{"id":196,"date":"2009-01-29T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-29T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2009\/01\/29\/vodafone-ponders-and-prepares-to-bulk-up\/"},"modified":"2009-01-29T01:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-29T01:00:00","slug":"vodafone-ponders-and-prepares-to-bulk-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/29\/vodafone-ponders-and-prepares-to-bulk-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Vodafone ponders and prepares to bulk up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Did you know about Vodafone’s Flipfont<\/a> app? No, I didn’t think so; it seems to have gone more or less unnoticed. Well, it allows you to – listen to this – customise your phone frontpage. Woah! How cool is that? The downside? Well, you need to pay \u00a31.99 for the pleasure, per screen! I don’t think so… And, apparently, (now) so does Vodafone. Amidst the iPhone\/AppStore rage<\/a> and the “revelation” that UI might actually matter to people, they seem to have realized that changing a font will not necessarily change the uptake of consumption to new levels. And because they cannot have the iPhone (although it has the Blackberry Storm<\/a>, which is performing much better<\/a> than the initial damning reviews<\/a> would have suggested), they will launch their very own app store, or so they said<\/a> (if you read Dutch, that is; how nice that we have a Dutch blogger amongst us who translated it for us).<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

This is not the only bit of news though: Vodafone also wants to tighten relationships<\/a> with two other players in the market, and these are none other than giants China Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Now if you thought that Vodafone was large, take this in: together, these 3 carriers combine 821 million (!) subscribers (Vodafone<\/a> 280m, China Mobile<\/a> 457m and Verizon Wireless<\/a> 84m [although I believe that VF counts a number of VZW subscribers proportionate to its shareholding in]).<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Here’s what Vodafone’s CEO Vittorio Colao told the FT:<\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
\n
\u201cIf you think of three players, China Mobile is very strong in China; it\u2019s a big country. Vodafone is very strong in Europe, Africa, India. Verizon is very strong in the US.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cIf these three companies could work more closely… in the management of customers, procurement and service creation, we could be unbeatable, quite frankly.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And right he is…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did you know about Vodafone’s Flipfont app? No, I didn’t think so; it seems to have gone more or less unnoticed. Well, it allows you to – listen to this – customise your phone frontpage. Woah! How cool is that? The downside? Well, you need to pay \u00a31.99 for the pleasure, per screen! I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[52,1350,79,107,123,217,310,617,686,697],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-app-store","tag-apple","tag-blackberry","tag-carriers","tag-china-mobile","tag-flipfont","tag-iphone","tag-subscribers","tag-verizon","tag-vodafone"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-3a","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}