A monstrous Warid billboard in Lahore, introducing wzone

A monstrous Warid billboard in Lahore, introducing wzone

Driving around in Lahore the other day, I came across these large Warid banners at several places in the Cantt. area. As you can see from the image, Warid is investing quite a bit in advertising their newest service, wzone.

wzone is a mobile destination you can visit using your cell phone which provides you with real-time access to a huge selection of movies (Hollywood and local cinema) and music. Pretty cool! In fact, seen together with Telenor’s TV service, and Mobilink’s multimedia offerings, the trend is quite clear. Multimedia based value added services are the really the next frontier in the cellular war.

We wrote recently about the change in leadership at Telenor Pakistan. Clearly, one of the key challenges facing the new CEO would be to continue Telenor’s innovation in the value added mobile services arena. Warid, for a long time was focusing and competing pretty much solely on price. Not so much anymore. They’re growing up and getting to be a worthy competitor. Mobilink and Telenor both better watch out.

wzone was put together in collaboration with GETMO, which is a mobile content licensing company. GETMO obtains rights and licenses for content distribution from the content owner and aggregates a vast collection of content that can be syndicated to cellular providers like Warid. We’ll have to wait and see whether another telco inks a deal with GETMO.