Softer cell User profiles could also ensure that adverts would be targeted to the interests or needs of the recipient. As Timo Kamarainen reported for dot.life from Helsinki in December, the idea is by no means exclusive to Hong Kong. Some mobile subscribers in the UK too have long listened to their answer phones filling up with adverts from their phone company. The US is currently drafting legislation which may see this nascent mass marketing concept banned completely. But Hong Kong is a long-established testing ground where the latest developments in cellphone technology sink or swim.
Mobiles dominate the territory.
With Hong Kong's underground Mass Transit Railway and even the sleepier outlying islands all wired for sound, there's no escape from chirruping rings and half-heard conversations. Celler's market Even in Shek-O, a quiet beach community on the south of Hong Kong Island, thirsty mobile owners can use their phones to buy Coke from a massive vending machine which dominates the village's bus station. They simply dial up the machine and the cost of a can is added to their phone bill. That advertising has jumped on to the mobile bandwagon is no shock either. Advertisers in Hong Kong are falling over themselves to attract the attention of an increasingly bored market, often commandeering technology with dubious logic.