Box UK: BBC Innovation Labs Blog

Less than a month to go to the Labs. Dan and I are going to spend a week in an intensive workshop in deepest darkest mid Wales where our idea will be poked, prodded and ripped to shreds before we have to present the tattered remains to the BBC. So you would imagine it’s the fear of failure that wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, the fear of not being good enough… but you would be wrong, my biggest fear is ‘will I be able to get a signal on my phone?’

I would appear to be one of the 53% of mobile phone users suffering from ‘nomophobia’, no that’s not a fear of gnomes, but a fear of being out of mobile phone contact.

But it’s comforting that I’m not alone and also promising for the service that we’re proposing. Text messages, love them or loath them, are a great way of quickly communicating information to an audience. As they are ‘pushed’ out, we only have to rely on people;

a) having their phone switched on
b) having a signal and
c) checking their phone

If the user is expecting to receive a text message at a certain time then (a) and (c) shouldn’t be a problem, in fact as I mentioned in a previous post, the ‘reachability’ addictiveness means that those who would opt in for this service would be checking their phone on a regular basis anyway and the prospect of having their phone switched off would probably give them nightmares!

(b) however poses a slight problem as the information that we are distributing is time sensitive – getting an alert about traffic jams an hour after you have reached your destination wouldn’t be very helpful, in fact it could be confusing and annoying which would not promote the service.

But is this something that we need to worry about? In an age where the terms ‘nomophobia’ and ‘mobile junkies’ are being coined and mobile coverage is increasing, surely reachability shouldn’t be an issue…?

*** Claire