Back in January I worked on a project to pre-launch a rather ubiquitous idea called Sandbox. Well I wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of other Internet personalities, influencers and media practitioners in the Philippines involved in the beta testing phase, which is, to my knowledge the biggest crowd sourced activity ever orchestrated in the local online community.
Read on for more of my personal insights with the launch.
The summary: Loadmomma from Red Mobile combines social media and viral marketing with a prepaid load distribution.
The cat is finally out of the bag. Several weeks ago, customer service reps from uMobile (formerly CURE) called their former subscribers hinting of a new service on the rise. A lot of bloggers caught sight of this and have speculated their thoughts. This new telco, as we now know is Red Mobile. The ads are all over Facebook and the local Internet. However, there’s more to Red Mobile than just cheaper rates.
So here we go! Introducing … Loadmomma, the second half of Red Mobile and what seems to be the key missing piece. Loadmomma is a social phenomenon that challenges the way we send out load. Instead of buying load – why not earn it from other Red Mobile subscribers via a social network platform? Of course, you can always buy credits!
Quoted from the FAQ:
Anyone can be a part of the red mobile online community. All you have to do is log on to www.loadmomma.com, register your personal details and recruit as many of your friends to join the load momma community. As the referror, you will be considered the “load momma.†Make sure that your friends all register—each successful referral means that you can get P10 worth of red mobile prepaid credits, which is equal to 20 minutes worth of voice calls or 20 text messages (red mobile to red mobile). [source]
Interesting as well – the account management page lets you add friends in your email address books and social networks as well (see above). Under your account management page, you can send messages, view your friends (yes, Load Momma also has profile pages like social networks) and check your load statistics. There’s also a referral link which you can use to display on your blog for load affiliate credits.
And yeah – based on the menagerie of alerts you can customize above, it IS a social network and you can even customize the CSS for your profile page.
In other words, what we’re looking at is potentially free load depending on the number of friends we recruit on a daily basis (not yet sure how this works in practice but nonetheless worth a try!). So yeah, it’s not only cheaper than 24/7 Unlimited, the long term costs are cheaper as well with its current rates. I guess this is why they have the “It’s better than unlimited” tag line on the web page.
[Disclosed: BlogBank, a company I own, is running the Loadmomma campaign across its network]
So I recently got myself a SUN prepaid kit. I had to. Let’s just say that a number of factors led to me finally spending P70.00 for a new SIM by recommendation of Kenna — figures she works for SUN — I had to get one for my blog to make it easier for people to contact me, whom I didn’t know personally.
The two three motivators were a series of seminars to be conducted for a non-profit group this coming Friday, a small social experiment with Jonas Diego, Fritz, Marcelle, Jeff and a few more bloggers for Axe (yes! the deodorant!). It’s a viral campaign they’re doing and I’m pretty hyped about it – the schedule is fit for a rockstar: invading three bars from 9 PM to 4 AM on Friday. I hope I can keep up with THE Fritz. And yeah, I opted to get a second SIM for this purpose, more for security reasons. Hyuk! My number is here.
Oh and yeah, the last motivator is really to find a SIM for my spare review phones. For the past couple of months I’ve been using my uMobile SIM for spare units. I mean why not, right? It’s the proper way to review telecommunications products without the hassle of swapping my SMART SIM (I’m on a BlackBerry consumer plan but the BlackBerry Pearl is still somewhere in Canada for repairs).
Confession time: I lost my uMobile SIM. Yep. Misplaced. Got blown away by the wind. Got sucked by the vacuum cleaner. Oh well. So I’m on SUN again (used to have a SUN SIM back in 2006 and boy the service was bad). I think everyone deserves second chances, albeit first impressions were not that happy – there’s no signal in my room. Between Globe, SMART and SUN, the latter has the weakest signal – no signal at all! On the upside it allowed me to do something really geeky and connect my phone via Bluetooth to the desktop and use the desktop SMS function that wirelessly transmits the message to the phone outside the room. Really unnecessary. But geeky though.
I’m reposting the Verzio Envii review I wrote a couple of months ago for MANUAL. Credit goes to MANUAL Magazine, July 2008 Issue. And might I add, it’s silly that I’m running my secondary line on a more advanced phone! Review after the break.
So hit me in the head. Here’s the listing of countries for the iPhone launch. The top screen actually says June 11 2008. This is the list for “coming soon.” See anything we like?
EDIT: Erratum on the free load and how it works
EDIT II: Apparently the referral system is now up. I’ll be referring people who want a umobile number. The application requires me to input your name, email and a current cellphone number so if you’re comfy with giving that out to me, send me an email. All info you provide will be held in strict confidence.
EDIT III: Short video walkthrough here
SMART Telecommunications, Globe Telecommunications, SUN Cellular, Bayan Telecommunications. And now there’s room for one more.
There’s a new number in town and that number is “+63999.” Word is out that a telco called CURE which was bought by SMART has been launched for the public, and their name is U Mobile or ümobile, the country’s first free advertising-driven telco. It’s sort of like Inquirer Libre which we get to pick up on the train station free of charge — because everything is subsidized by advertising.
ümobile is a brand owned by Connectivity Unlimited Resource Enterprise, Inc. CURE belongs to the family of the 2 leading telecommunication giants—PLDT and SMART. We maintain our independence as far as strategic business decisions and day-to-day operations are concerned. SMART supports us in our needs especially on network complement. [FAQ]
Is this the telco for the masses? Well no. Not really. Not yet. Currently, applications are by invite only and I heard that people who have been invited to the service (those who went to the launch party a few hours ago) will be able to refer friends who can join up and avail of the free service. I heard as well that there is an allocation of P350 worth of credit per month for users P100 a month for the first 6 months for free. The P350 is the maximum amount of load you can receive by participating in the ad program that is sent to your mobile. We were blown away and I really have so many questions to ask. But as of the moment, that’s all I know.
Commenting on the worldwide telecommunications scene, this is something Google wanted to do – buy their own spectrum and launch their own telco free of charge, driven entirely by advertising. The Philippines is the first in Asia to have an Ad Driven telco and yeah, this is huge. Freakin’ huge. The telco has been in operations for more than a year now undercover and have now launched officially with several partner establishments to deliver advertising directly to the mobile phone.
Ads are purely contextual and users will have to answer a thorough survey which is updated every year in case interests changes. So yes, “contextual” is dependent on the survey as far as I was informed.
Cool beans. Freakin’ cool beans. This is big.
P.S. I won an LG KU380 Phone from the raffle — well I think everyone went home with one! Marketing is surely aggressive. Open bar. Piss drunk. Wheeee!