I frankly don’t have much use for cell phones that can send pictures or video. And it will be a cold day in hell before you’ll catch me playing a video game on one. But there’s one cell phone application I would dearly love that Verizon is about to launch.
I frankly don’t have much use for cell phones that can send pictures or video. And it will be a cold day in hell before you’ll catch me playing a video game on one. But there’s one cell phone application I would dearly love that Verizon is about to launch.
The two of you who still believe in convergence will tell me that you’ll watch video on demand and first-run movies while sending streaming video and e-mails via your BlackBerry or Motorola 6620. The real issue isn’t whether it’s technically possible to do all of these neat telephony Swiss-Army-knife applications. I can make my cell phone into a Palm Pilot, get iPod music on it, make it into a computer or even a walk-about TiVo. So what? It won’t do any of these things well and will become a kludgy artifact that will stay at the bottom of my desk drawer like all the other cell phone orphans residing in that electronic graveyard.
But finally, finally, Verizon is about to launch a service that leverages what cell phones do best: provide mobility. Location services are fine . . . as long as you aren’t mobile. But wouldn’t you like to know exactly where your kid/spouse/dog/car is while you yourself are moving? I would.
Imagine a service for $10 per month that would have five or six of these “points” hard-wired into your cell phone. Touch an icon and it would show you exactly where Thing No. 1 is . . . as long as he/she/it had a cell phone or a $90 geo-positioning tag. Then your phone would tell you exactly how to get to that person or thing from where you were.
I paid about $1,000 for LoJack for my car . . . it’s been five years and I have never used it. But I have lost my car in countless parking garages. Yes, I would like a system that would tell me to go 200 yards, turn right and there’s my car.
What’s in this for Verizon? For one thing, it’s a “sticky” application that will reduce churn. Churn is the percentage of customers who tell a company to take a hike during the year. If 2% of Verizon’s cellular customers switch to another carrier each month, Verizon loses about 21.5% each year. It’s hard to recapture those lost customers. What do you think it costs for a cellular carrier to add a new client? Take all their advertising and divide by the number of new customers. The real number is north of $400. That means for the first full year, the carrier makes no profit on that new customer. Now assume that the customer leaves – and add onto that number portability. There used to be very real pain in moving from one carrier to another, but today that pain is gone.
But if the carrier can add a service for $10 per month that increases the number of minutes a customer uses and decreases his likelihood of churning, then this is a service that is fully worthy of millions of dollars of advertising and having the voice of James Earl Jones doing his God imitation.
The trick to this marvelous technology comes out of the military. How do you get a moving tank to hit another moving vehicle? By using some very sophisticated algorithms for which you, Mr. And Mrs. Taxpayer, already have coughed up considerable dollars. What Verizon is doing is less cell technology than it is using the cell phone as a display tool.
I want it. I want to know where my wife is and whether she can pick up Kid No. 2. I want to know where Lassie is right now. And I want to activate Lassie’s cell phone and tell her if she doesn’t come home right now (“and I mean now!”) I will give away her dinner to that Rottweiler that lives down the street.
