When I went through this arti­cle from Dig­i­tal Chosunibo I could not do any­thing else that roll on the floor laughing.

SK Tele­com has launched a new ser­vice ded­i­cated to fish­er­men that will allow them to mon­i­tor the depth and tem­per­a­ture of the water where they are fish­ing and will show them the loca­tion of fish. The sys­tem will work using a float-​shaped ultra­sonic trans­mit­ter that is con­nected to a cell phone on one end and a fish­ing line on the other.

That’s quite funny. I can­not imag­ine the mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion of such a ser­vice. Maybe in Korea they have a lot of fishermen.

I use to fish dur­ing week­ends and I would say that I would use such a service.

SK Tele­coms is not new to these kind of announce­ments. Some time ago they launched a ser­vice that was already tar­get­ing fish­er­men and was able to make mos­quito fly away using a mobile phone gen­er­ated tone. Just have a look at the orig­i­nal arti­cle for a sci­en­tific expla­na­tion on how this work.

If you read this you may think these are jokes.

The most inter­est­ing thing about SK Tele­com comes at the end of the article.

SK Tele­coms has already 1.300 ser­vices providers and last year they received 5.000 pro­pos­als for new ser­vice to be launched.

That’s the way inno­va­tion should work for a mobile oper­a­tor. Look at every­thing that comes on your desk, make these pro­posal go through your inno­va­tion process to dis­till only the very good ones and launch them.

That seems to be pretty easy. In the real­ity we all know that this is not as easy as depicted.

I would like to ask SK Tele­com a few questions:

  • Which is the depart­ment in charge for the selec­tion of these new ser­vices? Mar­ket­ing, Inno­va­tion, R&D?
  • How many peo­ple are employed in these departments?
  • How does the selec­tion process works?
  • Do you have a uni­fied busi­ness model you use with your ser­vices provider or it is ana­lyzed on every sin­gle service?
  • How do you price these services?
  • How do you com­mu­ni­cate new ser­vices to your cus­tomer base?

And, finally, how many fish­er­men do you have in Korea?

Why do I blog this? Well, I am always intrigued by new ser­vices and by the process that brings them to the market.

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