If you know anything about me, its I just love mobile phones, your don’t spend three years of your life doing a PhD in the subject without a little bit of passion. So when I read about the Phone Hacking, three questions come to mind when I think about this subject. So as an engineer, geek and entrepreneur.
- Why did the technology fail?
- Was it designed this way for a reason?
- How do I make money from this?
Voice mail is a very profitable part of the mobile operators portfolio the best being SMS. So stopping customer, in fact anyone accessing it is never going to be an option. One of the core problems with profitable businesses is that they tend not to innovate around these big revenue areas. You see this in many tech businesses especially in the mobile industry, look at Motorola in 1G, Nokia in 2G and someone with drop the ball in 3G. Its the old frog in the boiling pan story.
Voice mail has been the same for fifteen years with little innovation or business model development across the entire global industry. I am sure the technology has changed but not the service or the business model. Its just waiting to happen with billions of users across the globe this is a truly unified service, its voice mail.
Even after the event we the consumers are not told how to protect and keep this private. Why hasn’t there been adverts on TV telling us, the public how to stop anyone hacking into our voice mail and putting every message in the open press.
Is it because no one wants to know who leaves a message on my voice mail system or is it designed this way?
Even since Turin proved knowing what people are keeping in their message box, helps you win wars. There is no government on the planet who would want a secure voice mail system. It just wouldn’t make not sense to make it secure. Just think of how you could use voice mail message to set off all sorts of nasty stuff, only unlocked and decode by single voice recognition activation at a time and place set by the sender. 007 would be busy for months.
However, there is always a profit to be made from every situation. So what is it?
– Security audits for famous people. £10,000 and we will check all you voice mail systems on weekly basis against your phone records to ensure date and time of login matched your phone records.
– A secure ISO 27001 rated voice mail system which is accessed via a secure app on the phone. Voice mail is send and received via secure encrypted channel. All messages are activated by finger print and voice recognition and co-geolocated by the phone.
– An apps which logs into voice mail when messaged and downloads to a phone within five minutes. Therefore no messages are stored for more than five minutes.
The possibilities are endless and with a billion customers, so are the profits…