Catch all the mobile action at Confederations Cup!

Excitement is building in the world of soccer fans as the FIFA Confederations Cup draws to a close in South Africa. The tournament is looked on as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the World Cup and draws hundreds of thousands of spectators each year to watch some of the best teams in the world display their talent! FIFA ensures that you can get updates and news about the games wherever you are in the world, whenever you want through a mobile message subscription service that sends subscribers text message alerts.

By hooking up with local mobile network operator and official sponsor, MTN, soccer fans can subscribe for less than 50p per month for access to, amongst other things, live match action and goal video’s if your mobile phone is WAP-enabled. If it isn’t, don’t panic as normal text message alerts including goal alerts, half-time highlights and full-time highlights are on offer. If you want to feel a little bit more involved in the action, feel free to download Top Club Anthems, Team Flags, Player Photographs or Team Photographs or Wallpapers. Unfortunately, this deal is available to MTN subscribers only. There is no mobile subscription option that we can find on the main FIFA site, a lost opportunity, considering that FIFA did offer this service in 2005 for the FIFA World Youth Championship in Netherlands.

Those fans looking to win tickets were able to enter the Fly the Flag for Football competition by sending a text messaging with the word FLAG to 41929. And ticket applications both for this and next year’s World Cup Final are confirmed via text message alerts to the lucky recipients.

Hopefully mobile ticketing will soon be the order of the day for sporting events such as the Confederations Cup. Many of the latest mobile phones such as the Nokia 3320 already have the technology in place for the phone to be ‘read’ by a machine at the entrance. The mobile phone in essence becomes the ticket. Known as Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, the mobile phone is able to buy and store low value electronic tokens. On the security front, the great thing is that the tokens can be ‘switched off’ if the phone is stolen. The relatively slow implementation of NFC technology is startling given the immediate possibilities that it opens up. Juniper Research forecasts that by 2013 there will be over 400 million mobile ticketing users and that this section of the market will generate in excess of $92 billion!

Southend United Football Club is one team in the UK that has fully capitalised on the demand for content over mobile message with the mobile zone on their website. Fans can sign up for text alerts, downloads and ringtones, plus mobile soccer games to keep you ‘in the game’ no matter where you are in the world! Their text message alerts even include notifications of pre-game line-ups and red cards as they happen!

Sports entertainment is rich in potential for mobile developers looking to create innovative application of the mobile platforms. For UK soccer fans that have missed out on all the action of this year’s Confederation Cup make sure you go mobile for next year’s Soccer World Cup.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: Clickatell, mobile applications, mobile developers, mobile payment, mobile subscription service, mobile ticketing, SMS, SMS text messaging, text alerts, text message, text message alerts