These two videos, leaked to us by a Vodafone insider, show a new product called Vodafone People that bears a striking resemblance to Zyb, the mobile phone utility and social networking site that Vodafone bought last year for €31.5m ($44.5m).
But we don’t think Vodafone wants us to know about it just yet. Although there’s a Twitter account with just over a hundred followers, nothing’s going on there and you won’t find much by Googling either. What’s clear, though, is that Vodafone is now aiming squarely at integrating social networks, an area which the Three network has pushed heavily to date.
Vodafone People has “active contacts”, similar to the old Jaiku format and seems to be taking on INQ Mobile (which has an exclusive contract with Three in the UK) by syncing contacts on multiple devices and details with Facebook. In other words, Vodafone appears spooked by Three’s focus on social networking.
It looks like Vodafone People will integrate Twitter, GTalk, Facebook and its own status updates too. Throw into the mix features that currently exist on the Pre, iPhone and Android handsets, like threaded conversations, and you’ve got a pretty powerful feature set that rivals Skydeck.
According to the videos, Vodafone People will be “open to everyone” across 247 networks and 400 mobile phones. The videos show cloud syncing across mobile, PC and Mac. Even Nokia can’t do that successfully yet. Always backed up and always updated? Sure, that’s nothing new on its own. But this isn’t a handset manufacturer, an operating system or an application offering this: it’s a mobile network, via technology they’ve purchased in the form of a start-up.
Voice and data services are only going to get cheaper. The last thing mobile networks want is to become “dumb pipes”. So here’s a network trying to increase the value of its proposition by offering its own services.
Looks very slick indeed. Just the sort of thing to bring the normobs up to speed. I was wondering what was going to come out of the ZYB purchase.
Hey Mike,who owns Yafflezone?I’l admit,their logo is prity sad but seems like they have got an impressive business model.
When are they launching?Mike,can u please find out and report on it.
http://www.yafflezone.com
Can we block the word Yafflezone; there have been about 10 poste for this crap in that past 2 days
“That’s not unsurprising.”
Really?
Surprising = Surprising
Unsurprising = Not Surprising
Not Unsurprising = Not Not Surprising
Not Not Surprising = Surprising
For another example see the often misused irregardless as opposed to just regardless…
I’ve done all I can do here…
Forget “yafflezone;” don’t these people have a Marketing Department. Do they have any idea what “zyb” means?
Bwahahahaha!
I think its great
I think it’s just another Walled Garden 2.0 try.
A brilliant new feature for vodafone, but will it really be able to rival the dominance of 3, iphone or blackberry?
How is it the ‘dominance’ of 3? I thought vodafone has the biggest market share in Europe as a mobile operator.
I have absolutely no idea what a Zyb does. So I aint going to miss it on my N97. In a hundred years from now historians will look back at all the stupid names the internet has spawned and think these was the generation of retards.
Gus
If you like you phone, you will like Zyb, it stores all your contacts on a server for later retrieval.
Seems smart for carriers to be branching out into the verticals.
By the way, what’s the song in the first video called??
Where did the videos go???
It appears “someone” has removed them.
the video’s don’t work!
If Vodafone People will be “open to everyone” across 247 networks and 400 mobile phones, there will definately be a charge to use it. People can already access social networks for free and back up their names and numbers for free, so what’s the benefit to the end user? Or do we all just fall for this ‘proposition value’ fluff?
Well I guess it depends which cross-section of the end user it is aimed at. To tech-savy/early adopter/geeks it won’t mean a lot. To the rest, the actual main bulk of vodafone’s customers, it could prove to be a convenient one stop shop.