118118 seeks to dominate UK text answer marketplace

Bad news for AQA and Texperts? Or is all competition, good competition? I’ll talk to the founders of both services soon and see what they reckon. Meanwhile, let’s ponder the news. 118118, the UK directory enquiries giant, is on the march.

Alfie has the news:

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118118 recently revamped their service to include the ability to call or text to ask the folk there anything at all. This reminds me of this one time, we decided to goof around and call the 192 information service (this must have been 1997 or so) to ask them random silly questions, was much fun.

Aside from pranking kids, this service offering from the UK’s leading information line/service presents a real and (I’m sure) measurable threat to the excellent UK start-up Texperts (previously 82ask). It seems to me that 118118 are even taking pages directly from the book Texperts wrote, just look at the images below (both screengrabs from Texperts and 118118 site’s respectively, both in the top right hand corner of each site.)

This really is a serious competitive problem for the burgeoning and pioneering Texperts service, and I wonder how they will differentiate or adapt to take on this monster competition. They certainly don’t have the budget to splash out on 4/5 prime time slots on the 5 major Terrestrial broadcasters here in the UK as the 118118 folk are currently doing. The 118118 service also benefits from some *serious* brand recognition, so when you do want to text a question, texting 118118 is quite natural if you know they will answer any question and not just directory enquiries.

So what’s the answer for Texperts? More funding? Internationalising the service?

For a bit of fun, I decided to ask 118118 and Texperts the question:

“How many pineapples (approx) would it take to extend from the Earths’ surface to the Moon?”

Here’s 118118’s answer: “The average size of a pineapple is 9.4cm. Converted into KM is 9.4 10-5 kilometres. Multiply it to 384.403km. This will be approximately the answer.”

Um. Ok. What? Why didn’t they give me the *actual* answer!? Wow, that was dumb.

Texperts answer: “Pineapple=15cm. 239592 Distance between earth and moon in miles. 1 mile=160934.4 centimetres. 10729 pineapples per mile. 25705822568 pineapples would stack between here and the moon.”

Woohooo! Now that’s more like it!! It might not be accurate, but for a question like this, who cares, you want to be be able to state a ridiculous number to your friends around the table in the pub, not be told to, essentially, work it out on your calculator. So it seems that on a service level, the Texperts service wins out – a fast response to a question in answer form, not as a series of clues.

But service is seldom enough, if 118118 are pushing their service to grab the Texperts niche, there needs to be a business strategy response. Please do leave your thoughts on what they might do/what it means (or if you have a different number of pineapples that would make it to the moon) in the comments below.

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Alfie’s post was previously published on his blog. (Reproduced in full here, with his permission). Thanks Alfie!