Prepaid Numbers

2010 July 5
by Dave

As I left 7-11 this morning with a Super Big Gulp of cola I happened to overhear an interesting conversation. Four homeless people were standing around outside the store and one of them was explaining to the other three how his prepaid cell phone worked and how much it cost him. The others were very excited by this.

The thing that they were most excited about was the ability to have a consistent phone number, but not have a monthly bill. As long as they bought a tiny bit of phone time every few months, their number would be good. This reminded me of a post that Michael Caulfield made last week. He referred to a study finding that as smart phones with access to e-mail and instant messaging have gained market share, users have actually increased the percentage of their messages that are sent via sms.

Caulfield posits that the mobile phone number is actually mobile telephony’s killer app. Text messages will get through to a person wherever they are, regardless of what carrier they are on, regardless of what IM app they use, and regardless of whether or not they can get email on their phone. Also the recipient can receive and view it no matter what they are doing.

Of course the homeless people learning about prepaid wireless weren’t interested in text messages, but I think that is because they haven’t used them and thus have not yet realized that they are both a cheaper and more useful mechanism to convey many kinds of message compared to a voice call. The fascinating thing to me is that the concerns of homeless people in their 50’s and 60’s are so aligned with those of teenagers and twenty somethings.

This tells me that building a better phone number is a good idea. I am sure that others have had the same thought and are actually working on such things, but here is what I would like to see in phone number 2.0.

First off, I think that routing through my mobile phone is a good idea. I think that should be maintained. My mobile is with me and thus my mobile’s identifier serves as a good proxy for me. We should send texts to each other exactly like we do now, except that if I am sitting at my computer at work, Outlook should pop up a notification with the text message just like if I receive an email and I should be able to respond by typing the message on my computer. If I am in my car I should get incoming messages read to me and be able to reply via voice. Basically, I should be able to pair my phone with whatever device makes sense for my given location.

Secondly, my SMS conversations need to be logged in gmail. I need to be able to instantly remind myself what day I had committed myself to going to lunch a week ago. In the same thread I want effortless calendar integration and to-do list integration.

Spam needs to be nonexistent, and a smart status system needs to be implemented. Whenever you send a message you should have to give it a category that the recipient’s phone can use to automatically decide how aggressively to notify them of the message based on their past propensity to answer messages of a given type from you, in this time and place, while doing whatever they are currently doing.

Since I always try to be neither a trend setter nor a trend follower, what I want in a next generation mobile number is irrelevant because I won’t be using it until the network effect has kicked in strongly enough that I have no other choice to communicate with people. So the real question is what feature set will prove compelling enough to both teenagers and homeless vets to drive ubiquitous adoption. I don’t know, but I think that there are lots of people working hard to answer that very query right now.

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