As I state in my mini blurb at the top of this blog I think the mobile phone is a great link between the digital and the physical world. I just came across a service that has the potential to be one building block in that world. BipBip is a simple service best described with their own words: Create your wishlist, set the deal you are willing to accept and then get on with your life waiting for the SMS with the deal info once it is found by the system. Sort of a Pricerunner with notifications. The difference is it is a highly targeted advertising channel. The service is not trawling the net for your deal. It signs up retailers to offer their goods and bipbip charge for each received notification about a deal. This is the business model – highly targeted advertising. The upper end of the value ladder in advertising for sure. In here lies the main challenge for bip bip. They obviously need to sign up a large number of advertisers/retailers to make the service attractive, and in order to do that they need to have many users to get the attention and ultimately the deal from the advertiser/retailer.

Story of my life in the mobile content world, I can’t help thinking here. There are plenty of great concepts out there. Reaching the critical mass or the tipping point is the real crux on the way up. As soon as you have to involve parties from outside the mobile industry it tends to become a teaching/preaching mission. This is time consuming and can kill a company faster than you can say “update the sales pipeline”.  I hope bipbip makes it up the slippery slope to the pass of critical mass.