British start-up wants to bring business model to other countries
The British start-up Samba Mobile http://www.sambamobile.com offers its customers free 3G broadband internet for smartphones, tablets and laptops. In return, users have to watch promotional videos. The offer is currently only available in the UK, but expansion is planned for 2013. Exact information about the destinations is not yet available, but Germany, France and the USA are named as preferred markets. Since launching in July this year, Samba Mobile has gained approximately 10.000 users in the UK, TechCrunch reports.
Free: mobile internet in UK (Photo: pixelio.de, Gerd Altmann)
Watch advertising voluntarily
To use Samba, customers must initially purchase a SIM card for five pounds or a data stick including SIM for 25 pounds. After that, users can start earning data volume. For each commercial seen, 3,5 megabytes are credited to the personal account. According to Samba, an average customer sees three commercials a day, which is enough credit to visit around 30 average websites or send 100 emails. There is no limit to the data volume, but the range of commercials is initially limited.
This means that over-motivated customers can run out of commercials. In such cases, credit can also be purchased, the prices are in the range of competitive offers.
"The offer is mainly interesting for devices that are only used for surfing, otherwise the SIM card would have to be constantly changed. Austria is probably not particularly interesting as a market for Samba Mobile. The competition is very fierce and the prices are in comparison so low that the offer here would not be attractive enough. In countries with higher price levels there are more opportunities, "says Tom Tesch from Orange Austria http://orange.at opposite pressetext.
Expansion plans
In a second round of financing last month, Samba Mobile received around £ XNUMX million in capital from investors. Samba also has a cooperation agreement with the Spanish company yuliop http://yuilop.com closed, which offers customers the opportunity to make free phone calls and send messages via Voice over IP. To do this, users also have to earn points by using the yuliop app to chat with friends or recruiting new customers. The two free offers want to apply to each other in the future.
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