Vodafone announced deals with Microsoft and Yahoo to support their instant messaging communities within the Vodafone Live portal, and vice versa.
Now, this is not the Personal Instant Messaging initiative launched last year by the GSMA. That was about network centric, operator centric communities of IM users using an operator service and interconnecting to others.
These services are about a tightly integrated product between the PC and mobile, for these two communities. So that’s where Vodafone is starting and it may, it says, add new providers as time goes by.
There was not much on pricing though. The operator would not commit to flat rate data, or a bundle, or anything at all on pricing. Our hunch would be, for European markets, for a basic flat fee, and then a per service subscription on top of that.
It may look like a walled garden, but it’s not, Vodafone’s strategy boss, Alan Harper, said. Vodafone wants to integrate certain applications with its live! site – so it can ensure a decent user experience, he said. And the live! portal will become more a jumping off start page.
T-Mobile’s Hamid Akhavan said he wanted to see net centric, thin client or browser based applications made available, harnessing the Web2.0 boom.
The company wants to extend its Web’n’Walk theme so users are truly getting the mobile internet experience.
So what does that mean? Well, T-Mobile also said it would launch a mobile IM service this year. Again, they couldn’t help on pricing, nor did they even say which communities they would support, if any. That’s all to come, it seems. Both Vodafone and T-Mobile insisted that mobile IM in no way threatens SMS revenues.
Outside of messaging T-Mobile also said it would be taking social networking very seriously.
Here it will be building some tariffs and products that allow people to communicate with their closest group of friends, building on its US MyFaves product. But with Vodafone having announced partnerships with YouTube and MySpace, they’re not alone there. Although it did demonstrate the difference of approach.
It would also be launching a push email client for the mass market, it said. Blackberry had done well, with 1.5 million T-Mobile Blackberry users. But it’s an enterprise product and that’s where the mass market model comes in.