Not all that interesting, but might have been something cool for Hotmail to do to sell "premium" email accounts ... Czech protal Seznam.cz has been offering free email accounts for the last 6-7 years .... you get a simple 10mb account (available via POP3 or IMAP, however....) for free just by signing up. Well, they've up'ed the act and offer premium accounts that come with 2GB of storage and allow you to send 13mb attachments.
The cool thing about it, is that they just didn't upgrade all 4 million of their users ... if you wanna upgrade, you gotta send a Premium SMS for 3kc (about 13 cents USD) to get it activated. It's obvious they're not trying to make extra money off this, but it's a good way to upgrade only those who WANT the space. Even though I don't use my Seznam account all that much, I sent my SMS -- it costs basically nothing and I'm juiced with 2GB now.... how cool is that.
Compare that with Microsoft's Hotmail Plus premium account $19.95 USD per year .... you basically get the same storage (2GB), ok, fine ... but you gotta pay with credit card. There is nothing impulsive about that, and I'm not keen on giving them my credit card -- they should just charge a premium SMS (and lower their price abit, since they'll never compete with Google's gmail) ....
It just goes to show that many US tech companies are still very primative when it comes to mobile technologies ... in the Czech Republic, you can join almost any online chat, make donations, etc.. all via premium SMS ... it's an old technology, but allows for impulse buys and is generally easy to use ... not sure why people haven't jumped all over it yet. Strange.
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