Ben Smith talks to Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic, about some absolutely astonishing survey participation figures — so surprising that the Flirtomatic team are considering offering their clients the ability to run surveys on the service.
Posts Tagged ‘results’
MIR Show – Week 45 – Flirtomatic’s astonishing survey results
Friday, November 21st, 2008Results Day and my Mobile Phone!
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Tomorrow, it’s GCSE results day. This means two things – feeling extremely sick, and using my mobile phone a lot!
I haven’t really thought about the communications side of tomorrow much, seeing as I’m more worried about everything else. However, as Ewan pointed out to me tomorrow morning I will spending more time than I have in a long time, using my mobile phone.
From what I’ve seen from previous year groups (we’ve been shown videos into scaring us to work hard), everyone is using their mobile; so how will I be using mine tomorrow?
Firstly, there are my plans to Twitter everything. It’s more of a plan to keep me sane whilst walking into School than anything else. Then again it’s also partially so that anyone who is interested enough to care, can follow what’s happening on my Facebook and Twitter profile.
Then, there are the “after reading the results” communications. Obviously, whether good or bad (that sends shivers down my spine), my family will want to know.
That’ll mean making a phone-call to my Mum, and trying to tell her everything whilst everyone else in my year group is at the same time. My School is also built in such a way that gaining a signal is near impossible, so I’ll have to hunt around for a good spot, preferably away from my teary-eyed and excited peers.
I don’t doubt for a single second that the hundred and eighty strong year group will not be making dozens of calls and texts. With everyone owning a mobile phone, and eager parents, I expect everyone will have fully prepared and topped up mobiles.
The rest of my family, namely my Grandparents have asked me to send them a text or “drop call” them. I can only imagine that even if I text them the results, they’ll be phoning me up, probably with speakerphone on, so that they can all hear.
And finally, another Twitter update.
Isn’t it odd to think that five years of work will be summed up by 180 characters on the internet? Hmm, whatever the outcome, I don’t want think about it now.
What’s even weirder to think about is that there will be around three hundred thousand students receiving their results tomorrow, and probably doing the exact same thing. Maybe not the Twittering though, because I don’t know of anyone in my friend groups, or year group who micro-blog; but I can guarantee that a number of texts and phone calls will be made.
With any luck whatever I will be texting and saying on my phone tomorrow, it’ll be good – although I don’t have high hopes for Music. But even so, at least I can phone up a reassuring voice in the event of anything drastically horrible.
And that is why I love my mobile phone.
Best of wishes to anyone else who are also receiving any results tomorrow!
Virgin Mobile gets £366m writedown
Thursday, August 7th, 2008Ouch. It looks like Virgin Media’s mobile arm has let the side down if the latest set of quarterly results is anything to go by: the company has announced a massive goodwill writedown on Virgin Mobile in its second quarter financials. In short, Virgin Mobile is now worth £366 million less than originally thought in goodwill terms.
Such writedowns are a bit of a nebulous beast – who can really guess how much people’s warm and fuzzy feelings are worth towards a brand? – but wiping £366 million off Virgin Mobile’s value, even if it is purely on paper, has got to smart a bit.
That said, it doesn’t look like this is a major blow for Virgin Mobile. The decision to go ahead with the writedown comes as a result of declining values for mobile phone companies across the board, according to Virgin Media. Virgin Mobile’s got a few other reasons to be cheerful too: the company is planning to get into the tasty 3G data market, it’s doing better selling mobile contracts to cable customers and it’s squeezing more cash from its pre-pay customers as well as adding more post-pay users. It might be a knock, but Virgin shouldn’t have any difficulty in putting it behind them.
Nokia: There may be trouble ahead
Friday, April 18th, 2008Interesting results out of Nokia this week: despite some promising numbers, like net sales up 28 percent year on year and device volumes up around about the same, it looks like the money men weren’t impressed by the results. Why? Nokia’s warning things won’t always be as rosy.
“Nokia expects the mobile device market to decline in value in Euro terms in 2008, compared to 2007. The change from our previous estimate of value growth for this market primarily reflects the negative impact of the recently weakened US dollar, the general economic slowdown in the US, and possibly going forward some economic slowdown in Europe,” the company said, and added that average selling price is expected to go down too.
There’s also discussions on how rising food prices will affect Nokia’s performance in emerging markets. According to Business Week, Nokia’s CEO said the chance there will be a knock on effect is “pretty remote. The mobile phone is a necessity item”. That sounds somewhat on the optimistic side to me, unless Nokia’s next line comes with Bluetooth, a two megapixel camera and a few loaves of free bread.
