My concern in all this, is the damage it is going to do to legitimate services and not just premium SMS. What about companies who are looking to embrace mobile services like two way SMS for the first time but are just put off because of the bad feeling surrounding SMS that these stories create.

It is beholdent on all of us in the mobile industry to insist on compliance by all of our clients. We must provide them the tools and the services that ensure trust is rebuilt among the users.

The success of interactive SMS in the broadcast sector has done a lot to raise the profile of SMS in the business sector. Everyone is, after all, a consumer. We need to make sure that it doesn’t go on to ruin it.

I don’t think it’s tarnishing the mobile industry – this voting could have been done via other means – it’s our fault for being too damn convenient. I think the clear message is that it’s the dodgy middlemen, not the ‘mobile’ industry.

On the flipside, it’s doing wonders for the credibility of the BBC’s independant journalistic structure and right to criticise internally. Long live the Beeb. Could anyone see Fox News or any other Evil Empire conglomerate having its own internal journos expose something like this?

Maybe that’s being a bit harsh – your old nan may be addicted to GMTV ‘quizzes’ and she’s patently not stupid, because that would make you a second-generation quiz-participant. Maybe you are from a long line of quiz participants, who knows?

The media will spend weeks in a lather over this matter, which is really of no import at all in the wider picture, without ever actually asking ‘had the shortlist stayed open longer, how much more likely would be to win the prize’?

My guess? maybe they would have gone from one-in-a-million to one-in-half-a-million. Odds which, if you applied the same expectation of ‘winning’ to real-world likelihoods like getting hit by a bus or a falling piano, would see you never leaving your house.

England, IMHO, is sleepwalking toward Pete Townshend’s vision of ‘GridLife’ , where you all sit in your GridSuits and have experiences piped to you in the comfort of your own homes. Never venture out, never take risk, never need to exert yourself.

I may be in the mobile industry, but SMS voting as Mogadon for the masses? Let’s not kid ourselves that this is actually important.

Cheers,

Mike

Part of me wants this to all go away quietly before damage is done for us all in this industry. But then we also have to route out the bad apples and in this day and age I’m afraid that can only be done openly and publicly.

oh sigh…..

steve