Drink Coke, get stalked
If America's strength is driven by consumerism than Coca-Cola is the chauffeur. From WWII to NASCAR, the Coke company has innovated using every means at their disposal to wrest back another tenth of a point in market share from their arch-enemy, Pepsi. The latest is their announcement that they will be sponsoring their own social-networking system on mobile phones.
This is challenging because there hasn't been a killer app yet for mobile browsing, mostly because of the connection latency and the limited screen size of cell phones. Coke will also be inheriting the liability that is intrinsically to social networking. Pimping kids is dangerously litigious. I can only assume that Coke will filter, censor and carefully limit communication between members to reduce the risk. Either that or they've come up with a good authentication mechanism to prove that kids are kids and pedophiles are not.
Posted on June 07, 2007