Industry analyst Juniper Research reckons Mobile Web 2.0 will generate $22.4 billion of revenues in 2013, up from $5.5 billion this year. What’s Mobile Web 2.0 when it’s at home, though? You might think the term covers social networking and user-generated content stuff, which it does, but Juniper has thrown mobile search and mobile instant messaging into the mix too. Apparently, us mobile users are going to be ‘prosumers’ by 2013, creating content as well as consuming it. Juniper reckons that just the social networking and UGC side of things will be worth $11.2 billion in 2013, with growth as fast (if not faster) in developing countries as in the West. ”Combining the power of the social network map - namely: ‘who I know, how I know and where I know’ - with that of mobility, presents the greatest opportunity for revenue generation of any of the applications as defined within Juniper’s Mobile Web 2.0 framework,” says the report’s author Ian Chard. In other words, some of the many mobile social networking companies touting their wares now are going to be rich. Although many aren’t. Place your bets now…
Archive for the 'Social & Sharing' Category
The Mobile Entertainment Forum has presented one of it’s annual industry awards - a ‘Meffy’ - to the founders of mobile social networking pioneer UPOC.
The Meffys Special Recognition award was given to Greg Clayman, Gordon Gould and Alex LeVine, the founders of ‘Upoc’ for their part in creating the first mobile social community. Founded in 1999, Upoc was the first corss-carrier SMS community that enabled both two-way chat and ‘broadcast’ information messages that let users receive updates on music and movies.
Global MEF Chair Andrew Bud stressed the importance of social networking apps in today’s mobile world.
“MEF believes that the biggest development in mobile entertainment this year – perhaps the biggest since the ringtone – has been the meteoric rise of mobile social networking,” said Bud, “MEF is proud to present its influential Meffys Special Recognition Award for 2008 to the UPOC Founders for the invention of mobile social networking.”
Actually, I’ve just noticed something about the Upoc logo. Is it really still in beta, or is that just a blatant attempt to get some Web 2.0 cred for this well established service? Hmm.
Rmbrme is a clumsily named (all the good URLs are gone, remember?) but possibly quite useful mobile service that is meant to make it easier to, well, remember people.
Rather than some Derren Brown-esque memory training witchcraft, Rmbrme uses your mobile phone to bridge the gap between casually asking for someone’s phone number and getting them to join your social network.
As illustrated by a flash animation on the site’s homepage, you just text the person’s number to Rmbrme’s shortcode and then it will do the rest - texting the person and inviting them to ‘friend’ you in whatever social network you list in your profile.
The stalking applications of this technology are obvious, and it would seem to be a boon to exceptionally lazy Lotharios who would like to ensnare casual acquaintances in their web of seduction but are pressed for time and would prefer their victims did most of the work for them.
Supported networks include Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, Manhunt and Beebo although the actual SMS service seems to be open only to US carriers at the moment. Surely this would do well in the UK too?
One microblogger client to rule them all..
The thing that bugs me about Facebook and Twitter, etc. is that if you have several groups of friends all signed up to different services then you need to update your status for each of them.
This used to be especially annoying before Facebook dropped their daft ‘all status must begin with Username is..‘ requirements but even now it is a bit of a drag.
The web service HelloTxt gets around this by giving you a single page to update several such services at once. It’s one of those simple websites that seems obvious but can quickly become invaluable if you do a lot of this kind of social networking/microblogging.
HelloTwitFace is a Windows Mobile freeware app that is essentially a front end to HelloTxt, but with the added bonus of tabs for Facebook and Twitter that let you read what your mates are doing too.
That’s it realy, Simple but effective. You can update Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Bebo, Pwnce, Myspace and several others all with a couple of taps.
The app runs on Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and is available for free here.
Good news, vodka-lovers. Smirnoff is apparently going to invest more heavily in its mobile activities, following the success of its existing mobile site, which has been visited by 90,000 unique users since it launched last October.
According to New Media Age, the site will be expanded to include options to upload your own photos and videos to share with friends and other users. Although it’s good to see a big brand getting the mobile bug, this move into UGC is questionable.
Will users really want to share their content through a vodka brand’s portal, rather than YouTube, Flickr or Facebook – all of which are now easier to upload to from your phone? We’ll have to wait and see.
Orkut? The small green fella who wished he could fly? Nonono. Orkut is Google’s own social network, which isn’t very big in most of the world, but is very big indeed in Brazil and India (which as anyone with a spot of geographical knowledge will tell you, means millions of users).
Anyway, it’s just gone mobile, at the logical address of m.orkut.com. Features include profiles, friend lists and updates, accepting and denying friend requests, and personal messaging. It doesn’t support the Communities forums - apparently one of the most popular features on Orkut - or videos though.
In the countries where Orkut is big - particularly India - going mobile is a big deal, since it opens the way to sign up people out in the countryside who don’t have regular access to a net-connected PC. However, Orkut will face competition from some of the mobile-only social networks who’ve also been targeting these ‘emerging’ markets.
While Flickr users are getting their knickers in a twist over its launch of videos, mobile backup firm Mobyko has snuck up with its own multimedia sharing service. It lets people upload photos and videos direct from their phones to Mobyko’s gallery, which can then be shared with mates online.
It even lets you store texts, which Mobyko says is ideal if you need to keep an important text from a business associate. Does that ever happen in the real world? I assume there’s also a feature that stops your important texts being shared with the world alongside your photos and videos, mind. You can organise all this stuff into albums, and add descriptions to individual photos and videos.”We wanted to give every mobile user the tools to ensure that they would never again lose a mobile moment,” says Mobyko CEO Julian Saunders.
It’s a logical extension to the company’s existing contacts backup service, but it remains to be seen whether it’ll attract new users, given the competition from individual sites like Flickr and YouTube, established mobile startups like ShoZu, and handset apps like Nokia’s Lifeblog.
I know what you’re thinking: isn’t Flickr the Flickr of mobile photography? After all, there are numerous ways to get your camphone snaps onto Yahoo’s photo-sharing site. However, that hasn’t stopped US firm Mobicious from launching its own mobile-centric service, called SnapMyLife.
The idea: you take a shot on your phone, and immediately send it to SnapMyLife using MMS or email, where it’s published for the world to see. There’s also some good social networking features, allowing you to invite friends from your phone, and get alerts when they publish new pics. Oh, and there’s no filth involved, since the company is using filters to identify and remove risque snaps. CEO George Grey is certainly bullish:
“Internet-based social networks and photo-sharing sites have recently introduced mobile uploading features, but have only scratched the surface. Many of SnapMyLife’s early users prefer to use the mobile-focused SnapMyLife site over services that provide their ‘full-experience’ on desktop interfaces.”
Although it launched today, the site’s had more than 90 days of pre-launch testing, and claims to have signed up more than 1,000 people a day, attracting over 500,000 unique visitors last month alone. Oh, and it’s apparently one of the ten most popular social networking web apps on the iPhone already. It’s well worth a look.
Mobile social networking is building up a head of steam, although it has to be said that much of the hype is focused on the mobile efforts of the big Web firms like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, despite the fact that a lot of the innovation is coming from mobile startups.
iPhone offers an opportunity for the latter to grab some of those column inches. Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington is already on the case, with an enthusiastic post about an unnamed startup working on a social networking app for iPhone:
“It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.”
It apparently uses the iPhone’s built-in triangulation tech to identify nearby users, in the absence of GPS. Arrington also suggests that the startup has found a way around the fact that native iPhone apps won’t be able to run in the background when you’re using an iPhone. He’s not allowed to say how though. The shots above are mockups, apparently. Thoughts?
Ahh, Twitter. Microblogging conduit, supply-side surveillance system, personal broadcasting outlet.
The thinking man’s Facebook status update.
Twobile is a new Windows Mobile client for Twitter that lets you send Tweets directly to the service without having to fire up your web browser and naviagte to the Twitter site.
Supports most of the web versions features, including sending private messages, displaying friend’s tweets and viewing public timelines.
Displaying user avatars can mean that the app uses up a fair bit of memory to cache the image, but there is a housekeeping function to clean out the cache if things get a bit overloaded.
Twobile is freeware, available here.
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