Business 2.0: While users seem to love the ability to post pix on the fly, the real beneficiaries will be carriers, who’ve been looking for ways to plump up their flat revenues-per-customer. Here’s why. Everyone expected camera phones to unleash a flood of photo sharing and, with it, growing demand for bandwidth. But that didn’t happen because sharing pictures with your cell phone is a real pain in the neck: Uploading them is awkward and often doesn’t work. But moblogging relies on technology that makes it a snap: Sign on with a moblog service like Flickr and start e-mailing photos from your phone to that account.
I still wonder how well this will catch on if I have a transfer limit and have to mentally keep track of how many photos I uploaded and how big they were to avoid overage charges. If I’m getting charged airtime too (hello Verizon) it makes things even worse. I think the carriers would be smart to have their own Flicker-like service where their customers get unlimited photo uploads for a flat fee or a good per photo set-price like 5 cents.
jesse if you read the whole that’s exactly what i am saying.
I currently use Cingullar as my carrier and pay $24.99 a month for unlimited data service. I mostly email photos to flickr. I use approx. 24 – 40 megs a month of data.
I am going to grad school in Ireland in late Sept. and have been looking at the options for data packages and am astounded by the prices.
I guess I will have to cut down on my Flickr addiction… ;op
Damn it Om, you expose my cheapness yet again. I probably need to break down and subscribe to Business 2.0 (if only to help support your lifestyle). Jen, you seem like just the customer the carriers need to make money off of this type of thing. Did you find $25/month a good value? How big a voice plan do you have with Cingular?
I am not going to pay for data service on a cell phone until I can get at least 10Mbps downstream out of a data service plan.