O2 revamps ‘Active’, as i-mode fades away….

Sad news for fans of i-mode, on the back of some good news for the rest of us – O2 (NYSE: TEF) is preparing to pull the plug on i-mode, at the same time as getting ready to launch a newly redesigned ‘Active’ portal.

The new portal features highly sophisticated personalisation, and is content-centric – it’s the result of 9 months of work between O2 and mobile content firm ChangingWorlds. ChangingWorlds was responsible for O2’s first personalised portal, way back in 2003, and claims ~96% of people turned the personalisation feature on.The Clixsmart system in place generates both user profiles and community profiles, allowing better tracking.

O2 revealed it’s plans to shut down i-mode last summer, after less than stellar performance – whilst a number of great innovations were delivered, the core service has not attracted the users – O2’s Head of R&D commented that in fact it was the handsets (or lack of) that proved to the biggest issue.The company will continue to support i-mode until 2009, but will not be launching any new handsets.

It’s always a shame when services don’t perform as expected, and this one is no exception – i-mode could have been a success here, but I was always puzzled as to how the Japanese experience would be translated over here  – there are so many unique factors in Japan that contributed to i-mode’s success, that it was never guaranteed in Europe – and in this instance, unfortunately, it just didn’t fly. Sad, but true.

[Via: Telecoms.com]