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March 03, 2006
Ageism in technology? Yes. For good reason? Hmmm.... maybe.
The March 2006 issue of Wired magazine has an article about Sky Dayton new venture to bring state-of-the-art mobile phone technology to the U.S. by means of a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) called Helio. Sky Dayton, you'll recall, is the guy who founded Earthlink. He's now the ripe old age of 34, quite ancient in technology terms. An MVNO is a company that sells mobile phones and service plans, but doesn't own any network infrastructure; rather an MVNO leases infrastructure and capacity from other companies that do. Examples of MVNO are Virgin Mobile and Mobile ESPN; even the bottom of the rack Seven-Eleven wireless plans are MVNO.
Dayton is annoyed that cell phone technology in the United States is a backwater. It is only necessary to look at Korea and Japan and the Scandinavian countries to find much more imaginative use of high-speed cellular technology. Helio's goal is to bring that technology to the U.S. by teaming up with SK Telecom, Korea's leading wireless carrier. They will be buying network capacity from Verizon and Sprint. They are also setting up a partnership with myspace.com.
All this was interesting in and of itself, but what struck me was the description of the marketing research that the Helio consultants have done to drill in on their core potential customers--18- 32-year-olds with money to burn. They broke down the 61 million 18-32 age group into 8 groups, five of which would not be interested in the Helio products, but 3 groups would be: the "spoil me", the "see me", the "feed me" crowd (read the article for the whole explanation.)
I have to say that I found it rather distasteful, all the while knowing that this is exactly how companies figure out how to make money. The clear implication of this planning is that persons of my generation (baby boomer) would not have interest in having a wireless phone that was able to receive video news or TV or streamed music. (I find it more than a little odd, since I probably have more disposable income than do many young professionals who still have student loans to pay off.) It is true that I am not interested in having music videos from the latest bands, nor am I interested in the offerings of myspace.com. But maybe I am interested in video newsfeeds from CNN and the offerings of gather.com, the new web site sponsored by partly by NPR for the intellectual crowd.
For tech companies there will always be an unending supply of 18-32-year-olds. But what happens when the current crop gets out of the targeted marketing demographic? Can we expect companies to abandon them, or will we start to see a broader range of services offered to a wider demographic over time? I may be antique by the measurement technology time, but it doesn't mean that I'm not interested and that I don't have money to spend.
Technorati Tags: Helio, cell phones
Posted by tdr at March 3, 2006 11:04 AM
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