Reuters was at the Ki-Bi booth at CTIA promoting its mobile version, which it seems to think will do well using Ki-Bi’s technology. This is part of Reuters “direct to consumer” strategy, which is both online and mobile. Reuters Mobile offers several different alert products, and will soon be launching video news on mobile in the US — it’s already available in Europe and Asia. The whole thing is going to be ad-supported, although I suspect the wires company will also make money selling its images as wallpapers. The site is mobile.reuters.com and when I accessed it on my computer I got a pop-up…I really hope the site is detecting the device being used and wouldn’t serve that on a mobile.
As part of the promotion Reuters put its content on the Ki-Bi card which was being distributed at CTIA (the others included AOL, USA Today, Spin, Spinfone, Silverbirch Studios, Impact Mobile and Ki-Bi itself), the idea being that people dial the number on the card, hold up the card to the phone and press a button, the card makes some noise and content is then pushed to the phone. In the case of Reuters it was an SMS with a link to the WAP site.
“We think it’s a great distribution for us, it puts the content right in the hands of the consumer,” said Patty Reeber from Reuters. “A lot of times people just don’t know how to text in to get the content … the Ki-Bi card makes it a lot easier. You’re used to making phone calls and basically that’s all you do.” It may not be a simpler way to distribute mobile content, but I guess it is more familiar. Also, it enables the content to be prepaid when you buy the card, which is useful for a whole segment of people.
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