Tweakker connects 500,000 to mobile web, saves $4.65 million

Tweakker is a Denmark-based company with a simple idea: it should be easy to connect to the mobile internet. So it created a web site that gave you every piece of info you need to get your phone connected to data services – automating the process of getting your settings correct, no matter what phone you own or what mobile operator you’re on. In May it launched an API allowing operators, service providers and others to offer this service to their own customers – and today it has released some results since the launch.

Who needs Tweakker?

It’s important to realize who Tweakker is aimed at – it’s not for your big, established operators with their own networks. When you buy a mobile from one of them, your phone comes out of the box with all the settings it needs in place. But the MVNO model is becoming more and more popular – smaller operators that buy bandwidth on existing infrastructure. If you decide to switch your service to an MVNO, part of that process will be changing all of your settings so that you can connect through the the new network. Generally, the most simple way of doing that is by ringing the new operator – and they’ll talk you through the process step by step. Operators hate those kinds of customer care calls, though, because they’re very expensive, and significantly reduce ARPU.

What Tweakker allows, through the API, is for MVNOs, service providers or content providers to automatically detect and deliver the new settings to your phone. It makes the switch over easier for the customer, and less expensive for the operator.

What’s the news?

Since launching the API in May, Tweakker has reached its first target milestone – over 500,000 people have used the Tweakker API to connect their phone to the mobile web. The company claims this has reduced the cost of customer care calls for the operators by around $4.75 million.

What we think?

Ok, so 500,000 is a comparatively tiny number. But this strikes me as a genuinely useful service – I could have used it myself earlier this year when I was switching over to an imported Nexus One. If I had been able to use Tweakker to automatically point all of my settings to the right places, it would have saved me a lot of time. Tweakker claims to support 10,000 mobile phone models, including over 2,000 models where Over-The-Air updating is enabled – meaning the customers don’t even need to input the new settings themselves. It just happens automatically.