In case you haven't heard, the powers that be desperately want to play host to your mobile content. From Internet giants like Google and Yahoo! to the major carriers, there's a race to be the trusted host of all those pictures, messages and videos on your cell phone.
Ireland's NewBay software is one company that really wants you to trust your carrier with all of your personal content. In a press briefing here in Dublin, NewBay's CMO, Nagappan Arunchalam, outlined the reasons both customers stand to gain a lot by trusting their carrier with their mobile content.
NewBay has a vested interest in making the case for the carriers. The company offers a suite of white label social aggregation and content hosting and sharing solutions for operators. If you're using T-Mobile's myFaves service, you're using NewBay's software.
Arunchalam wasn't shy about the bet his company has made. "We've bet everything on the carriers being the ones to host user content," he said, adding that customers tend to trust their carriers more than they would a third-party service like Google or Yahoo!
I got to thinking about where the photos I've taken here in Dublin actually reside. For the most part, aside from those I've uploaded to Facebook, they're sitting on my iPhone. I'm not a subscriber of Apple's MobileMe service. In fact, when I think of it, I back up my pics on another service called Photon from a company called Phanfare. Because my service with Phanfare is free, I'm not sure what recourse I would have should I go to that site tomorrow and find that all of my content is gone. I would be equally skeptical as to the helpfulness of Google or Yahoo! should the unthinkable happen if I were using their services.
The reasons that a hosted solution is good for carriers are many. Probably the most obvious reason is that it means increased stickiness. Arunchalam points out that if a customer has two years of SMS messages and photos stored on a carrier's cloud, she's probably less likely to leave said carrier at the end of her contract.
It all sounds very nice and logical. Arunchalam notes that carrier customer service and liability are two huge benefits of a carrier-hosted solution. Nevertheless, the whole thing hinges on "trust," which for American consumers is anything but logical. I don't think of my carrier as an evil empire, but for some reason, neither do I think of it as the host of all my mobile content.
That may change, but for now, I'm happy with the way I choose to do it, which leads me to conclude that while trust may play a part in where we choose to store our content, it's more about choice than anything.