Magician Criss Angel performed one of his MindFreak illusions for the Canadian media today at a Virgin Mobile press conference here in Toronto where Sir Richard Branson announced his company’s plans to launch a contract-based cellphone service early next year. Yes, after spending two and a half years encouraging Canadians to view the cellular contracts of Bell, Rogers, Fido, and Telus as being evil and to switch instead to the “freedom” of pre-paid phones, Virgin Mobile Canada has now performed an abrupt about face and will soon launch the very same kind of monthly billing, annual agreements they’ve been railing against. And here’s the kicker, it’s been part of the plan all along. Branson explained to the assembled reporters that the original pre-paid service was just “Phase One” of their original plan to establish a business in Canada. The next part was to help the Canadian industry adopt number portability, and with that now available, it opens them up for “Phase Two” which will bring in a second phone service that will compete against those of the major operators.
The twist, according to Branson and his Virgin Mobile Canada execs, is that their contracts will be “transparent”, “fair”, and won’t include pages of fine print. Like their current pre-paid phone service, the new contract based service, which they are dubbing as “post-paid” will be targeted towards the youth market. The main incentive for pre-paid users to make the switch will be access to more sophisticated phones and services. Today’s announcement was little more than that. Details such as pricing, agreement structures, and service fees are currently being kept secret until early 2008.
With Criss Angel in town to perform at tonight’s Virgin Unite Midnight Magic Charity Event, Branson had him make an appearance for the press conference, to speak to his own admiration for the British Entrepreneur and to perform a trick for the crowd.
Angel began by picking out a member of the audience and handing him a sweatband. He asked the volunteer to first choose an American state (New York) and to then toss the sweatband back into the crowd to another person who chose a quantity of air time (15 minutes). That second volunteer was then told to toss the sweatband again to another person who supplied the first three digits of a phone number (568) and then tossed the sweatband again to another person who chose the remaining four numbers (5293).
Once the sweatband was returned to the stage, Angel then asked Richard Branson himself to offer up the name of a person he hasn’t spoken to in a very long time (Caroline). With that last bit of information, Criss Angel then had the very first volunteer come up onto the stage and help him pull down a lock box which had been suspended on a change, in the middle of the stage, in full view the entire time.
Upon opening the lockbox and a large tube inside, the volunteer gave Angel a piece of paper and a cell phone. The Cellphone’s banner graphic had been changed to reach “Caroline” and the paper, once unfolded, revealed a drawing of a phone with all of the volunteered information filled in – “Caroline will call from New York, we will talk for 15 mins from # 568-5293”.
He then pulled out a deck of cards (everyone in the audience was given a similar deck on the way in) and gave a brief lesson on how to perform a simple card trick where you can have a person cut the deck, choose a card, and you mystify them by guessing what it is. The key, he revealed, was in setting up the cards so that you know what where the bottom card will go after the first cut, and then making sure to talk about the dynamics of cutting and shuffling instead of actually doing just that. All the talk gives the perception that the cards have been mixed in the other person’s mind, but in reality the cards haven’t changed and you know which card will be pulled. After that, he then threw the cards out into the audience and left with a wave.
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