STAMFORD, Conn.-Intelligent Information Inc. introduced a wireless commerce platform called Village Square for wireless phone, pager and wireless data device users.
Village Square allows users access to various personal information services and transaction functions. Subscribers of Village Square can set up a personal reminder alert schedule as well as shop for various products from the information service provider’s list of brand-name companies. It also is touted as a marketing tool for direct marketers and advertisers that wish to target messages to specific personal events.
For instance, with Village Square, a subscriber can schedule a reminder of a relative’s birthday. The user receives the reminder alert via a pager or short-message-service-enabled digital phone, and with it a short advertising message from one of III’s partners with a gift idea, such as flowers.
Phone users then can use the one-button direct connection function and immediately call the advertiser’s customer-care center via a dedicated wireless-only link. Paging subscribers will have to call the customer-care center independently.
“Village Square provides two powerful services to the customer,” said Stephen Maloney, III president. “First, it provides a personalized calendar that reaches out and taps you on the shoulder and reminds you about an event like a birthday or anniversary. Second, it gives you the immediate ability to act on the reminder through electronic commerce.”
The first brand-name product to become a commercial sponsor of the Village Square service is 1-800-FLOWERS, which has set up the required wireless-only direct link to its order-processing center. III hopes to gather a variety of other companies to create similar wireless-only dedicated lines for the Village Square service.
III provides information services including news alerts, weather reports and sports scores. It provides its services directly to cellular, paging and personal communications services providers, which in turn offer those services to customers, an increasingly popular way to increase minutes of use and furnish value-added services as a way of increasing revenue and reducing churn.
