"Vodafone Live puts a great message on top of weak services," she said in a recent research note, while a competitor, i-mode from NTT DoCoMo Inc., had the opposite problem, getting the services right and the marketing wrong. She said that only conversational content services - those that blend communication, which consumers are willing to pay for, with content that they expect to be cheap or free - can deliver.

"Providers must enhance existing content to make it conversational," de Lussanet said. "For instance, they could enrich weather services with the capability to distribute weather maps to friends, with an invitation to a picnic or a warning to drive safely in the fog, attached."