Today's MediaPost writes: "One out of four students surveyed online reported receiving ads on their mobile phones, or spim. 68 percent of respondents who received wireless spam said they were less likely to purchase a product from businesses responsible for serving the unwanted ads. Fortunately for the advertisers responsible, only 5 percent of students receiving such spam could even recall the name of the business or product in question." Then, of course, there are multi-media messages (MMS) and location-based mobile ads, but the industry fights back.
On the other front, Engadget writes, "We’re now starting to see the advent of spam in the Skype realm. James Enck has coined the term Skam to denote the reception of strange messages from total strangers."
As for "spit" - spam over Internet telephony in general - there's little agreement on what constitutes spam, writes eWeek.
"On one hand, you'll hear that U.S. consumers are about to feel an onslaught of tens of thousands of telemarketing calls from overseas call centers taking advantage of cheap calling, and using their location to avoid U.S. do-not-call regulations. On another, you'll hear that the real threat is more traditional spam aimed at VOIP systems, or perhaps denial of service attacks on these systems."
Anyway, here are two companies that offer voice broadcasting (that is, put ads on people's voice mails in bulk) - Protus and Campaign Leverage. I think they are cool, but then again, I love chatting to telemarketers. Speaking of which, here's a 1903 article in Western Electrician that explains how affluent households who could afford a telephone are tempting targets.
