Vendors like Apple and Google recognize that the cloud is central to the mobile experience. Without the ability to access ones data, sync to the desktop, laptop netbook (and soon, a tablet?) with our mobile smartphones whether we’re stationary or mobile, our digital life is fraught with nothing but frustration.
The center of the action in communication and being social surrounds mobile devices as does an increasing amount of our consumption of music, video, news and information (and if you head in to a typical retail outlet selling CD’s or DVD’s, you’ll notice a continual downtrending of floor space devoted to merchandising them because, quite frankly, sales in these categories continue to drop in bricks and mortar stores). With smartphones sporting GPS and applications that allow providers (and the marketers who work for them) to have a HUGE amount of data about usage, consumption, social, demographic and location patterns, if you were Best Buy with only stores and a website with typically limited connection to customers, what would you do?
Get in the game, of course. To that end, Best Buy has announced mIQ, a free, cloud-based service with 1GB of storage that you can sign up and use with smartphones (except the iPhone…go figure). What is mIQ?
mIQ from Best Buy Mobile helps users sync their contacts, text messages, calendar events, calls, photos, videos, and internet favorites from their mobile phones to their private web-based mIQ account. Once in sync, the user can backup and interact with their information, share their experiences with friends and social sites, discover the top solutions available for their phones, and restore their content when moving from one phone to the next.
The four key areas they pitch are: Backup your phone; Access and interact on the web; Share your experiences; Restore your phone content; which are very Apple MobileMe-like (except for Apple’s nifty Find-my-iPhone feature).
Developed by Dashwire, a privately held company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA who says about themselves, “The company is backed by investors who built the wireless and technology industries at McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, Voicestream, Nextel, China Unicom, and Microsoft; and by Best Buy Capital.”
No question this beta mIQ offering has been in development for some time and Best Buy management is planning for the continual shift away from people buying media and interacting by walking in to a store and, instead, to interact online via a smartphone or other mobile device. Having a cloud-based service is table stakes for a retailer like Best Buy to even get in the game…let alone win it.
Want to sign up and give it a whirl? You can make a request by doing so here and submitting your email.