My OperaMobilizing the web'n'walk community
Friday, March 16, 2007 1:22:37 PM
Yesterday Opera and T-Mobile Europe announced that T-Mobile will launch a new web'n'walk community service build on My Opera. The press release stated that:
I believe it's time to step back and look at our collaboration with T-Mobile. T-Mobile and Opera have been working closely together now for more than two years, and T-Mobile made headlines in June 2005 with the launch of web'n'walk. On its debut, T-Mobile became one of the first operators to offer real Internet browsing on a mobile phone, with unrestricted access to all content. For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that control of the content (the so-called 'walled garden'), was the best method to drive operator revenues from data. T-Mobile and their customers disagreed.
This evidence showed that walled gardens did not keep customers and revenue in; they held revenues back. And that is a very interesting observation I will need to get back to later.
Meanwhile, I suggest all those who haven't tried photo blogging with Opera Mini to test it out. It supports lots of web services like MySpace and Flickr, or check out recently added photos to the Opera Mini photo stream.
By integrating the community into their product offering, T-Mobile allows its customers to take advantage of popular My Opera features such as photo-blogging, photo albums and more, all from the convenience of their web'n'walk powered phones.
I believe it's time to step back and look at our collaboration with T-Mobile. T-Mobile and Opera have been working closely together now for more than two years, and T-Mobile made headlines in June 2005 with the launch of web'n'walk. On its debut, T-Mobile became one of the first operators to offer real Internet browsing on a mobile phone, with unrestricted access to all content. For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that control of the content (the so-called 'walled garden'), was the best method to drive operator revenues from data. T-Mobile and their customers disagreed.
T-Mobile launched a number of Opera powered handsets like Nokia 6680, 6630 and N70, but they also understood these high-end mobile devices would reach only a niche market, primarily because of price. To address this they chose Opera Mini for the mass market Java enabled mobile phones. The first results came in at the close of the third quarter of 2005. After web'n'walk's launch in June 2005, the indications for an increased data usage as well as data ARPU were very promising. On average, web'n'walk customers visited 330 Internet pages per month. These raw numbers corresponded to a 489% increase in data volume per user, and 119% increase in data ARPU. After introducing several Opera Mini based web'n'walk phones at the end of the second quarter 2006 and Internet usage surged 350% while revenues jumped an additional 70%.Too expensive, too complicated, too little used — that’s our clients' judgment about our current data services, - Ulli Gritzuhn, T-Mobile.
This evidence showed that walled gardens did not keep customers and revenue in; they held revenues back. And that is a very interesting observation I will need to get back to later.
Meanwhile, I suggest all those who haven't tried photo blogging with Opera Mini to test it out. It supports lots of web services like MySpace and Flickr, or check out recently added photos to the Opera Mini photo stream.
