Pocket Picks :: The coolest things for the coolest phones

Mobile entertainment providers are always looking for new ways to relieve bored phone users of their cash. Wap services, mobile games and mobile TV have all had their moments of intense industry interest and excitement, but the big thing at the moment is certainly mobile social networking. With MySpace Mobile still being tweaked and tested in the States there’s no dominating presence to put off potential newcomers, so fresh social networking platforms are popping up all over the place.

One newcomer to the scene is mobile games publisher, Hands-On, which has recently signed up to bring the MeeGos range of instant messaging characters to mobile, as well as announcing video-sharing service PhameTV and revealing plans to expand mobile flirting site FunkySexyCool across Europe.

So how do social network providers plan to seduce you this year? Eric Hobson, President and General Manager of Hands-On EMEA and SE Asia, provides some pointers…

Hands-On seems to be making quite a serious push into mobile social
networking via the Meegos, PhameTV and FunkySexyCool deals. Why?
It’s always been our intention to provide a full range of mobile entertainment products. Even our recent games, such as World Poker Tour, have a massive connected community element. Lifestyle category community is key - just look
at the success of web-based community sites.

I think that we also sometimes forget that the mobile is first and foremost a communication device. When we looked at working with FunkySexyCool we saw it was a huge success in Australia and in Germany. It’s an exciting community with really passionate users so we knew it was a perfect service for us to partner with. Likewise, with MeeGos, which has over 50 million users on MSN messenger, we knew it was a huge opportunity.

One product that we’ve created is Phame TV where you can upload your own videos and be paid when others watch them. This has had a fantastic response from operators - they appreciate the huge commercial opportunity and the way in which we’ve built a distinctive product specifically for mobile, avoiding the legal minefield that the web products have exposed themselves to.

Who are you aiming the services at?
FunkySexyCool is all about flirting and playing games (trying to get the most votes to appear on the front page of the site) and the existing marketing tie-in with MTV in Germany shows we are aiming it at that kind of demographic.

Meegos is much less about flirting and more about chatting and staying in touch with friends - it’s also aimed at a slightly younger core demographic than FunySexyCool which is certainly ‘edgier’. Phame TV is about bite-sized entertainment for the viewer and the chances for the directors to make cash.

It seems to me that the barriers to entry with social networking on
mobile are similar to those of gaming and web browsing - hidden/uncertain
data download costs, lag, etc. How are you looking to counter these?
The great thing about FunkySexyCool as opposed to other web-based social
networking products is that it has been made specifically for mobile and has in-built and transparent charging mechanisms.

With respect to operator data charges this is something that the networks need to take into account as they begin to launch more and more community-based products where people consume more data. I am sure that it’ll go down the ‘all you can eat’ route in a relatively short space of time.

On top of that, the pricing levels for FunkySexyCool are always set at price points that are affordable, so that people can easily manage the ongoing subscription and use premium features. For example, for a certain action such as a small payment for a ‘SuperVote’ you can vote for every girl or guy in the community to get yourself noticed.

As for lag, I don’t think it is a very significant factor in FunkySexyCool as there is no real-time chat and even then I am not so sure it is so problematic - our World Poker Tour product has thousands of simultaneous real-time six-player games running all the time with no lag issues, our expertise is in carrier grade content and community platforms, so handling large user numbers isn’t an issue for us.

So, let’s take an average consumer - someone who’s idea of social
networking on mobile is to send a receive text messages - how will you
get them to migrate to a more advanced mobile social networking system?
I think that word of mouth will play a big part in people coming into a community such as FunkySexyCool. Ourselves and the operators have a role to play in marketing the products but I ultimately believe that these services are so compelling that they have a great viral effect where people show their friends. We know that FunkysexyCool is extremely addictive and the average session for a user can be 30 minutes a go as they sit there trying their hardest to get the most votes and see their face and name up in lights on the front page of the site!

Also, in the case of FunkySexyCool there are a lot of great brands that we’ve spoken to who want to be involved with it as it is so unique. Already, we have
a partnership with MTV in Germany which involves TV spots on the channel
throughout the week, and a core part of our strategy for getting people to try FunkySexyCool is to partner with media brands - radio, TV, print, online, etc, to help spread the FSC word. Many of these companies are very keen to work with successful businesses who understand social networking, so they can leverage this for their brands and consumers.

How are you positioning the FunkySexyCool network? Is it all about dating?
FSC is really unique, it’s certainly not a dating service (which are low volume, self liquidating). It is very much a flirting community (which are high volume, and addictive), and fame and celebrity also play a very strong part in the compulsion to get involved. The in-built voting system that I mentioned previously makes taking part a big game.

The whole essence of the site is that you vote people as being ‘funky’, ’sexy’
or ‘cool’ but it becomes an obsession for people to get the most votes and win the weekly and monthly prizes that are on offer. This is where the premium elements come to play as you can give people votes in the hope of raising your profile and that they will return the favour.

Isn’t interoperability an issue with social networking on phones? Don’t consumers want to be able to a) access their buddy lists from MSN or AOL, or b) access their MySpace/FaceBook/whatever pages? Can people be bothered to set up a whole new network on their phones?
It really depends on the nature of the social network in question. On the web, each of the major social networks serve a clearly defined purpose - so MySpace is really a personal homepage at the end of the day whereas FaceBook is all about communicating with people at your University or College or reuniting with old college friends. Tools such as MSN messenger are there to enhance the social networking experience by connecting people across different groups so it is not a network in its own right.

Likewise, the mobile networks will emerge will offer very different customer propositions. MySpace will extend onto mobile as a kind of mobile homepage whereas FunkySexyCool is all about the real-time interaction with others, i.e. it’s intrinsically mobile. Phame TV is all about uploading video clips so others can see them and is an entertainment channel, with the added attraction to budding Directors of monetary reward. As MSN appears on Mobile then it will do what it does on the web which is to act as a kind of social glue that transcends all the social networks and helps people stay together.

Talking of MySpace, when that goes properly mobile, isn’t it just going to pretty much kill everything else off?
Definitely not. I think that there is more than enough room for multiple social networks. Just because MySpace is a successful example of a social community it should not be seen as a panacea for all types of social networking, nor should it be assumed that a web-based property will be an immediate success on mobile phones. Brands have tried this in the past and if you don’t get the offer right you end up with a very small mobile franchise (eg Match.com mobile dating).

As I mentioned earlier, MySpace is a totally different proposition to something such as FunkySexyCool or Phame TV and they can all co-exist very happily together. Further to this, the exclusive Vodafone deal with MySpace has locked the service off for millions of people across many other networks and so there will be a lot of people who cannot even access MySpace on mobile even if they wanted to - not without migrating service carriers.

Your press release on FSC mentions how the system is monitzed, but this is the sort of thing that sends a chill down the spines of phone users. How closely will people be able to monitor charges? Surely a lot of it will depend on the data rates they have with their network operator?
The hundreds of thousands of people that use FSC now seem more than happy with the charging structure because they feel it gives them value - people will not pay for something that they do not think is good value. Also, the extra premium services are there as optional tools for the community members to use or not use - there is no obligation to use them, and they are not large sums of money - such as 2 euros for a SuperVote.

We’re seeing a very good ARPU on the service which means people are happy to pay for services they value. More than that, if they did not like it then I suppose they would vote with their feet and leave, but that is quite the contrary and we are seeing excellent growth in the user base.

Are you looking to integrate social networking into your games? How?
We believe very strongly in community aspects to our games and we’re already doing this to great effect. World Poker Tour in the US is a massive success as a real-time multiplayer subscription product and it regularly charts in the top three mobile games across all US carriers. The multiplayer aspect has grown a big community that has been the key success factor in the product.

This year we’re launching World Poker Tour 2 globally and the bulk of changes in this version have been around enhancing the community features - buddy lists, better chat, private tables, etc. We also have a networked fantasy role playing game called Heroes Lore 2 in South Korea which is the runaway number one game and its entire success rests upon the community functionality. Just to give you a snapshot of its popularity, there are over 1100 guilds (each with 40 members), over 500k network battles a day (people fighting other real people in 1v1 and 2v2 battles), over 1 million items traded a day in the marketplace and around 25k individual users accessing the network features a day.

What new handsets and other devices do you think will drive mobile
social networking? What did you see at 3GSM that made you think ‘that’s
the form factor and specs list we need to drive this market’.
We hope that social networking will available to all across even the lower-end handsets and that it shouldn’t be a technologically driven phenomenon that’s limited to more high- end devices. It stands to reason that video-based services such as Phame TV will lend themselves slightly better to higher handsets that have good quality video capture devices that can take better and longer pieces of footage, but even without this there are plenty of phones that can already playback video.

The beauty of something like FSC is that it is a WAP service that can now be
accessed by the vast majority of mobile phone users. Even the ability to take a photo and upload it into your profile in FSC is something that most modern handsets are capable of - I hardly know anyone that does not have a very basic camera on their handset.

What can network operators do to make social networking more attractive to their users?
I certainly think that an ‘all you can eat’ data package will be a key part of helping these services take off but it is also important that operators partner with the right people who can provide the customer with a compelling experience that they are comfortable in. A very key feature of our services (Phame TV and FunkySexyCool) is that they are moderated in real-time by teams of dedicated trained people. This is more and more pressing as operators (quite rightly) demand security for their users so that they are not subject to abuse or the more unsavory aspects of what people sometimes want to show others.

It will be very interesting to see how some of the unregulated web communities manage to deal with the stricter demands of the mobile operators for vetting
content. Network providers also need to be reassured about strong policies on copyright infringement.

Do you see a point where social networking will be a seamless element of mobile gaming and vice versa, with phone users able to drop into, say, chess games or multiplayer racers, while still logged into a social network? Something like the Xbox Live model?
This pervasive form of gaming has always been spoken about and we already are looking at interoperability between the World Poker Tour web and mobile products. I’m not sure that the people who are in FunkySexyCool will necessarily be the same people who want to go head-to-head in a racing game so there will still be some separation but where we are talking about mobile, console and web then that is an entirely possible reality.