We don’t know much about Indiana-based Mosh Mobile yet, but it claims to be offering free, advertising based mobile service to U.S. customers after they purchase a phone. The news comes as Amp’d, a high profile U.S. MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) has ceased operations after blowing through $360 million in capital.
Blyk, a much anticipated MVNO in Europe with a similar model (free service, advertising supported), has missed a couple of launch dates. Mosh Mobile has launched, although in a private “beta.” Only other Mosh Mobile users can invite you to join the service. They are not yet saying who their service provider is.
The business model: “The service will be supported via advertisements delivered by text message, the wireless web portal, inserted in to wireless pages, the free wireless applications and will be targeted to various usergroups.” To generate any kind of realistic ARPU (average revenue per user), there is going to have to be a ton of advertising. It’s not clear that users will be able to tolerate it, or that advertisers will get the kind of return they are looking for.
The company says they are funded, but are not disclosing details. They have a Twitter account where they are keeping users updated.
Update: I’ve been talking to mobile execs…no one has heard of Mosh Mobile, it doesn’t appear to have any carrier deal, and the fact that the domain name was just registered suggests that this is more of a hope than a reality. We’ll keep on it.
This would be cool, just like Ooma, free phone service once you shell out for the hardware, even if the phones cost a couple hundred I would still try it, just hope it’s GSM with the phones unlocked so when you travel you can pop in new SIM cards. If anyone has an invite I would like to try this service out.
I’d love to try this out
Will this be added to inviteshare?
I’m not sure that the infrastructure is ready for this, kind of like with web 1.0. Some things just can’t be done yet. Sometime in the near future, perhaps, wireless will cover the U.S. by businesses and individuals and there will be a way to allow some of this bandwidth to be securely shared with people who need to make phone calls…But I can’t really see the traditional telecoms letting something like Mosh Mobile succeed.
i’ll take a free ferrari that plays radio commercials 24/7 but i don’t know about a spamming cell phone
Scenario #1:
Allen: Hi Mom, Allen here… how’s it going?
Mom: It’s going good
Allen: Hold on, I have to take this ad so we can talk for another minute
Mom: WTF
Scenario #2:
Allen is sleeping.
Allen gets up because phone sent me an advertising message at 3am.
hear that noise? that’s the sound of the bubble POPPING!!!!!! this is RIDICULOUS. Remember all the free ISPs during the 2000 boom? HOW MANY SURVIVED TO 2002? zero
NETZERO!
Even if it only lasts a year, that is a years worth of service I wouldn’t have to pay for and a cell phone that will be worth some money as an antique 50 years from now, but if it’s an unlocked GSM phone one can alway move to tmobile or at&t.
Web 2.0 = Bubble 2.0.
Not all businesses can support themselves on advertising. I can’t imagine this being anything other than intolerably annoying.
Is this for real or is it just a joke? They just registered the domain yesterday (Created: 2007-07-28) and a day later they are already offering service? Strange …
Okay all I have to say is…. “WTF?!?!”
When are people going to realize that being bombarded with ads – is like being attacked by a friggen paint ball gun, its a stupid model that lacks any form of original thinking.
With literally one search on the web I found a site mentioning it claiming the service is run by Nokia:
Got invited last week by Nokia for their new mobile sharing community platform called MOSH. I must admit it’s great to be invited to all exciting Alpha and Beta mobile testing, still it’s quite difficult to test them all in-depth with a lot of workload on the shelves these days. However, as with anything good in life… quality, curiosity and surprise always make a good cocktail and make you want to try out things immediately before others.
http://www.m-tr...h-by-nokia.html
so I suspect the Beta– crappy site thing is just a marketing gimick.
actually, I am wrong– that seems to be an entirely different Mosh
why?
1. hostage crisis in korea and asia market.
2. middle ages crooks believe greed is good
3. Oil price skyrocketing
4. milk price skyrocketing
5. africa inflation
6. over price homes. not one at 20s-40s actually buy new homes.
many youngers were draft to war and other seeking jobs that hires
young.
7. FDA & some americas banned some asia products.
8. everything starts get overpricing people will stop buying it.
9. tutition budget cuts. Many will drop out or join army to seek themselves death road.
10. Dropping
When these things drop. you can’t buy anything product all over the world.
what to do? I think it’s best for us to create product.
LOL @above post
Imagine someone predict stockmarket crash this monday. I hope you laugh you too…
I won’t mind either.
Wow, TechCrunch features ever dumber companies by the day.
Let’s analyze the demographic of a “free mobile service that is supported by advertising”:
- Young, tech-savvy, unlikely to pay attention to advertising
Let’s analyze the demographic of potential advertisers:
- Ooops, none.
No advertiser will go on with this farce for very long. Not everything in life will be free. You won’t see a doctor in return for having a Google AdSense screen installed in your forehead to display ads to everyone who walks past you. You won’t get free movies in return for watching ads every 10 seconds.
The more advertising crowds are world, the less valuable it is due to the clutter. The more people ruin blogs (read: PayPerPost), the less blogs matter. The more TechCrunch writes about stupid companies, the less TechCrunch matters.
This actually may work if they can piggyback Mike, USA termination is under half a cent to fixed or mobile, so they have no infrastructure costs, no billing, I can see this one rolling with the right people behind it, As for Blyk, even if it gets off the ground it will never last, mobile termination in Europe is just too expensive to carry free calls.
I feel dirty just thinking of the amount of advertising one would have to go through to get a free service. There are certain things that are just worth paying for, even thinking back to teenage years, I doubt this free service would have been appealing.
I’ll be watching closely to see whether this ever takes off…
very nice site