VimpelCom targets robots in Russia
Second placed Russian carrier VimpelCom has teamed up with machine to machine network specialist Jasper Wireless to bring what it claims is the first M2M platform to the Russian market.
VimpelCom, which operates under the Beeline brand in Russia, said it will use the M2M offering to connect and manage consumer electronics as well as enterprise solutions in a bid to accelerate market entry for a new generation of electronic devices, including e-Readers, digital photo frames, cameras, personal navigation, mobile internet and gaming devices, as well as involvement in key verticals such as transport and logistics, banking and payment, security and tracking, telemetry and monitoring or e-health care.
“Embedded mobile devices in the consumer and enterprise segments represent a vast growth opportunity for our existing and prospective customers and VimpelCom wants to capitalise on this market opportunity, offering customers tailored M2M services that are unique in the industry and accelerate market entry of connected devices – including innovative and flexible business models, automated operations, real-time monitoring and diagnostics as well as enhanced customer support,” said to Andrey Patoka, vice president corporate business development at VimpelCom.
Swedish vendor Ericsson recently predicted that there will be 50 billion devices connected to the network by 2020, with the majority coming from M2M.
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Would you kindly explain the relevance of the Robot reference in the headline? There doesn’t seem to be anything in the article to support it.
Hi Larry,
We often refer to robots when writing about M2M, it’s kind of an in joke. In this sense we’re referring to machines that operate automatically. And it’s a good attention grabber for a headline too! Human SEO if you like…
And you don’t consider that misleading? Does accuracy take a back seat to SEO?
Not really. M2M does not make a good headline, for human readers anyway. The body of the article is accurate and SEO isn’t taking a back seat – if you look at the browser title bar on this page you will see that the page title that will be crawled by the web indexing robots does not make any mention of ‘robots’ and instead mentions ‘M2M’.
So what you’re saying is that, since the headline is only misleading to people, it’s okay for it to be inaccurate. Only people interested in M2M would read an article with that in the headline, so using ‘robots’ invites more readers, even though the article isn’t about robots.
Have you ever heard the term “bait and switch”?
Hi Larry, i think what we’re saying is that we judge it acceptable to use gentle euphemism and a dash of artistic licence from time to time in the creation of our headlines. it’s an age old journalistic tool, and certainly predates online news. Headlines are designed to grab readers’ attention.
Mike, I respectfully disagree. I have a master’s degree in journalism, and spent 15 years working in the field, but even without that background, I’d know that providing an accurate reflection of events is always the goal of journalism. I’m sorry, but your “gentle euphemism and a dash of artistic license,” is not an “age-old journalistic tool,” except for sensationalist rags that would rather incite than inform.
I’d prefer you stick to the facts; you shouldn’t need to mislead people about the content of an article to get them to read it.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree then, Larry. We’ve certainly never sought to “incite rather than inform” and I don;t think an accusation along those lines really stands up, whatever the content of this headline. It’s an interesting debate, for sure, but perhaps one we might better pursue offline.