The occasional light expression

The other day I was musing over why mobile operators in India have not yet integrated text/image/voice ads with the basic voice calls, SMS/MMS or atleast with value added services? I started wondering how the more mature European market is doing on this front.

In my search I stumbled upon this interesting interview with Marko Ahtisaari who heads User Experience and Branding for BLYK, the first ad-supported Mobile Virtual Network Operator operating out of the UK and other European countries. BLYK targets 16-24 year olds and provides free SMS and voice minutes for end users in return for watching ads. So it sounds like an ad-driven model is beginning to take off globally.

The interview highlights some interesting experience aspects of an ad-based mobile service. I liked Marko’ answer to the last question: “We founded Blyk because we felt strongly that for mobile advertising to take off, you needed a company with the capabilities of an operator, but the ethos of a media company. And we think it’s important to work within existing patterns of behavior.”

I wonder what the future of mobile advertising has in store for us - Hollywood has been feeding us images of inter-planetary communication through videophone - what contextual ads will you see when you get a call at 3 am from a wrong number versus at 8 am from a tele-marketer versus an SMS at 11 pm from the cute girl across the lounge?
This could be a space for interesting innovations - if the content and context are well understood by markets and advertisers - otherwise the ads might just have a run in with future spam filters.

Justauthority is an interesting Indian site which allows users to search through judgments of the Indian Supreme Court. So if you’re one of those curious cats who is interested in the details of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, or government cases against Reliance and other companies, or landmark cases, this free online resource might be useful for you.

IDYeah is a niche Pune based design and IT company which created this site.

I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.

I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com

Via Doubtsourcing, an irreverent and in-your-face take on global and distributed product development, outsourcing, offshoring and the like - by Sandeep Sood with artwork by Aron Botham.

Sandeep also runs Badmash.tv, an animation company out of Berkeley and Bombay. One of their pieces has Amitabh Bachhan as an anti-Obama candidate for the 2008 US presidential election. Fun!