Bango launches Button against itself
Rating: Is the Button a shortcode killer?
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With the launch of the Bango Button, it
would first seem that Bango is trying to put itself out of business is the
mobile content delivery sector. Button is a free icon which is placed on
standard web sites and provides a very simple means of delivering content to a
mobile phone.
In order to create awareness of the Button, Bango is pitching at social web
site users. The company has made it very easy to place the Get On My Mobile icon
on consumers’ home pages.
The objective is to make it easy to download a photo and use it as the
handset’s wallpaper. What the Button provides is a simple URL which the
recipient type’s into the handset’s browser.
I comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that Bango has actually bought the
wap.com URL to use with the Button service. The URL replaces the industry
standard method of texting a character string to a specific shortcode. A service
which is currently a very large piece of Bango’s existing business.
So, if the Button is free, how is Bango going to make any money. Well there’s a
whole host of facilities built into the Bango Button management panel which
illustrate exactly how it will generate cash.
It’s not just that Bango provides multiple means of enabling a Bango Button
owner to charge for content. It is all the analytic statistics which the
company can provide to a serious business client – such as an advertising
house.
Buried away in there are also tools to enable Button owners to ensure their
content shows up in all the right search engines. Listings on Yahoo!, Google
and JumpTap are provided to users for free, however.
What Bango hopes to do is create such
awareness of the Bango but that all a content owner needs to do is place
Bango’s distinctive exclamation mark icon on the web sites and the general
public will know that it means ‘click to download mobile content’.
There are obviously some bugs in the early
implementation of the Button but I managed to create my own Button – and debug
it – within about 10 minutes. If you want to give it a try its here.
The Button has many applications that will
help it appeal to consumers. Whether big businesses will follow suit remains to
be seen.
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