Selling in the Now

There are a lot of lame ideas out there in wireless, and this industry has to cull out a lot of pointless applications and services. Therefore it’s always a pleasant surprise when a company comes up with an idea that’s fairly unique. The company I’m referring to is IQZone, which has created the instantaneous classified ad for the mobile phone.

Some of you may already be familiar with IQZone founder and CEO Michael Bates. He founded IQOrder in 1999, which eventually became InfoSpace’s mobile shopping portal and was one of the innovators behind AutoMap, which was sold to Microsoft. Bates seems to have a knack at identifying interesting mobile and software ideas. Just think about it: vehicle navigation and mobile commerce are two of the hottest areas in the information economy today.

Bates’ latest project, though, takes something rather mundane, a classified ad, and infuses it with all the capabilities of mobility. IQZone isn’t just allowing customers to create a classified ad on the phone, which would be of questionable significance. Instead it creates the equivalent of a real-time ad network. Rather than wait until the Sunday paper to be printed or wait for the Internet masses to sort through Craigslist, IQZone can post an ad in one minute, shipping it off to all the people who want to see it in the next minute and connect buyer and seller via SMS or VoIP call in the third minute. That creates a whole new possibility for classified ads, particularly in markets where the value of the merchandise is short-lived.

Take concert tickets: your friend fails to show up 30 minutes before the show starts, and you’re stuck with the unreliable jerk’s extra ticket to the hottest show in town. You use your camera phone to take a picture of the ticket, load into an MMS with perhaps a few garbled descriptive words like “Imp C Snakes HOB Tnite 3R Cntr 20.00/bo” and then ship that multimedia message directly to the IQZone server (no client software). A second or two later, the picture of your ticket appears on the IQZone site with the heading “Impotent Sea Snakes, Tonight at the House of Blues, Chicago, 3^rd Row, Center Aisle. $20 or best offer” OK, so the House of Blues doesn’t have seating, but back off—you’re the one going to see a band called the Impotent Sea Snakes.

That ad gets not only loaded up to the IQZone site, but also to half-dozen partner ad sites, including Oodle, Yahoo Classifieds, Google, Craigslist, Edgeio and MySpace, where it could be seen by potentially millions of people in your area, all of whom I’m sure are huge Sea Snakes fans. What’s more anyone vying for tickets can set alerts on IQZone directly or through its classifieds partners so the instant an ad for Impotent Sea Snakes tickets are posted they’ll get it shipped directly to their mobile phones, embedded in which will be an option to SMS the user through a blind number or initiate a blind VoIP call linking buyer and seller simultaneously. Chances are the adoring Sea Snakes fan was standing right next to you all along. Now, whether you sell the ticket for $20, exchange it for a concert T-Shirt or just give it away to a rather attractive potential buyer is up to you. IQZone wipes its hands of the transaction after it connects you—your questionable business/personal decisions are your own.

While the service was meant for immediate items, according to CEO Bates, the types of things people have started posting on IQZone range from vintage cars to personal ads. It turns out that while the service was designed for immediacy—immediate purchases as well as immediate location—people are posting ads where no immediacy is required. The service is both free to buyer and seller (though ad-supported) and since it’s easy to use, people are posting to IQZone instead of or concurrently with Autotrader.com or Match.com, Bates said. Perhaps he’s on to something. We are a culture that seeks instant gratification, so it makes sense that we’d be seeking the instant sale, no matter what means or media is available.

Speaking of which, anybody want to buy some concert tickets?

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.