Vancouver’s AirG community inks deal with Nextel on prepaid youth wireless service

A Vancouver firm offering virtual communities over wireless networks has added another feather to its cap with a deal with Nextel Communications Inc.’s prepaid youth wireless service. AirG is providing a customized version of its LOL private label mobile community for Boost Mobile, an offering aimed at the 15-to-30 demographic. The community, branded Boost Hookt, features picture and text profiles for each user, as well as e-mail capability and private messaging lounges. With the success of online communities such as Myspace, it was perhaps only a matter of time before interactive user-driven communities made the jump to wireless, says AirG’s Frederick Ghahramani, director of the five-year-old privately held firm. "A mobile community is analogous to an online community, the only difference is it’s with you at all times," Ghahramani notes, meaning that users have more opportunity to spend time interacting and creating revenue for AirG and Nextel, who share a 50 cent-per-day charge for accessing the LOL network. Currently, more than 100,000 unique Nextel subscribers use Boost Hookt each month, with 12% of those spending more than 15 hours a month using the service. AirG’s offering extends to more than 80 wireless providers worldwide, coverage the company claims makes it the largest interoperator mobile community in the world with 5 million registered users. "When you use the Boost Mobile product you can chat or interact with people on Telstra in Australia, or Orange in the U.K.," Ghahramani says. LOL is also compatible with newer Java-enabled devices on 3G networks, as well as older ones using text-only SMS services. "You can have the version of our product on any one of those platforms, and you can still intercommunicate with users on the other platforms and other networks," Ghahramani says. While Europe has been touted in the past as leading adoption of new wireless applications, Ghahramani says North America has proved the strongest market to date, "possibly because customers here have been conditioned to services like Myspace, but it could also be that the price points here are a lot more attractive," he says. Since AirG provides the back-end support for the offering, including customer care, billing, and user profile management, Ghahramani says the firm is also partly responsible for LOL’s content. "Left unregulated, it’s not only a legal hazard for us and our partners, it’s also bad for the end user, because if you’re constantly being spammed or harassed, it reduces the quality of service and people just won’t come back," he says. AirG runs a round-the-clock content monitoring centre that looks for inappropriate or predatory behaviour in the publicly accessible areas of the network, and also employs other means of managing content such as filtering software and user-defining bans. "We monitor for inappropriate language, behaviour – if there’s predators, or people who are targeting children, we filter those out," Ghahramani says. Future plans include the addition of video and sound to the personalized profiles, allowing users to include "a short video clip that you could upload from your phone," as well as a one-touch dialling service so members can take the interaction from data-based to voice-based if they wish.

Vancouver’s AirG community inks deal with Nextel on prepaid youth wireless service

News | 08/18/2005 4:00 am EDT

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