Vodafone 360 communications drives networks

Vodafone announced Vodafone 360 last week, with much fanfare, and many people focussing on the new, LiMo Foundation based Samsung Vodafone H1 which certainly has a beautiful looking user interface - though I'm slightly concerned about the amount of empty black space on the device, just how readable is that text in those small boxes going to be?

All the excitement about a new phone the more interesting piece of the annoucement - the set of network services that Vodafone are rolling out has been somewhat lost.

Even more interesting is that Vodafone also announced support for these services on other handsets - of particular interest to me was the annoucement of support of Vodafone 360 on the Nokia 6730. This phone is unlikely to generate much excitement - it's a standard candybar device of the same form that people have been carrying around in pockets and handbags for years.

As such it's likely that as Vodafone 360 rolls out to the mass audience, more people will experience Vodafone 360 for the first time on this Nokia handset than on a LiMo based Samsung handset.

So what will Vodafone 360 look like to them? Vodafone 360 on the Nokia handset centres around the connected address book - it seems Vodafone have been reading my post from February, which is that Vodafone need to

• Drive more connections between people and businesses
• Drive more connections between people and other people

Vodafone 360 does exactly this. Integration of social networks drives more person to person connections - whether it's messages as a result of status updates/photo sharing/location sharing, or businesses to people connections from application stores with the Vodafone connection.
The challenge for Vodafone is now to relentlessly focus on this core vision of driving connections - and not get into distracted by trying to "sell content" - content will sell alongside these connections, if Vodafone facilitate the connections.
My experiences from Live Talkback are that mobile phones have massive potential to drive connections with mass scale audiences - since launch we've already had over 65,000 votes on the Live Talkback platform - with individual events showing over 10,000 votes alone - people have a massive desire to connect, and interact. Mobile phones are a large scale social tool, and mobile companies can benefit from understanding that.

Comments

[Moon]

UWEtgj I'm out of league here. Too much brain power on display!