Juno Online Services and Sprint PCS agreed to a one-year agreement last week to feature Juno’s new mobile service on Sprint PCS’ wireless Web.
The deal lets Sprint PCS customers access the Internet via Juno from a Sprint PCS Internet-ready mobile phone.
“That’s where the world’s going,” said Toby Bryce, senior vice president of corporate development at Juno, New York. “A couple of years down the road everyone is going to be accessing their Internet profiles and their e-mail on the go, and you need to start building for that now, from a product perspective, a technology perspective, a marketing perspective and, in this case, a partnership perspective.”
Sprint PCS, Kansas City, MO, will feature the new mobile service — Juno Mobile — under its Messaging folder. Sprint PCS — www.sprintpcs.com — has similar agreements with other Internet service providers, including Yahoo!, America Online and MSN, said Suzanne Lammers, media relations manager at Sprint PCS.
Juno Mobile also will be featured, along with the other ISPs, on Sprint PCS’ “What’s New?” page, Bryce said.
“Our goal in this agreement is to make our services available where mainstream customers, [Juno] customers in particular, are accessing the Internet,” he said. “The numbers aren’t going to be tremendous over the next 12 months, but they’re going to be reasonable and growing.”
Despite the growth, however, Sprint PCS, which also said this week that it has 1 million wireless Web users, does not expect the wireless Web to become a major marketing platform for online marketers in the near future, Lammers said.
“It’s just not an area where we’re doing anything yet,” she said.
Juno — www.juno.com — has considered the online marketing possibilities over the wireless Web, but does not yet see it as a “large scale advertising medium,” Bryce said.
“The main focus for [Juno], and probably our competitors, is going to be getting your service up and running over the wireless Web,” he said.
Bryce also said the limited space on the wireless interface might contribute to the lack of online marketing opportunities.
