Does Qualcomm have a sick business idea on its hands? We’re not sure yet, but check this out.
Wireless Week has a story about Qualcomm and ‘unnamed partners’ building a health-based MVNO called LifeComm that is expected to launch in the second half of 2008. The wireless service will focus on health care — with some of the partners including medical device manufacturers — as well as a brand focused on consumer fitness, and healthy living.
LifeComm will be both a health care and consumer play. Potentially combining the service with some necessary health devices, like heart or blood pressure monitors, could make it more of ‘a necessity’ spend, rather than a luxury item, like Helio or Amp’d. Especially if the startup could ever convince health care providers to recommend the service. Mobile users in Korea and Japan have access to similar health-related services.
Still it is the track record of MVNOs in the US that makes us pause.
As Helio and Amp’d can attest, building a newly branded phone service is incredibly hard and costly. Particularly when the MVNO business model requires significant tolls to the network carrier and massive marketing costs. Virgin Mobile went public recently and still has a negative net income after roughly 5 years in business. ESPN Mobile closed shop and returned from the dead as a content play.
Consumers (at least in the U.S.) are just confused what Helio and Amp’d are. They are starting to bring in some numbers, but signing up the first hundred thousand has been like pulling teeth.
Both Amp’d and Helio have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on building their businesses. The Wireless Week article says LifeComm will be closing a bridge loan in the next few weeks.
Good luck. Though, there are also a few reasons why Qualcomm’s MVNO could be an easier play than aiming at the tech savvy college and young professional market.
First Qualcomm can probably help negotiate a pretty good deal with a CDMA carrier. With it’s long standing carrier relationships, the company has the kind of weight that can help it at the table.
The article says the phones offered by the service will use BREW. Verizon Wireless may be a likely candidate for that one. Qualcomm and Verizon Wireless have a long standing relationship, with Verizon being the first to recently launch Qualcomm’s MediaFLO service.
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4 comments so far
2:07 AM PT
Amazingly, 10 hours after being posted, this blog post has attracted zero comment, which probably says something about the level of interest in the idea, which can be garnered from the blurb.
Prima facie, in a nation of baby-boomers, the market size can look attractive, as does creating a network effect through alliances with device manufacturers and such. However limiting their devices so as to function with one type of cellular technology will be pretty silly on the part of device manufacturers, and telling their customers to incur additional expense for making their monitoring devices accessible may require a bit too much ‘cross-sell’ on account of a healthcare payor/ provider. There are too many assumptions at work in this proposed service and creating a niche MVNO, when broad-based services are not making tonnes of money, is not likely to change the economics substantially. One to watch!
7:19 AM PT
My POV is as a health care consultant, not a telecom expert. From a long-term POV, LifeComm could be very significant:
* LifeComm is a major sign of disease management going mobile and going retail.
* It’s the beginning of “the doctor in your pocket.”
* There are no boundaries. Expect LifeComm to move to international markets.
* Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is moving beyond the elderly and homebound.
Please go to (link) for additional perspectives and reader comments.
2:12 PM PT
The big difference between this and any other MVNO is that this is targeting a target audience of women aged 45-60.
Never before the target of mobile operators these affluent consumers currently spend nothing.
Contrary to the conventional operator practice of drilling into the pocket money of children with gimicky ringtone offerings this Lifecom service has the potnetial to deliver something of value to someone who wants it and can afford to pay for it.
Certainly one to watch, it’ll be interesting to see the phones they launch.
4:31 PM PT
Cambridge UK based consultants “Wireless Healthcare” have an interesting announcement about the provision of health services with CDMA technology:
(link)
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