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Google Envisions Free Cell Phones For All 164

Posted by Zonk from the i-have-no-friends-you-insensitive-clod dept.
Salvance writes "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a day when all cell phones are free if the user agrees to watch targeted ads. While he provides no specific plans for Google to give away phones, the implication is that he expects such moves in the future given Google's current pilot successes with delivering text ads on phones." From the article: "Schmidt also said his company was working on how to allow users to maintain basic control of their personal data. Currently, Google stores consumer data on hundreds of thousands of its own computers in order to provide additional services to individual users. The company is looking to allow consumers to export their Web search history or e-mail archives and move them to other sites, if they so choose."
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Google Envisions Free Cell Phones For All More

Google Envisions Free Cell Phones For All

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  • When your only tool is a hammer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:24AM (#16821006)
    Everything looks like a nail.

    When your only revenue is advertisments, everything looks like sticky eyeballs.

    • Re:When your only tool is a hammer (Score:5, Funny)

      by joshier ( 957448 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:28AM (#16821028)
      Are you saying... We are all nails living in a hammer world?? AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

    • Re:When your only tool is a hammer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arun_s ( 877518 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:30AM (#16821036) Homepage Journal
      That's okay. It'll probably take less than a week after release before the adblockers come around. Its survival of the fittest from there. The gaudy flash advertisers will be first to go, and I probably wouldn't mind the less intrusive ones if I was getting a phone for free.
      • "less than a week after release before the adblockers"

        depends what network you're on. If yours lets you use J2ME, you good. If it's BREW only, I'm sure no adblockers will be allowed on the network.

        Three cheers for platform control!

    • Look, I don't mind commercials. I'd /really/ like /targeted/ commercials. They just never seem to be truly targeted to my interests. Very rarely when I do a Google on the things that interest me are the sidebar ads relevent to what I'm actually looking for. It seems 90% of the "targeted" ads are really just totally irrelevent ads someone has paid to associate with the keywords I was actually searching for.

      If they could /really/ give me targeted commercials, I wouldn't mind them so much.

      And something els

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by joto ( 134244 )
        Look, there's no way you are going to get commercials that are targetted enough for you to be happy. Either you are shopping, in which case, you want to see and compare ads from several producers (or more likely, you want to see and compare independent reviews from several different sources about several different products that may cover your need). Or you are not shopping, in which case any advertisement you see is an intrusion, and takes away from your time. Either way, the ads are not targeted enough. An
        • Things could be a lot less irritating. I'm never going to buy a new SUV, join the army, drink pop, or take medical advice from an ad. It'd sure be nice if the current 90% of ads that are irrelevant to me never came back again. I'm also very against repetition. I'd much rather see a different geico ad, or a different ad. Maybe I'd be willing to see an ad once a day or once a week, but the current 10x/hour is unacceptable.

          I don't care if the ads are perfect for me, just make them a little less close to
        • >Or you are not shopping, in which case any advertisement you see is an intrusion, and takes away from your time.

          Just because I'm not presently shopping does not mean that there might be advertisements that I might be interested in for /future/ shopping.

          For exmample, I am a new parent. Thus advertisements relevent to babies are of interest to me while I'm watching TV, whereas a year ago they were not. I'm into computers and electronics, and so I /enjoy/ viewing advertisements for those sorts of things,

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) *
        And for this application, I want REALLY targeted adverts. For instance, I'm a bit of a gourmet. I want my phone to report my GPS location to Google's adserver, which I expect will return restaurant ratings to my copy of iNavigator, so that when I'm out on the road and decide to stop for dinner and I hit Menu...Shortcuts...Restaurants I get the 25 closest to me that have three-to-five star ratings, sorted by cusine. Then I can just hit one and have iNavigator lead me to dinner.
      • "You have an incoming phone call that is being brought to you by Cruex. Do you have painful, burning jock itch? Try Cruex! This targetted ad brought to you by Google AdSense."

        And speaking of Sci-Fi Channel - I'd take a slew of Geico ads over the deluge of Cruex ads that were hammered into us when the network was new...
      • Kinda like when opera was ad driven. I never tried to disable the ads because in the preferences, they allowed you to select your interests. I saw all kinds of ads for stuff that I thought was pretty cool, and everybody won!

  • Call the Free??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:28AM (#16821022)
    What's your time worth? What does a call cost?

    Right now,phone calls don't cost much. With all the competitive pressures they'll just come down. Let's say your life is worth $60/hour or $1/minute. How much of your life are you prepared to throw away to get that free phone call?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      My life is priceless. Therefore what I am willing to trade it for; and what I might object to trading it for, might be a bit at varience with someone who thinks of their time as worth $60/hr.

      KFG
      • > My life is priceless.

        Everybody has a price. You may not know yours yet.

        How much money are you willing and able to pay for one hour more life? That's your price.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by kfg ( 145172 )
          How much money are you willing and able to pay for one hour more life? That's your price.

          I am perfectly capable of conceiving of situations in which I would be willing to simply "toss away" all that remains of my life for no money at all. I can even conceive of situations in which I might pay someone to end my life.

          I do not measure the value of either my time or my actions with a balance sheet, nor do I hold my mere life, in and of itself, to be the highest value.

          In the long run we are all dead. Make your l
        • IF I was in a hospital with tubes comming out of my nose, on tonnes of drugs sill in pain and not looking like I would survive I'd want the plug to be pulled.

          How much would you pay for another hour of that?
    • No that's not why these phones are so bad. You see, it isn't really your choice at all whether to get an ad-phone. Once a lot of people have a 'free' phone paid for by advertising the market for paid phones will be much less, so your choice will either be an 'annoy me' phone or a really expensive one with lots of features you don't even want (but maybe some CEOs want). If anything even paid phones will be like Cable where you pay *and* you get ads.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by aplusjimages ( 939458 )
      I can see it now. A consumer with a Google Phone sees a murder or robbery and dials 911. Instead of getting an emergency operator immediately, the consumer sits through a couple of ads for CSI. And depending on their location, they might get CSI: Miami, CSI: Las Vegas, or the CSI in New York. Hell even Heroes might come up with a tag line like, "Be your own hero."

      • Actually, I hope ads play during a conversation. Say, call your friend and tell him to pick up a case of Pepsi, and all of the sudden you and your friend hear a chime and an ad for Pepsi starts streaming to both of your phones.

        Or maybe the cellphones they're making have the same sensors as the Wii remote and all of the sudden a holographic ad appears in front of you to PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN A FREE IPOD

    • X1 data traffic charges (Score:3, Interesting)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      Never mind your time, the whole approach neglects the outrageous fees some telcos associate with data vs voice traffic. At the rate I get billed for data transfers, it would be far, far cheaper to buy a cell phone every six month than it would be to pay for the data transfers of advertising.

      Especially if it goes beyond SMS ads.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eivind ( 15695 )
      Doesn't work out like that.

      Your life is priceless -- but this doesn't imply that you're not willing to sell some of your time for any price.

      $60/hour is ridicolously high for selling time for most people. That corresponds to a yearly wage of over $100.000 (after taxes), which is something like 4 times what the average American *actually* earns.

      But you're rigth, phone-calls are pretty darned cheap. I call for about $20/month, which means getting that for free is worth less than 1 hour/month. So, to answ

    • Before we complete your call to 911, we have a word from our sponsor...

      This is Bob. Bob is living large thanks to the magic of Enzyte...

  • Ads on phones? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LokiSnake ( 795582 ) * on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:32AM (#16821046) Homepage Journal
    For a (smart)phone used for web communications, I can understand how they'll target ads, but for a phone that is only used for voice communications, how can targeted ads be implemented? There has been a trend of Google venturing into print, TV, and radio ads, and those can be done successfully through advertisers bidding for related spots on each medium, since newspapers/periodicals have separate sections, and TV and radio have set programming, but what about voice communications? Will they target ads by looking at your contact information? Or perhaps capture keywords in your spoken words? I doubt that, since they will never do any evil, but how else would this work (without text to analyze)?
    • In a few years every other phone will be smart phone.

    • Re:Ads on phones? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by supersat ( 639745 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @05:45AM (#16821344)
      Three words: location, location, location.

      Carriers can already determine your phone's location (thanks to the Wireless E911 [wikipedia.org] mandate), and third-party companies like Navizon [navizon.com] are already beginning to do the same thing independently of carriers.

      Now, imagine you're Google, and you own the service. You notice that it's lunch time and the user hasn't stopped for lunch, but they're near a fast food advertiser. You could send an SMS with a coupon to the user.

      Now, I don't know that they'll necessarily follow this model, but there's plenty of things to analyze and target without being much more invasive than current carriers.
      • without being much more invasive than current carriers

        Considering the rapacious terms of service for most carriers (think: "All your base are belong to us") combined with the generous "data sharing" of CPNI, I think the only thing possible that would be considered more invasive would be a full-on cavity search.

  • Just the "device" ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kihjin ( 866070 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:32AM (#16821048)
    I could be wrong, but it seems this only means that you would get the device for "free," not the service. This is hardly a revolutionary idea; cellphone providers have been "giving" away devices for free (along with those nasty catch-22's) for ages.

    This is not to say I'd go long with this anyway. I'd be very annoyed if my phone beeped every 10 minutes, only to discover that I've received an advertisement.

  • What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jlarocco ( 851450 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:33AM (#16821050) Homepage

    Am I the only person who hates advertisements? I don't want to see ads while I browse the internet. I don't want to see ads while I'm watching movies or TV. I don't want to hear ads on the radio. And I sure as hell don't want ads on my cell phone.

    Charge me for your product or service, then leave me the fuck alone.

    • Re:What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Wizard of OS ( 111213 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:49AM (#16821126)
      Isn't that the reason that you can:
      - still buy a mobile phone that doesn't have advertisements?
      - get pay-tv where you can watch movies without interruption (at least here in the netherlands)
      - become a slashdot subscriber and NOT see the ads anymore.

      This is a new businessmodel, for those of us who don't want to pay for the product or service but instead want to view ads. If you don't like it, don't use it. There are (and will be) plenty alternatives for you.
      • In most places, the only reliable way to get advertisment free tv is by bittorrent.

        And you wonder why it accounts for 30% of all net traffic...

      • Re:What the hell (Score:4, Informative)

        by dissy ( 172727 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @05:38AM (#16821312)
        > get pay-tv where you can watch movies without interruption (at least here in the netherlands)

        Yes, not in the USA really.

        Our pay-per-view tv still has ads most of the time, thou fortunatly not interrupting the show, just at the begining, and sometimes at the end.

        Even when you go and buy a DVD, there are generally ads packed at the start, and frequently set so you can't skip them.

        Technically downloading here isn't suppost to be illegal, but i fear it soon will be, in addition to distributing and copying which already is illegal (regarding bittorrent downloaded shows, where you upload as well) and ripping a DVD to remove the ads (or atleast change it so they can be skipped) is definatly illegal.

        Of course a large portion of us don't care about the fact its illegal, and do it anyway, but that's the only way to get ad free movies and shows these days in the US.

        Yeay USA :/

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by IcePop456 ( 575711 )

        Yes pay movie, but I do pay for cable TV ($50) and still get bombarded with commercials. Yes satellite radio is commercial free, but not all stations.

        I pay taxes and tolls, yet there are still advertisements on the highway. Granted many are probably installed on private property.

        Free with ads may be the new model, but the old one has certainly been updated with "you pay far less because ads cover some portion of the cost (aka profit)".

        • Yes pay movie, but I do pay for cable TV ($50) and still get bombarded with commercials.

          You are, to some degree, confusing apples and oranges. Paying for cable is nothing more than paying for shipping and handling, commercials pay for the content.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by JuicyBrain ( 977451 )
        I remember when I was a teenager, I used to go to the movie theatre and it would cost me 4$. The popcorn and the sodas were reasonably priced and I could enjoy an hour and a half of ads-free entertainement. Those were the old days.
        Now, the ticket prices have more than doubled, I have to take a second mortgage just for a small popcorn and the movies are half as good as they were. Fortunately, I now have the chance to watch 20 minutes of ads before the movie begins. Because, let's be honest, if it weren't for

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by LunaticTippy ( 872397 )
          The really frustrating thing is the ads are cheap. There's a chain of theaters here that doesn't show ads and their prices are the same as the other chains. We're all sitting through 20 minutes of ads for about 20 cents per person. What a ripoff!
    • I do believe you are correct that you shouldn't HAVE to look at ads, however having a service provided to you with the only cost being to avoid looking at ads is brilliant. Think of free newspapers, TV (not that $ky crap, but normal TV) and most of the net. Think of your morning paper, would you pay £35 to have a quick, ad free read on the train?
    • I don't mind when I'm getting something for free, and those ads are unobtrusive. Some of the ads on TV in the UK are better than the shows! I read the free paper on the train, so can't complain about the adverts can I? However, it riles me when I rent a DVD and can't fast forward the adverts. If I've paid to watch something, I should not have to watch the adverts!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kabocox ( 199019 )
      Am I the only person who hates advertisements? I don't want to see ads while I browse the internet. I don't want to see ads while I'm watching movies or TV. I don't want to hear ads on the radio. And I sure as hell don't want ads on my cell phone.

      Charge me for your product or service, then leave me alone.

      Done right, I'm not against it. I'm not against 2-3 ads on a web page. (I really hate those sites that spread 2 paragraphs across serval pages with ads scattered on each little page.) In movies, I don't min

  • It won't work (Score:3, Insightful)

    by VincenzoRomano ( 881055 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:35AM (#16821058) Homepage Journal
    It didn't work with landline phone and it won't work with cell phones!

  • What kind of company? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater.gmail@com> on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:37AM (#16821068) Homepage
    Which reveals in stark relief what sensible people have been saying for a while - Google isn't a search company, or a technology company - it's an advertising agency.

    • Google isn't a search company, or a technology company - it's an advertising agency.

      I see where you're coming from, but that's a misuse of the term "advertising agency" [google.com]. They compete in no way with the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi. They are an advertising broker, being a middle-man between those who have ad-space and those who want to place ads (some of which will have been designed by ad agencies). Even that doesn't do them justice, though -- it's merely a description of their main source (AFAIK) of rev

  • time to wake up (Score:3, Insightful)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:39AM (#16821078)
    It's not possible to watch ads 24/7. Sorry folks we simply can't do it. Seems to be a great frustriation to advertisers that we don't want to watch their ads all bloody day. After a while you just shut down. CNN is driving me nuts lately with the Head On commercials. They even tried to make a joke of how obnoxious they are. Hate to break it to them but I switch the channel everytime they come on. The scary thing is if I try to switch to the other CNN channel half the time there's one running there too. I swear the Clockwork Orange eyes pried open senerio is an advertisers wet dream. You want advertising to be more effective? How about less of it. People used to watch commercials or at least let them run. I hit mute or switch the channel everytime so it went from say ten minutes plus an hour to zero exposure for me. How effective are your commercials when no one will watch them or worse yet they switch the channel?

    • Re:time to wake up (Score:4, Insightful)

      by walnutmon ( 988223 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:59AM (#16821166)
      Good point, but I guarantee you that most people you see on the streets are not going to change that channel and possibly miss a moment of "The Amazing Race" or thier favorite synidcated gameshow. Plus, I know people who talk at work about their favorite commercials.

      That is acceptable once a year, and it is during the superbowl, because the inherent manliness of watching it makes up for your minds freedom being sold for a day.

      This post is brought to you by Dial anti viral vagina cream, Post(tm) Cocks and Mallow cereal, and the movie Junk Puncher, from the makers of The Matrix, premiers in a theater near you Friday...
    • I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that can't stand those Head On commercials. I do the exact same thing and switch the channel the second they come on and usually don't make it back to that channel for a long time (my attention span is short enough that I can easily get interested in some other show that's on). Most other commericals I can just tune out - the Head On ones are like scraping fingernails. I wonder if they offer deep discounts to all the other advertisers that have spots running immediate

    • Advertising Works! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by quokkapox ( 847798 )

      CNN is driving me nuts lately with the Head On commercials. They even tried to make a joke of how obnoxious they are. Hate to break it to them but I switch the channel everytime they come on.

      But you are now familiar with "Head On" as a brand. The average consumer is now far more likely to select Head On instead of some equally useless, but less familiar generic homeopathic headache remedy. I would guess that very few American consumers are even smart enough to research their headache remedy purchases i

    • "It's not possible to watch ads 24/7."

      They want you to watch ads 23/6 and spend that last hour and day buying the products advertised.

  • Judging from my usualy phone calls... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dartarrow ( 930250 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:39AM (#16821082) Homepage
    ..my 'targeted ad' would be for V1@GRA and 'how to ease your debt'
    • judging from Google Ads on /. my targeted ad would be: "Next pope is John Paul II, impersonated"
  • Whatever happened to do no evil? What Google is doing is inbetween good and evil. To rip off what someone else said, more or less, Google is doing Goovil.

    How will they make sure people actually pay attention and just don't do something else for the 30 seconds or so?

    Will there be a 911 and other emergy number exception?

    If cell phone calls are so inexpensive, why not fund it through various other means? There are endeavours that require a vast amount of people. I think one of them involves identifying picture
  • ...per month (or other preferred billing peroid) for unlimited calls, but NO ads. Why always this obsession with ads? I have purchased everything I own after seeing other people with the item(s) in their lives, from my first car to an iPod. The standard of living countries that frown on over commercialisation (such as Sweden) is the same or higher than countries that surround themselves with such crap. Google show such little imagination it's stunning. Watch this space.

  • Text message adverts... (Score:3, Funny)

    by walnutmon ( 988223 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @04:50AM (#16821130)
    Honestly, I don't even like getting text messages from friends, unless it is a girl who is saying "I am on my way to give you BJ, need beer?"

    I don't even watch TV anymore because commercials are so god damn annoying.

    The last thing I want is some annoying bullshit ringing my phone while I am sleeping, roll over, cursing the fact that I haven't muted it, check out who sent me what...

    "Best buy is having a sale on Kelly Clarkson: From church going babe, to cocksucking ho! And don't forget to watch 3LBS tonight, it's not exactly brain surgery... Actually it is!"

    While "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is playing in the background...

    Jesus Christ, that is some evil shit.
  • All your ads are belong to Google. ;)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dtzWill ( 936623 )
      All your ads are belong to Google. ;)


      From the way things have been going, more like:

      All your everything are belong to Google.

  • Advertising Madness (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2NO@SPAMearthshod.co.uk> on Monday November 13, 2006 @05:04AM (#16821188)
    The business world seems to have gone advertising crazy!

    People don't want adverts. People do not want adverts on TV; that is why we used to have VCRs, before the advent of DVD+RW and Sky Plus. Anything worth watching got recorded, and the advertisements got the fast-forward button. With Sky Plus you can start recording, wait ten minutes or so (the total amount of advert breaks in the programme minus the anticipated amount of time spending re-watching good bits), start watching from the beginning, and fast-forward through the breaks.

    People do not want adverts on the radio, which is why it's so good that Radio Two is the first station up from the bottom of the dial.

    People don't want adverts in magazines and newspapers, and will turn the page and miss a good story rather than see an advertisement.

    People don't want adverts on the internet. Hence the popularity of various advert-blocking and flash-blocking Firefox extensions, the use of "block images from this server" and {for the full-on geek} Squid. Even people without advert-blocking software will navigate away from a site which tries to bombard them with images.

    I don't think I'm alone in saying that I would much rather pay cash up front for the phone calls I am going to make, than watch advertisements.
    • The business world seems to have gone advertising crazy!

      Google's business is advertising.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by planetmn ( 724378 )
      While people don't want advertising, I would argue that people prefer advertising to paying for the service themselves.

      On this side of the pond you have choices:
      TV: There are a few channels without commercials, but very few, some people use DVRs and fast forward through them. I don't know that I agree with you on the VCR, I myself have never heard about somebody recording a show onto a tape just to get through the commercials (though I have known of people who recorded a movie and while doing so, edited

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hhghghghh ( 871641 )
      People don't want adverts. If people don't want adverts, why do they act like they do and reward companies that advertise by buying more of their product? From the company's point of view, feelings of like or dislike are irrelevant. In this regard, they're much like abusive boyfriends..

  • Boom! It's a trap... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RuBLed ( 995686 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @05:04AM (#16821192)
    From TFA: "Schmidt acknowledged that mobile phones may never become totally free to the consumer. Newspapers are still not completely free a hundred years after they started relying on advertising, but they certainly are inexpensive, he noted."

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by husey ( 1000259 )
      "Newspapers are still not completely free"

      What? Like Metro?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BKX ( 5066 )
      Ordinarily, I don't respond to karma-whores (I earned my excellent karma the old-fashioned way.), but this time I will. Though, it is actually a response to TFA. Newspapers and magazines make enough from advertising to be completely free to the consumer. In fact, many magazines have tried going completely free. What they found was that if you give magazines and newspapers away, people think that they must suck because they're free and they won't read them. If you charge for them (it doesn't matter how much,
  • The future seems to be 6 months away: http://about.blyk.com/ [blyk.com] Nokia envisioned this in 2000, and some people behind Blyk are ex-Nokia executives.
  • This advertising overload will just cause people to 'develop' a filter, sort of advertising blindness.
    Just like what happened to ad banners on the web, i hardly even notice them anymore let alone click on them.
    And as people pay less attention to the advertising it's worth less and they'll have to find other sources
    of revenue...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Not everything can be financed buy advertising. Eventually you're going to have to advertise a product that separates the end user from his pennies.

    I suspect that the person who makes this product that people are willing to spend money on is going to make a killing.

  • Talk about targeted (Score:5, Funny)

    by ZoneGray ( 168419 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @05:46AM (#16821352) Homepage
    Well, it should make for some interesting ad targeting.

    Let's see, we'll just dial here... Nine One One... Send..... "ring, ring... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know, Kidde fire extinguishers come with a full lifetime guarantee...."

    ARRGGHHH!

    Hmmm, try again. Let's call a Corvette dealer.... dial the number here.... "ring, ring.... Your call will be connected shortly. Did you know that you can order Viagra from the privacy and comfort of your home? Press 69* for more information."

  • ads? No thank you (Score:3, Insightful)

    by whistlingtony ( 691548 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @07:31AM (#16821938)
    I don't watch TV partly because of the ads. I hate ads. I don't want to consume. I don't want to WANT to consume!

    Having Stuff be supported by ads is incredibly annoying. I use google instead of say... MSN(ha!) because I don't want my bandwidth sucked up by annoying ads, and I don't want to be clobbered over the head with pictures of pretty people. Frell That. And when I'm just searching, I don't look at the google ads at all. Sure, subliminals count for something... Sigh.

    When I do shop, I use sometimes use google (when I don't go directly to a website I know and trust) though. Their ads are less annoying and intrusive. They grate less on my nerves. It's simple. When I want to shop, I'll go FIND the ads. They don't need to find me. Screw the impulse buy!

    So, by being less annoying, google gets me to shop through them. Sometimes.

    Thank the gods for Adblock and Firefox, or I'd have to browse in Lynx.

    I've read Snow Crash. I've read The Selfish Gene. My mental anti-viral software is loaded.

    Oh gods, I'm becoming a Luddite.

    -T, who will always pay to avoid ads or go without.

  • This call brought to you by... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AnswerIs42 ( 622520 ) on Monday November 13, 2006 @07:42AM (#16822026) Homepage
    I don't browse the web on my phone. I don't watch TV or listen to music on my phone as well. I use it for what it is.. a PHONE. So I am kind of concerned at to HOW they will bring the ads to me. Will it be something like this?

    *ring*
    Me: Hello?
    Phone: This call has been brought to you by....
    Me: Argh!
    Caller: Hello?
    Me: Ah, ok.. I had an ad playing here. What's up?
    Caller: It's you're father he is in the hospital with..
    Phone: Interested in hospitals? Check these out...
    Me: What the f**k?!?
    Caller: What did you just say? you're father is in the HOSPITAL!
    Me: Sorry, the phone just ran another ad.
    Caller: Oh, I .. see.. Well, you're father is really sick so you should go see him.
    Phone: Want to send flowers.......
    Me: Let me call you back from my land line.
    Phone: Need phon... *click*

    Oh yea.. I can see it now...
  • No. No ads to talk on the phone. No No No No No. No Joke. No No No No.
  • I watched some Fox news for a laugh recently - and am shocked, as a Brit, as to how much advertising they sling at you folk over there.
    And it all seems to be rather poor, shoddy, lengthy adverts.

    Apparently, the 45 mins of "24" fills an hour here (with adverts). But you guys drag it out for an hour and a half.

    If that's the style of advertising we'd get, please, no.
  • You're cell phone battery is low and you just locked your keys in the car. You fire up your cell phone to call one of your friends to come pick you up. Before you make the call a targeted add displays and as a result you're phone dies before you can complete the call. No thanks, I'll pass.

    I'm sick of commercials and targeted ads as it is. I'd rather pay what I'm paying now and own the phone. It's bad enough that I've got to watch ads before I sit to watch a movie and while I'm watching television (that was
  • Google wants to give phones as long as you agree to watch ads.
    People want to take phones and then ignore or bypass the ads.

    At some point these two things will become in conflict. Just like ads on web sites. How many people have ad blockers again?
  • During the dot com boom there were ISPs that offered down-market rates if you'd just let them clutter up your browser with ads. Most of us would rather just pay more and not put up with even more ads than are already on the web pages. I make so little use of my cell phone that I'm considering cancelling my service. But under no circumstances am I going to move to some obnoxious ad supported cell service.
  • What's peculiar about this kind of thing is that we should bear in mind that for these ad-driven services and products to be successful, they have to pursade you to watch adverts that cause you to spend more than would have without the product. So if they hand out a 'free' phone (worth maybe $30) - then the belief is that you'll spend $30 more than you would have done with the people sponsoring the phone.

    OK - so that's a net gain for the advertisers - and a net loss for their competitors. If all compani

  • Maybe this would work in a developing nation?

    For me, on the other hand, I use an uber-cheap phone from T-Mobile. There's no way I'm going to watch a commercial every time I make a call when it's so damn cheap to own my phone outright. (Granted, I'd use a free phone if the WALLPAPER were an advertisement...)

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