about.blyk.com

Red Herring has selected Blyk as on of the winners of the Red Herring 100 Europe 2007 award.

Pekka Ala-Pietilä will be giving a keynote today, March 26th at the Red Herring Venture Market Europe (VME) event in Cannes.

International Herald Tribune wrote an excellent summary article on what is latest with mobile operators and their mobile advertising plans, featuring Blyk as the pure play ad-funded mobile media for the 16-24 year olds.

The new uses of cellphones present vast opportunities for consumer brand companies, who are finding it difficult to reach customers through media like magazines and television. “[Mobile] advertising absolutely makes sense to extend expensive multimedia services and mobile TV to the mass market,” said Linda Barabee, an analyst at Yankee Group. “I think we will see consumers say, ‘You know what? I’m only going to spend this much money on my mobile phone.’ ”

The Economist interviewed Pekka for an article in today’s print edition: Adland’s test tube: Britain provides a glimpse of the future of advertising.

Excerpt:

THE future, noted William Gibson, a science-fiction writer, is already here—it is just unevenly distributed. To see the future of mobile phones, people look to Japan; to see the impact of broadband internet connections, they look to South Korea. And for a glimpse of the future of advertising, the place to look appears to be Britain. The country is a “test bed” according to Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, which has just announced an alliance with British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), a British pay-television company…

…In addition, next year a new mobile-phone service for young people, called Blyk, will be launched in Britain before being rolled out across Europe. Users will be able to earn airtime in exchange for receiving advertisements on their handsets.

Blyk’s co-founder, Pekka Ala-Pietila, a former president of Nokia, the world’s biggest handset-maker, says the firm decided to launch in Britain first because it is the second-largest advertising market in the world after America, with sophisticated advertisers who appreciate the market segmentation that new technology makes possible. As a result, he says, Britain “is where we could learn the most”.

Eric Auchard writes in Google CEO sees free mobile phones, funded by ads:

Web search leader Google Inc.’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising.

Schmidt said on Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web on these devices, advertising becomes a viable form of subsidy.

“Your mobile phone should be free,” Schmidt told Reuters. “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones.

Schmidt was interviewed following a speech on the theme of business innovation organized by Italian student groups and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Jack Ewing wrote a piece in BusinessWeek on Blyk’s Radical Mobile Phone Plan.

Thomas Crampton wrote an excellent piece on Blyk in International Herald Tribune: Coming to (free) mobile phones for youths: Ads. He gives a good overview of the venture and the business model innovation. The story also quotes Nicky Walton, a senior research analyst for mobile content and applications in London for Informa Telecoms & Media: “Offering fully free voice minutes and text messages in exchange for advertising is a real paradigm shift, but the time is right and I really don’t see how this could fail,” Walton said. “The business model is powerful for users because it is free and for advertisers because it is so tightly focused on known individuals.”

Blyk has potential beyond imagination. And to be part of a disruptive and potentially revolutionising new medium is very exciting. Blyk brings value to its users and it brings value to advertisers. It brings value to the entire telecommunication industry and to the entire mobile advertising industry. And as always with new things, it brings new and exciting challenges for all.

For decades marketeers have been dreaming of a medium that has the distribution effect of broadcast, targeting capabilities of direct marketing and interactivity found with the internet. And now it’s here.

But are you ready, marketeer?

You will get feedback. What’s good and what’s not. You will be told how to develop your offering, products and services. And the feedback comes directly from your customers, real-time. Not from traditional market research.

Are you ready to co-develop your products? Can you change your campaign within two hours, if it doesn’t work? How will you have this dialogue with Blyk users? How will you respond to the feedback?

Blyk can give you more “reality checks”, more information, more engagement and potentially more sales than any other medium. Now is the time to get prepared, and our entire Blyk team is ready to start the journey with you.

It has been very exciting and rewarding to share our story of Blyk with an increasing number of people.

Time and time again it amazes me how fast people – be they young users, advertisers, partners, investors or new members of our team – understand the profound innovation of Blyk.

By having the courage to think differently we all can turn latent capabilities into great opportunities. By taking the most obvious of elements and combining them with a new twist you can create something which becomes inevitable.

During Antti’s and my journey with the idea of something which “will become inevitable one day” to the launch of Blyk this week I have been especially proud of all great people who have joined us to form the outstanding team we are today.