Tarun Dua

mginger.com is a new mobile consumer site targeted at mobile ad marketers to reach willing end-users at a fairly low cost and with an added incentive for users to control what communication they want to receive and get a part of share from the marketing budget. I haven't tried their service so I don't know how it works this are just my thoughts on this revenue model.

UPDATE: Looks like mginger folks are a bunch of hardcore spammers. I see a lot of popular news sites spammed by them/their affiliates.

For a long time I considered that people should pay me(revenue share with the site operator) to view my profile/resume on a resume/social networking site and this might make some model. Very logically people should pay me for viewing the ads/clicking on ads, pay me to send me "SPAM" I want. Yes the barrier to entry to mginger.com is still very low.

This is one of the democratic solutions for click-fraud, un-wanted spam on mobile phone space especially in a country like India where implementation of privacy related laws is weak. I remember a domestic BPO ( which shall remain un-named ) trying to hire me as a business development head for their 'crown-juice' verified telephonic database (with so much more information about you than you can imagine ). Their answer to my question as to how do they get their 'raw' information was 'I don't want to know that'.

A solution I had been in mind for mobile phone spam was to create an addressbook backup/synchronization service which runs on the phone or the server side using a direct SS7 link to each mobile phone operator and stores 10-100 numbers, depending on the size of the addressbook which show up as SPAM1, SPAM2 numbers(stored in the addressbook itself for more popular spammers) and whenever an un-solicited caller calls who is not in the addressbook of the user can mark it as a name SPAM in the addressbook and that gets synchronized into the addressbook backup's central database and gets pushed to all the other users of the service. Kind of like Vipul's Razor for Un-solicited calls.

Maybe a combination of the two approaches is a space for yet another mobility startup.

Update: Later I found this startup bankaro.com that implements the above idea of telephone spam filtering using a trusted network.