Mozes: Secure Your Keyword

Any opinions on how the ENUM standard will effect Mozes’ business case?

Not sure about the US , but in the UK a similar service has been in operation for about 4 years

Micheal: What is the name of the similar UK service?

Is there revenue model completely based around advertising? How are they making money from all the individuals using the service personally/between each other?

I really like this service. Why? Because it’s innovative and different. There are so many videoo sites out there they all blend into one another and it gets boring. Here we have a service that’s new, different; and even if it’s not perfect, it offer something no-one else does (in the US). Overseas, they’re well ahead of us in the US w.r.t. cellphone technology.

I spent half an hour fiddling around with this, and secured the keyword ‘charlie’ for myself. It’s definitely interesting and innovative.

I never have business cards, so I can see using this as a means of transmitting my contact data to people fairly quickly. By texting ‘charlie@(recipient number)’ to the mozes number (66937) I can forward whatever canned information I’ve specified at the Mozes site.

It’s a neat premise. The interface has a long way to go. It’s counterintuitive throughout - I had to go beyond the inline instructions several times just to create and configure my account. I think they’re looking at two more interface revolutions before they’re capable of significant casual user retention.

I want to provide a little more context.

Our main goal is to deliver a platform that connects people in a cool new way and a big part of that is addressing how information flows - from push to pull, from mobile to web and in & among groups. We see lots of opportunity for that in social circles, and, yes, commercial stuff too. Consumers pretty much know how they want to deal with advertisers, and advertisers are challenged more and more in how to reach consumers. Mozes plans to help bridge that gap.

On the user side, our goal in getting our beta going is to get the kind of comments we got from Charlie above and create a much better user experience. Charlie - your comments are awesome. We’re at the earliest stages, and we will move fast to address some of the obvious useability issues.

In the coming months, you’ll see us deliver on some great partnerships. You’ll also see us expand what a keyword can mean in terms of accessing information and making it available to others. We think the really cool stuff will not only come from us and our users, but from developers too. We’re going to work hard to earn the trust of the user and developer community.

If you think we may be on to something and have any ideas or want to learn more, please email me at dgp[at]mozes.com.

qtags (launched in US and Canada in march 05) is similiar to mozes, but focuses more on the advertiser aspect. That is, we developed qtags to make it easy to people to remember ads / messages they like without getting added to advertiser mailing lists. Advertisers display a qtag word on ads, and then if you see something you like, you text, get a 1-time text message with info and also we store a web-link for you online at your qtags.com account. We’ve experimented too with using qtags for people — we put them on all badges at the 06 NewCommForum in Palo Alto and on an Ad-Tech conference in Seattle, both in Feb 06. I agree with Dorrian that people pretty much know how they want to interact with advertisers and for the most part they want to retain control over that interaction. Using qtags makes it easy for people to bookmark ads (and connect to the right place online)but stay anonymous, and advertisers pay for those texts, not the user. Try it, here’s a live qtag word - hiphop - text the word hiphop to 78247 (qtags on the dial).

Hi !

I thought 411Sync already did this several months back. And Marc Center also blogged about this

http://blog.broadbandmechanics.....source_sms

Radio station song lookup via mobile phone/SMS. has been available in the US for the last few years also. Please see Yes.com for details. It’s possible that Mozes is using the Yes.com interface.

And that type of service is *huge* in the UK; the Brits even have a service that allows the user to hold a mobile phone close to a music source, and the song will be identified via digital fingerprint.

Since this is the second article about Mozes, I’d have thought a little more research would have been performed about it’s features.

It should be ‘Text the radio station (e.g., KROQ) to 66937…’

Well, from what I understand, you just need to be well connected to generate any buzz. No innovation necessary. Just take an existing technology that has potential, create buzz, then create a buzz.

As we can clearly see, Companies like Yes.com and 411Sync exist for several months and actually innovated this technology. However, looks like founders of these companies are not well connected to generate any buzz. thats really sad ! And some other company takes away the credit

Btw, I really hope that these guys (Yes and 411sync) get credit for their hard work. Keep up the work.

The UK song identification service is at http://www.shazam.com/

I’ve used it a couple of times and it seems to work *most* of the time but does rely on there not being too much background noise. I do believe this is a few years old now though…

It’s a great service for groups communication. Such a service exist since 5 years in Switzerland provided by http://www.mnc.ch

http://www.939.ch/ is a version of it. The business model is based on revenue shared between the operator and the service provider. Owner of a keyword can define the price of messages for a channel.