If you attended
our event during the weekend at the Alabang Town Center, you may have noticed several banners littering the presentation venue with a strange bar code alongside a "Mobile This!" tagline. This barcode is part of a service known worldwide as TMS or
Tag Mobile Service. And now, it is here in the Philippines, making its debut in Mobile Pilipinas 2006, the country's biggest wireless tech expo.
In one sentence,
TMS is a convenient way to download any form of multimedia into your mobile by turning your phone's camera into a barcode scanner.
Welcome to the next generation of content distribution in the Philippines! In the "old days" we used to grab content (quotes, movie schedules, breaking news, ringtones, movie clips) by texting a few characters to an odd number combination (text "imhandsome" to 5555). This is well and good, but it is time to take advantage of a much more convenient piece of technology that allows you to really make your mobile phone an extension of your personal life. Imagine being able to:
Avail of discounts in restaurants by shooting a promotional TMS tag
Bank online by shooting tags
Link your personal blog to a TMS tag to be viewable online
View promotional videos of shelf products before you buy them
Download your favorite (legal!) music
Turn your cellphone into a debit card
In fact, if you have your cameraphone right now, you can point your browsers to the
TMS Philippine Embassy website and
download the java applet for your phone. If your phone is not listed, try downloading the app closest to your phone model. You can also choose to download the app directly to your phone by going to
mobi.tms.com.ph on your phone's browser. Then, try launching the application and take a picture of the Mobile This! tag on this site and see what happens!
During the event, we gave away free "song souveniers" of our tech tracks band (and the winner is ... Jeepney Joyride!) by allowing our audience to "take home the concert" by merely shooting the tag and downloading the six original songs the bands played during the event. This is an example of how powerful the TMS service is.
As of the moment, shooting a TMS tag to access data is FREE for 2006. Standard GPRS, 3G and WiFi rates apply. Stay tuned for more news and TMS tag sightings around the metro!
