Motorola's New Investment: VOCEL, Junk Mail For Phones (MOT)

If you love all the junk mail in your snail mail and if you like spam in your email, then Motorola Inc. (MOT-NYSE) has just made an investment for you.  Its Motorola Ventures has made an unspecified investment in a company named VOCEL, dubbed a ‘pioneering wireless push technology company and developer of INCA-Interactive Commerce Accelerator wake-up mobile marketing service. 

According to the release: VOCEL’s INCA marketing services provide opt-in personalization, wake-up discovery, and one-click purchasing, which is designed to stimulate new data users and increase revenue for mobile operators and content publishers. INCA personalizes each marketing message through a sophisticated inference and recommendation engine that analyzes user-supplied demographics and past buying habits to select content that each subscriber is most likely to buy.  TRANSLATION: spam, junk mail, cell phone pop-up ads.

The good news is that this is supposed to be opt-in.  The bad news is that if a cellular company can make more money per subscriber then the temptation will be too great to keep it optional. The VOCEL website says right on its homepage: INCA gathers demographic information for each subscriber, determines individual tastes and preferences, uses active-push to send each subscriber the content they want most.

If you like having your privacy more compromised than it already is and enjoy getting spam and junk mail then this is perfect for you.  I’ll pass.  But there is one good question: Can they alert you if you are within a block of a happy hour?

Jon C. Ogg
June 5, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he owns.