According to I4U ads for the MSN Direct service will start airing on TV.

What is MSN Direct, you ask? Simply put, they bill it as the Dick Tracy watch. You pay a monthly or annual service fee to get local news, weather, sports, etc., sent wirelessly to your watch.

Now, what importance could this have? Simple. It’s going to bomb. Bomb hard. I can’t say it enough. What we have here is an amazing situation. Everybody and their mom knows this won’t sell in the US. Yet Microsoft wants to see it, badly. Maybe it’s just one of their risk ventures, I don’t know. But how, when SMS won’t catch on in the US, do they think they can sell additional hardware to wirelessly beam people news. Everybody already has a cell! Who is gonna pay about $10 a month to find out the weather on their watch, when they can do it for less, maybe even free, on their phone.

Somebody in their marketing department is seriously out to lunch. And did I mention, the watches don’t even look good?

The Finnish government just shut down a service sending text message replies allegedly from Jesus in answer to peoples prayer requests. My favorite quote from the article:

He declined to say how many prayers had been received, but added: “This was no gold mine… It seems you can’t interest people in everything.”

You don’t say! You mean, people didn’t buy into the notion that Jesus has a cell phone?