Get Ready for the Portal Wars II: The Mobile Portals

Watch out for the next portal wars: not, this is not Yahoo vs MSN vs AOL vs Google..this is the mobile portals war. It is still very early days in U.S., but it slowly building up in U.K. Some telecom operators, after realizing the folly of developing walled-garden portals only for their own subscribers, have started building a cross-network, over-the-web portals.

Case in point: Virgin Mobile in UK is working on a mobile portal, accessible by anyone with a Net enabled phone, not just Virgin Mobile subscribers. It previously offered customers some mobile content, but this tended to be via SMS and vouchers.

And now, Vodafone in UK is considering a similar move: it is launching a mobile content portal, not linked to its much-vaunted “Vodafone Live!” content service…The launch is planned for this summer. Users will be able to access the portal via SMS push or a URL, as well as via Vodafone Live!. It’s likely the portal will be available to subscribers from other networks but the finer points of the scheme are yet to be set.

In another deal in Germany, T-Online Germany has signed an agreement with Vodafone and E-Plus, allowing customers of the German mobile operators to access the content of T-Online. Previously this content was only available through T-Mobile Germany.

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