With every day that passes the Internet becomes increasingly ingrained in our lives. Back in the late 90’s I held off the pressure to get a mobile phone until the job I was doing at the time demanded it.
On Saturday I visited a mobile phone shop and it seems that mobiles don’t come in ”basic” anymore. The salesman feigned surprise at my apparently very low usage each month of my allowance. “Do you use the internet?” he then asked, “…a fair bit” was my response. “Well (taking his phone out of a pocket) you can do all sorts on the internet on these now.”
Personally I’m not that interested, I work for one of the largest internet directories and I get to spend a fair amount of time at my Customer Street desk browsing the web. I tell him this but hes still wont be beaten by someone who, from the look he gives me, obviously lives in a house with an outside loo, no electric or running water! “Have a look at this, its great for telling you the name of any music that you hear! I only got shown this two days ago but I use it all the time….” I am left seriously unimpressed as his demonstration of internet technology fails to work.
I start to glaze over and my partner digs me in the ribs and I promptly take this as my cue to leave. OK so we have established that I don’t live with a phone glued to my ear or suffer from RSI in my thumbs from a texting overload. But there are an awful lot of people who do use their phones for other things than just speaking to people.
Techcrunch.com have published results from a survey which show the sort of things that people want from their phones. Surprisingly enough email (33%) was the thing most people wanted their phone to feature. Second place was taken by social networking (25%) and in third place with 20% of the votes came local information.
Customer Street have been offering a text service where we can text our customers, free of charge, the phone numbers of businesses for a long time, in fact I think I am right in saying we were the first directory provider to do this in the UK. But the internet is here to stay and we need to adapt.
In the first week of this year we have 11 people search on our Smile Local directory using an LG phone, there were other miolbie searches as well and this number is slowly building week on week. As charges for mobile services continue to fall and more people upgrade their phones the one thing we can be certain of is that anyone with a Customer Street or UFindUs package will increasingly benefit from this increasingly popular way to get local information.
