Opera Mobile

People in every industry develop a certain language, or lingo, that is made up of words, phrases and expressions linked to the nature of what they do. At Opera a lot of people will ask you if you have "bandwidth" - as in "do you have time and capacity." When I worked in the Air Force a lot of people (especially the ones who had let themselves become completely absorbed by the culture) would use words like "operative" and "FUBAR", and point out an attractive woman on the street the same way they would instruct their team mates on the direction and distance to a target. Some words become especially popular, and end up being what we typically call buzz words or jargon. Every industry has them.

The mobile industry is no exception. Walking around at 3GSM it struck me that we who work in this industry have perhaps taken our jargon too far, where fancy sounding marketing speak has replaced real descriptions, thus making it very difficult to understand what we actually do. There is a word for that: fluff.

It is reasonable to assume that most people who attend a show like the massive 3GSM are familiar with the mobile industry jargon (although I doubt they can make sense of it all). However, at such a show you have thousands of companies fighting for attention in busy and crowded halls. When a person passes by your stand, he or she has but a couple of seconds to notice YOUR company and understand WHAT it is that YOUR company DOES. This is your chance to differentiate yourself from the others.

Then why not say "We make the fastest mobile browser" instead of "Enabling the future of user-information interaction?"

To illustrate my point I took some photos that I pasted below. It is not my intention to discredit any companies; I know I have fallen in the fluff trap myself several times.

Oh, and the one at the bottom right is perhaps my favorite. Not for being fluff, but because I simply do not get it. What I get from that is "Reduce your costs by making your Web site look like crap" - clearly that cannot be the service they offer???