comments

4 Responses to “UnWired Nation: voice publishing”

  1. pauldwaite on August 1st, 2007 2:15 pm

    > “UnWired Buyer for eBay calls opt-in bidders during the last 3 minutes of an auction allowing them to choose to bid or not at the crucial moment. Ads that ride along on the phone calls provide monetization for the platform.”

    I suspect I’m failing to grok something here, but at first glance, I’d imagine that an advert that plays before you get told which item is just about to go would be annoying, and an advert afterwards would never be heard because you’ve hung up to go bid.

  2. Anonymous on August 1st, 2007 4:26 pm

    Oh yeah? Well my startup is a platform publishing information community partner content search web new media green tech mobile company. Beat that, Indy Gill.

  3. saunderscc on August 8th, 2007 5:53 pm

    Regarding 1, Unwired Buyer doesn’t “insert” ads into EBay auction calls. Ebay compensates UB for auctions won. It’s actually very straightforward and more importantly, it works. There is also a web version (at their website) that provides real time auction updates straight from EBay servers–I wish this were a Mac Widget.

  4. saunderscc on August 8th, 2007 5:57 pm

    Regarding 3, my bad. It appears there may now be an 8-10 second ad at the beginning of the call. See here: http://www.clickz.com/3626605

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