My mind’s reeling with ideas after reading Surj’s impressions of Sonopia, a company that’s planning to help users create MVNOs for their niche communities. Imagine…
- Launching a counter-carrier - mobile plans targeted at the employees of existing carriers. Tie them into expensive 24-month contracts then provide crummy service…could you get Verizon to eat itself?
- A massively distributed call centre, where Mechanical Turk finds you an agent and you split the call revenue!
- Spoof.mobi - a carrier that promises to treat you like crap, lock down your handsets and assign you a random number every nine days.
- Customer service populated by fictional TV characters - Jack Bauer: ‘Tell me where my daughter is and I’ll upgrade your phone!’
Seriously, Sonopia represents a potential step-change in mobile telephony, rather than seeing services bundled with telephony, we may start to see connected products and services bundled with branded-telephony, like the Nintendo DS’ bundled wifi plans. I’m really looking forward to Aaron’s more detailed analysis of Sonopia’s plans tomorrow.
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Come to think of it, customer service agents playing fictional characters is actually a really fun idea…it might actually encourage people to call in and see who they get!
