Vodafone’s 360: a complete U-turn on vertical integration?

Vodafone’s newly launched 360 service is not about ‘gaining control’ over the environment, claimed Bobby Rao, Director Internet Services Marketing, at Vodafone Group at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm this week in London. “360 is a way of differentiating our services,” he claimed.

Well, yes. But the idea behind 360 has at least one intriguing aspect which makes it much more than a way of differentiating Vodafone’s offering.

According to Rao an important part of the service is that it can be accessed by its user across any network. This is crucial in an increasingly multi-screen world where a larger proportion of mobile users are now looking more like ‘cloud’ users because they want to access the same services and data from different devices (home PC, mobile, office computer, laptop).