Australian company Jumbuck has signed up UK operator to its “suite of community services”, the flagship being Jumbuck Island, which is a 3D virtual world that acts as half massively multiplayer game and half chat function, as players walk around a virtual island and interact with each other. It’s already on Sprint, Nextel, Optus, O2 and Cingular, and this paragraph from the press release jumped out at me:
T-Mobile UK, Content Manager Lenka Horakova, commented, “The real advantage with Jumbuck is that T-Mobile customers have been able to benefit immediately as they are able to communicate instantly with Jumbuck’s large established global community. We’ve already had great feedback on their services from our customers.”
The users of the Jumbuck Island can chat with anyone else on Jumbuck Island, and what this means for carriers — and more importantly the carrier’s customers — is that they don’t have to worry about getting critical mass. Obviously you need a certain number of participants to make a chat service such as this worthwhile, but the first T-Mobile customer to sign up will already have plenty of people to interact with.
This is yet another reason why carriers should try to interoperate with each other rather than have closed portals — mobile phones, and everything on them, are about communication. The more people a person can communicate with, whether via phone, SMS, chat, game or whatever, the better it is for the carrier.
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