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I have been read­ing about Sonopia in the last few days.

The prod­uct, and the con­cept behind the prod­uct, is really very inno­v­a­tive in the oper­a­tor marketplace.

In the short: with Sonopia you can cre­ate a vir­tual mobile phone network.

You can cre­ate you own Sonopia that will allow you to

• Earn rev­enue with no up-​front com­mit­ment. Basi­cally when a new user sign up to you mobile phone plan you will get a per­cent­age of his phone bill vary­ing from 3% to 8%.
• Pub­lish con­tent to your Sonopia. Actu­ally I have not been able to find more infor­ma­tion on this but look­ing at some pic­tures on the (poor) web site a mobile client do exists to access your Sonopia content.
• The mem­bers of your Sonopia are auto­mat­i­cally part of a com­mu­nity. They will be able to share news, infor­ma­tions, pho­tos, videos and mobile blogs.
• You will man­age the mobile web por­tal for your Sonopia.
• They seem to offer some basic mar­ket­ing tool as mail­ing lists, cam­paign man­ager and so on.

Unfor­tu­nately the web site has very detailed infor­ma­tions but the idea is great.

As a poten­tial cus­tomer for a Sonopia you can fine tune your mobile phone plan choos­ing your mobile phone, call rate and cus­tomize your mobile phone plan at a very nice degree of gan­u­lar­ity. You may even choose which acces­sories you want to be shipped with your mobile phone.

There are sev­eral inter­est­ing things to be noticed:

• The idea of fine tun­ing your mobile phone plan is quite new, at least for the euro­pean market.
• This is a per­fect oppor­tu­nity for those kind of asso­ci­a­tions that get their liv­ing from sup­port­ers. A char­ity orga­ni­za­tion may launch a Sonopia and can be eas­ily get funded by their own subscribers.
• Social mobile net­works can become a real­ity with this kind of approach.

All of the Sonopia archi­tec­ture is based on the fact that they resell Ver­i­zon traf­fic and they are actu­ally a Ver­i­zon reseller. Given this at the end of the day you may become a third rate vir­tual mobile net­work operator.

Unfor­tu­nately the ser­vice is only avail­able in the U.S. and while brows­ing their flash based web site a lot of ques­tions I had still remain unan­swered. I def­i­nitely think they need to give a big­ger amount of infor­ma­tion to their Sonopi­ans and to poten­tial customers.

Any­way Sonopia still remains a great idea and it will be inter­est­ing to look how Sonopi­ans will mar­ket their Sonopia mobile phone plan. This may vary depend­ing on the size of the orga­ni­za­tion but it will be for sure an inter­est­ing thing to fol­low over time.

Why do I blog this? There is a lot of talk­ing about Mobile Vir­tual Net­work Oper­a­tors in these days. Sonopia seems to be a lat­eral approach to MVNO for the masses. Let’s give Sonopia 12 months to under­stand how they will go with the service.

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Related posts:

1. Tech­nol­ogy is there
2. The Inter­net in your phone
3. Device mor­ph­ing
4. Con­sumer behaviour
5. My fat mobile phone