Russell Buckley talks more about the rise in bluetooth sharing

It’s amazing how two people can have the same epiphany in one day … and blog about it! At least my discovery also got me a date. +1 for Stefan

Really tho check out his complete post, and this is yet another blog I’ve found that I’m subscribing to. Don’t worry folks I’ll probably start a blogroll after CES. Like I said I want to get to know and get to be known a little bit more.

One of the issues I’ve been banging about for the last three years is that kids are using Bluetooth to share music and ringtones. This has been met with widespread scepticism among ye of little faith.

New research commissioned by our friends at New Media Age released today shows that the tsunami I was talking about is actually here. 29% of children aged between 9 and 13 share files this way and I’m very sure it’s even higher among their older brothers and sisters.

One of the big issues with Bluetooth sharing is that it’s untraceable as it by-passes the operator network. This is a double whammy for operators as they still sell a lot of content and they don’t get the data traffic. In fact, given operators’ traditional reluctance to cannabilise revenues, it’s pretty amazing that they let Bluetooth creep in to handsets at all. After all, they’re resisting wifi enabled handsets (to prevent VoIP calls and loss of data traffic) and were very slow to embrace IM in case it cannibalised SMS revenues – my opinion is that it won’t by the way, but that’s a subject for another post.

Source: MobHappy