At Last - Debate!

It’s ironic really. We spend two and a half years putting up five or six posts a day and asking people to stick their thoughts in, and typically, we get, er, none. Then we take a day off and the comments come flooding in thick and fast.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve never claimed to be a mobile blog. There are some excellent mobile blogs out there. Take a bow, SMS Text News and MobHappy, to name but two, but here at Mobile Marketing Magazine, we try to do something different.
This is not the mobile marketing world according to us. We see ourselves more as an aggregator of mobile marketing news, views and opinions, pulling them together in one place, and occasionally, when something gets us sufficiently impassioned, having a bit of a rant about it.
Even so, we have to admit, when we interviewed Novarra President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan, a few weeks ago, we knew that what she said was likely to ruffle a few feathers. Even more so, once the interview was concluded, and we’d heard what she had to say.
Novarra had pitched us with an interview based on various new operator deployments. We said we’d we'd be happy to talk, but would prefer to concentrate on the furore surrounding Novarra’s deployment with Vodafone UK. The company agreed, the interview ran last Friday, and then came the long Bank Holiday weekend, which found me yesterday at Legoland with my family. Checking the web stats in the evening (after I’d put the kids to bed, I promise), I found the Comment count was up to 10 (and we’re not talking one-liners here) with the vitriol coming thick and fast.
In case the point needs making, the fact that we gave Novarra a platform to air its views does not mean we endorse them any more than the views of any of the other companies we run interviews with. That’s why we spend so many hours a day rewriting press releases, changing phrases like “the world’s leading developer of…” to “a developer of” and removing similar puffery. We ask the questions, they give the answers. In most cases, the answers we get don’t tend to cause much of a stir. In this case they have. To find out why, read the comments, and make your own mind up.

David Murphy
Editor