In this age of on-the-go videoconferencing and eye-popping wireless games, Cequint Inc. seems to be making headway with . wait for it . a kind of caller ID. No, really.
The Seattle-based company offers City ID, an application that displays the phone number of incoming calls as well as the number’s city and state information based on the area code and prefix. An extension of the traditional landline service, City ID pinpoints the location of a phone number with the help of a database of more than 20,000 North American cities, including towns as small as 700 residents, allowing users to see exactly where the number – if not the call itself – originated from.
Alltel first to dive in
Alltel Corp. began embedding the application a year ago on all new handsets, giving users a free, 15-day trial and charging $2 per month thereafter. While the carrier hasn’t disclosed the number of people who actually pay for the service, it said recently that the application is now available on more than two million phones.
The news followed the release of a Cequint-commissioned report by iGR that determined an operator with 30 million subscribers could boost revenues by 4% if 20% of its users subscribed to the service at $2 per month. And such results wouldn’t require much investment, according to iGR’s white paper.
“One of the leading feature revenue drivers in landline – caller ID – has been stagnant in wireless since number-only display was launched nearly 10 years ago,” according to the report. “Name caller ID is highly improbable . but wireless operators do not need to forgo the promise of call screening revenue from their entire base of voice subscribers. IGR believes that granular location information with each incoming call is the right balance of privacy and functionality for mobile users and the right mix of ease of deployment and profitability for mobile operators.”
Challenges
City ID has several glaring shortcomings, of course: Because most mobile phones have a caller ID feature, and because calling parties that have been entered as contacts can be identified by both name and number, City ID is useful only when the caller is not listed among the phone’s contacts. Further, location-specific prefixes are becoming less useful as local number portability becomes more common among fixed-line users, and area codes may become a thing of the past as mobile users take their numbers with them as they move across the state or across the country.
But while onlookers may greet Cequint’s flagship product with a raised eyebrow, an Alltel executive claimed the customer response “has been extremely positive.” And having the application pre-loaded on handsets can unveil an unknown demand among consumers, according to Cequint President Scott Weller, a former Research in Motion Ltd. executive.
“It’s experiential, and that’s something that’s built right into our model,” Weller said. “RIM, in the early days, said that access to e-mail at your kid’s soccer game is going to be a great thing, and everyone said, ‘Yeah, maybe.’ But once they use it, they get it.”
