October 30, 2006 at 11:42 pm · Authored by Ewan · Filed under Mobile

MyMobileLife
Originally uploaded by ew4n.

I’ve been hearing about MyMobileLife on and off from various sources for a little while now.

It sounds good. A dedicated mobile portal, on java, offering football alerts, messaging/chat, games, ringtones etc., news/entertainment, betting and shopping. It all sounds good.

But it’s the Carphone Warehouse. They’re good selling you a handset, most of the time. They’re perfectly shit at managing an interactive service such as Fresh Mobile (example. This experience, combined with a rubbash looking welcome page (top right), didn’t bode well.

Then, dear reader, my eye fell upon the ‘powered by Reporo‘ button and my mind relaxed.

All is perfectly good now.

Reporo is, alongside ShopQwik, one of the best mobile applications I have ever been fortunate enough to have used.

Carphone have done a deal with Reporo and got them to do the gubbins — the plumbing — to make sure that MyMobileLife will be simple, easy to use and successful.

Carphone are very good at marketing. Witness this line here:

If you’re a football fan who’s fed up with paying through the nose for text updates, you’ll love MyMobileLife. Instead of sending you expensive text messages, we send special MyMobileLife alerts that appear on your phone. We send you as many teams as you can handle for just £9.99.

Now, imagine having just got your new handset from Carphone and the adviser says, ‘oh, by the way, into football?’

The chances are, if you’re into football, and you’re a ‘normal’ user — that is, not a mobile geek — you probably get some sort of footie alert or goal alert on your handset. And you’ll be getting hosed.

That sentence there sells it to the masses. I can imagine it being very successful, if Carphone get it right. The platform’s perfect. Reporo have seen to that. So if Carphone can get the marketing right, they could very well end up with a huge AOL-style mobile community.

Could be good.