Wireless Federation

Wireless Federation Research on ”Mobile Social Communities” revealed that there are currently nearly 45 million members using it worldwide, a number that is expected to reach 175 million in 2012.

“With a huge rise witnessed in Online Social communities like MySpace, Facebook among others, there is now a paradigm shift in how people connect with each other using the electronic medium.” says Mohit Sehgal of the Wireless Federation. Increasingly there will be a move to the mobile given the increasing availability of bandwidth from the mobile operators and readiness of handsets available.

“Such mobile social communities will extend the reach of electronic social interaction to millions who don’t have regular or easy access to computers. The most significant increase may be seen in countries like India which have a far higher mobile penetration as compared to PCs”

The rapid pace of mobile social community growth means opportunities for new entrants hoping to join the established players such as SMS.ac, AirG, and Jumbuck that provide the technology and marketing behind leading mobile communities.

Opportunities to monetize mobile social communities fall into several main categories:

- Mobile operators profit from data usage that underpins all mobile community activities they carry, and in some cases from monthly subscription fees as well.

- Companies can sponsor special interest communities that relate directly to their brands or services.

- The self-profiling nature of these communities means that advertising can be targeted to specific niches with great accuracy. Many mobile communities also offer downloadable merchandise for sale — ringtones or images, for example.

“What would help drive these mobile social communities is for more mobile operators to sponsor them”.

Vodafone announcing the launch of myspace on their network is a positive sign and will shape the future for such similar relationships.

 It’s that social networking thing again  3 has released figures for its self-generated mobile content services such as See-Me TV that it says mirror the social networking boom on the internet.

The operator (sorry, mobile media company) says that there have been 100,000 uploads to See Me TV, which makes users cash according to the number of viewings they generate, earning its users £250,000 in total.Its Kink Kommunity, has 50,000 paying subscribers, 3 says, at a daily rate of 20p or a monthly fee of £1.49. Most of the users are choosing the monthly sub option. Of the 50,000 users 15,000 are “older users”, 3 says. That’s anyone over 30, by the way. Ouch.

Graeme Oxby , 3’s Marketing Director, said, “Social networking sites are massive on the internet and we’re bringing that model to mobile to create new communities over the 3 network. Clearly it’s working, with over 350,000 messages between kinksters every day - this is already a vibrant community in just two months. User-generated services are driving the development of new revenue streams over mobile in a whole range of ways.�

We’ve been hearing plenty of buzz around YouTube Mobile over the last few weeks. In early November, Mashable reported that talks between Verizon and YouTube were in an “advanced stage� - now we have a deal, with YouTube set to announce today or tomorrow an agreement that delivers clips through Verizon’s V Cast service. Although YouTube have been promising that YouTube Mobile would be launched within a year, this deal will come to fruition much faster: you can expect the service to launch next month. Users will be able to view select YouTube videos on their Verizon phones, and upload clips from a Verizon phone to YouTube. It’s thought that other carriers will jump on board very soon. Verizon, meanwhile, already has clips from MTV, ESPN, and ABC News, and the V Cast service costs an extra $15/month.

Orb Networks boasted in mid-November that they’d beaten YouTube to market with a mobile product, but only just. That said, Orb still works on multiple phones, not just those using Verizon’s V Cast service.

Yesterday YouTube announced a deal with Verizon to take video clips mobile. Today, Verizon Wireless is announcing an agreement with Revver that does the same thing - it’ll be launched in early December and available via the VCast service, which costs $15 per month. Revver’s unique angle is that it shares 50% of the ad revenue with content creators. There won’t be ads on the VCast service, but if your clip appears on phones, you’ll receive a cut as part of the licensing fee with Verizon.

Revver currently claim to have 40,000 regular contributors, although the stats suggest that they’re only a fraction of the size of YouTube - if they were to add comments and community to the site, that could increase dramatically. And while Revver claims to have higher resolution clips, I find these to be extremely slow loading - perhaps another reason they trail the leader.

Revver will appear in VCast’s “entertainment’’ category, and it works on 14 Verizon phones. Just like the YouTube channel, it’ll be a very limited version of the original site - the content will be divided into editor’s picks, viral video classics, laughs, animation and cute overdose. That’s probably better than using the most viewed clips on these sites, which are far too easy to game , but those who want more choice in their online video picks might want to try Orb’s solution.

South Korea’s most popular social network, a strange blend of Blogger, Flickr, and videogame like avatars, brings in about $300,000 a day. Now it’s launching a U.S. version. Should MySpace be worried?  

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Meeyoo Kwon, a 22-year-old college student, starts every morning the same way: “I just wake up, turn on my laptop, and go to Cyworld,” she says.

Cyworld isn’t a game, although its cutesy avatars and 3-D rooms may make it look like one. It’s a kind of social network - “cy” is Korean for “relationship” - and Kwon uses it the way Americans check for messages: constantly, on multiple devices.

During dinner at a traditional sit-on-the-floor restaurant in downtown Seoul, she sneaks regular peeks at her mobile phone to see if one of her 57 Cyworld friends has posted something new. Wherever she goes, she uploads photos: snaps of her meals, her purchases, and her eerie doll collection.

In South Korea, there’s a term for what Kwon is: a Cyholic. It’s hardly an unusual affliction. There are 18 million Cyworld members, or more than a third of the country’s entire population. And 90 percent of all Koreans in their 20s, like Kwon, have signed up.

That makes Cyworld’s per capita penetration in South Korea greater than that of MySpace in the United States. And its business plan is unique. There’s relatively little advertising and a whole lot of viral marketing, and the bulk of Cyworld revenue comes from the sale of virtual items worth nearly $300,000 a day, or more than $7 per user per year. By comparison, ad-heavy MySpace makes an estimated $2.17 per user per year.

Who would win a straight battle between Cyworld and MySpace? We’re about to find out, as Cyworld is launching a U.S. version this month.

Parent company SK Communications (a subsidiary of SK Telecom (Charts), Korea’s largest wireless carrier) has spent the past year launching sister sites in China (where it already has 1.5 million users) and Japan.

During the past eight months, a team in San Francisco has been feverishly customizing Cyworld to appeal to an American audience, trying to strip away the bubblegum kitsch that works so well in Asia without losing its cool.

It’ll be a hellish battle for the hearts and minds of teenage girls - Cyworld’s target audience. And it’s not as if MySpace (which declined to comment for this article) is the only competition. Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, MSN Spaces, Multiply, TagWorld, Tribe.net, and Yahoo (Charts) 360, to name just a few, are all jostling for population growth.

Still, there’s a huge amount at stake for anyone who can tame this fickle market - and Cyworld’s fearless leaders think their site offers a unique proposition that could quickly establish the Korean company’s world dominance.

“There are many social-networking services in the U.S.,” admits Hyun Oh Yoo, SK Communications’s CEO, as he lays out his plans for global expansion on the 20th floor of his brand-new headquarters in Seoul.

He fingers a small object attached to his cell phone, a charm in the shape of a Cyworld character. “But,” he says, dripping with the confidence of a man whose product has become a national institution in the span of half a decade, “their quality is not as high as Cyworld.”

The company has learned much in its short life. It was founded in 1999 by four graduates of KAIST, the MIT of Korea, who thought of it as a personal contact website, a way to connect to your immediate circle of friends and family (your “ilchon”).

It was hardly an overnight success. “They had a very hard time to even pay their employees or afford their servers,” says Yoo, who was then a corporate strategist for SK Telecom.

Spotting an opportunity, Yoo put together a deal, and SK Communications snapped up Cyworld for a mere $8.5 million in 2003. It was good timing.

Cyworld had introduced the “minihompy,” or mini-homepage, two years earlier and had been steadily adding features. By 2003 the user could upload photos, write a blog (called a “paper” in Cyworld), and create digital sketches.

Then there was the mini-room - a three-dimensional virtual space - and the mini-me (no relation to the Austin Powers character), an avatar that the user could place in her mini-room and send out to visit others.

The mini-homepage, and especially the mini-room, gave Cyworld a new lease on life. Now members could create their own content, decorate their rooms, and outfit their mini-me.

Yoo, who has a Ph.D. in media studies from Michigan State, calls it a “personal media network.” Since users had to provide Social Security numbers, there was no anonymity of the kind that is causing legal trouble for MySpace.

“If you are acting like a dork,” says Seung-hoon Lee, head of Cyworld in Korea, “you are showing your family and friends that you are a dork.” (It also means there is no double-counting in Cyworld’s membership figures.)

As Cyworld gathered a critical mass of users, it discovered a new business model. Using the site was free; personalizing it was not. If you wanted to decorate your mini-homepage and mini-room, you could choose from tens of thousands of digital items - homepage skins, background music, pixelated furniture, virtual appliances .

But you had to pay for them with “dotori,” or acorns, and you had to buy the acorns with real money.

At first, users could buy acorns only as gifts for others. This was supposed to “minimize people’s repulsion for paying for these items,” recalls veteran employee Ji-young Park, Cyworld’s chief service planner.

The virtual goods were cheap - typically less than $1 apiece - and consumers had no problem paying for them. A well-appointed mini-room reflected your social standing, and users who did not decorate were considered boring. The gift-only policy was quickly dropped.

As the user base expanded from young women to their boyfriends, husbands, and family members, the culture and economy of Cyworld were set. Lee believes that after the site hit 2 million members - right after the acquisition - it had its own momentum. The chances of anyone in South Korea (population: 48 million) knowing someone on the site increased exponentially.

Last year SK Communications had sales of $160 million and profit of $25 million. Half of that revenue and a majority of the profit came from Cyworld. (The company also owns a portal called Nate.com and an instant-messaging service.)

This year Cyworld expects to contribute $140 million in sales, with acorns accounting for 70 percent. That means Korean consumers will shell out more than $100 million this year for Cyworld virtual inventory.

There are about 400,000 items on the site today, and the only real cost is the revenue Cyworld splits with the 4,400 small graphic design shops and license holders that actually create the virtual items (and get 30 to 50 percent of the proceeds, depending on the item).

A third of that revenue is for music, where Cyworld has pioneered another new business model. For 50 cents you can stream a song on your homepage to anyone who visits.

Cyworld, via a partner, negotiates broadcast licenses with music labels. “You don’t play it for your own benefit,” Yoo explains. “You play it to visitors of your homepage to express who you are” - to impress friends with your musical taste, in other words.

Last year’s most popular track, by a group called Sweetbox, sold 1.5 million times. Cyworld sells 6 million songs a month, making it one of the most successful digital-music stores on the planet.

Cyworld is also increasingly bringing in revenue from mobile services. There are 2.6 million customers who have signed up to access Cyworld via cell phone for free, paying only upload charges. And they do: 90 percent of all images uploaded in Korea go to Cyworld.

On the advertising front, Cyworld is entering exciting new territory. There are banner ads on its homepage and on the pages of the most popular of Cyworld’s 1 million clubs, which are considered public territory.

But personal mini-homepages do not carry ads at all. Instead, any business can become a Cyworld member, setting up its own mini-homepage and creating direct relationships with consumers. About 30,000 have done so.

For example, one of Lee’s ilchon is neither a family member nor a friend, but a diving shop. Its mini-homepage has a diving blog, an ocean-themed mini-room, and news about upcoming diving events.

“We have too much spam in Korea,” Lee explains. “This is opt-in. I allow them to visit my homepage. If I don’t like them, I can delete them.” The diving shop’s ilchon is, in effect, its direct-marketing mailing list - but one Lee will stay on only if the relationship is mutually beneficial.

And here’s how to ensure such a beneficial relationship: Give customers free digital items or a chance to win acorns. Promotional homepage skins and other items act as advertisements on members’ mini-homepages.

A pomegranate-juice maker, for instance, offers a skin featuring a Korean movie star lounging in a white suit holding a can of juice to his head. Three and a half million Cyworlders have visited this homepage, and 30,000 of them have downloaded the skin. These promotional items, for which the companies pay Cyworld, account for about 10 percent of acorn revenue.

Cyworld helps turn consumers into not just publishers and website designers but also personal marketers. Lee writes a wine blog, and when he needs pictures of wine bottles he’ll often take them from the website of his favorite wine shop. The picture in his blog then acts as a link to that store. “That is real marketing,” Lee says, “because I am stamping this shop as good.”

So how does Cyworld plan to export its quirky brand of social networking - with its mini-rooms and acorn-based economy - to the United States? The answer can be found in a bare-bones office above a Quiznos restaurant in San Francisco.

There, in a back room filled with drab gray cubicles, is Cyworld’s lone American outpost. Eight Korean transplants and 14 local hires, most of them Asian Americans, have been busy rebuilding the website for an American audience since January. The transplants live in the same apartment building a block away.

Despite a $10 million commitment from SK Communications, the U.S. operation is keeping extravagances to a minimum. In CEO Henry Chon’s office, one of the few decorations is a sculpture of a Cyworld acorn made by a Korean art student in San Francisco who knocked on the door one day and, in true dotori spirit, offered it as a gift.

“We are trying to create something that works here without losing that aspect from Korea,” Chon says.

Yoo is counting on Chon’s background to help Cyworld bridge East and West. Chon was born in South Korea but moved to North America for college and stayed to pursue a career in wireless telecom. He and his wife use Cyworld to share pictures of their baby with relatives back home.

But Chon is the first to admit that the Korean site is “a little too cutesy” for American tastes. “The thing we’d like to retain is how the service is based on your real identity,” he says. By linking the identities of new members to their mobile-phone numbers at sign-up, Chon hopes to keep a lid on anonymous accounts - and the exhibitionism that can scare advertisers away.

To adapt Cyworld’s sensibility to the United States, Chon paired up each of the native Koreans on staff with an American, and the two sides debated which features to keep.

For instance, when chief marketer Michael Streefland, formerly of iVillage, pulled up his profile on the Cyworld beta site, one of the fields was for his blood type. Koreans think of blood type the way Americans think of astrology. “But we get a little creeped out by it,” Streefland says. “So that’s going away.”

The U.S. version will launch in mid-August with just three major components: the mini-homepage, clubs, and the digital store. The team added a navigation dashboard that appears on every page, as well as a “My Cyworld” tab that will give American users a single view of everything they and their friends have done.

The Korean site, by contrast, looks like a side street in Seoul packed with blaring signs. “We don’t want people to be overwhelmed,” says marketing director Kathy Yu.

The result: Where MySpace is as chaotic as a million teenage bedrooms, Cyworld’s U.S. version is organized but customizable. Each mini-homepage offers the same tabs (profile, mini-room, photos, journal, guest book, sketches, and bookmarks).

As in Korea, you can buy professionally designed background skins, along with digital items with which to decorate your mini-room.

Although the store will open with more than 5,000 virtual items for sale, Chon expects to make more money in the United States from advertising than from acorns. The pay-to-decorate model may be appealing - it’s why venture capitalists are calling every other week to ask if they can invest. (The answer is no.)

But Cyworld expects that no more than 15 percent of members will actually pay for acorns in the early stages. “The American public is not used to buying ones and zeros,” says Won Seok Chung, the company’s director of business development. “You have to change people’s minds that this is cool to buy.”

To seed the market, so to speak, members will get free acorns when they sign up, promotional acorns from advertisers, and extra acorns for referring friends or moderating clubs.

In the meantime, Chung, an inveterate dealmaker, is hard at work lining up other sources of revenue. At his former employer, Korean online gaming company NCsoft (which produces City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and Lineage), he helped strike the first deal with Coca-Cola (Charts) to put videogame characters on Coke cans in Korea.

Now he’s working to strike agreements with big advertisers and wireless carriers, many of which have relationships with Cyworld in Korea. He persuaded PayPal to provide the micropayment infrastructure and is hoping to land a major player to supply instant messaging.

Chung’s biggest hopes are for deals with music companies. “The labels love us in Korea,” Chung says. “Hopefully they will give us a break here.” Cyworld plans to sell 100,000 songs at launch.

Still, impressive deals don’t change the fact that Cyworld is entering the U.S. market at a time of social-networking saturation. MySpace and Facebook are already well entrenched. Hi5, Multiply, TagWorld, and even the much-maligned Friendster are gaining fast. Cyworld has discovered many more waiting in the wings. “Our intelligence shows there are probably 30 launching this year,” Streefland says.

That’s why Cyworld retained Look-Look, a youth culture research firm based in Los Angeles. Look-Look has amassed an online panel of 35,000 young consumers who answer surveys, write blogs about assigned topics, and participate in focus groups.

Co-founder Sharon Lee gave Chon and his team a crash course in Youth 101 and the harsh realities of trying to break into that demographic.

It goes like this: There are 42 million 16- to 24-year-old Americans, who influence the spending of more than $250 billion a year. They are one of advertisers’ most desirable audiences, but they are also the most difficult to reach.

“This audience doesn’t need one more product of any kind from anybody,” Lee says. “They have too many choices as it is. Their brains have become TiVo, and they are editing out a lot of this marketing.” The medium they trust most is word of mouth, with 86 percent of them ranking it first. A distant second, at 53 percent, is TV. And that gap has been growing.

The single most important factor in getting people to join is having friends who are already on the network. So when every teenager and 20-something already has a profile on MySpace or Facebook, how many more social networks are they willing to try?

The answer, according to Lee, is more than you might think. Two-thirds of U.S. youths have profiles on multiple networks - but 53 percent would join another if it were compelling enough. “They are playing with identities,” Lee says. “They are trying to figure out who they are.”

On MySpace, they can be glamorous party creatures. On Facebook, they can be students. And on Cyworld, the bet goes, they can be themselves. “Everyone in our focus groups has a MySpace page,” Streefland says, “but it doesn’t necessarily satisfy them. They think of MySpace as the stadium. But Cyworld is the slumber party.” The consumers who reacted most positively to Cyworld in focus groups were female high school juniors and seniors.

Cyworld will by no means be the most advanced social network out there. It offers no video hosting, no podcasting tools, and limited content search. But if the Koreans have done their homework right, such bells and whistles don’t matter. Rather, the market turns on creating an emotional connection with young consumers by letting them express themselves in an environment they control.

“It’s not about sitting in front of your computer,” Streefland says. “Go out and have a great life, and then come back to share it.”

With this wholesome approach, Cyworld hopes to attract 2 million American members by the end of next year. And that’s just for starters. In July, Cyworld signed a deal with T-Online to launch in Germany.

Back in Seoul, CEO Yoo explains that he plans to use the United States as “a springboard to go into other markets, like Europe.” Yoo’s face betrays no emotion when he says this. But the mini-me charm swinging from his cell phone is grinning like a maniac.

MOBILE user generated content and social networking worth 3.45 B this year according to the Communities dominate brands blog

Tomi and Alan say ..
The fastest-growing type of digital service, by revenues, is social networking on mobile phones. Every CEO of a Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Skype, MySpace, Worlds of Warcraft, 2nd Life etc will need to immediately launch mobile extensions, variants, access methods, sharing systems and/or alerts to their online social networks, or else their more nimble rivals will shoot past them.

The full text of the article they refer to is below:
Source: The International herald tribune
A cellphone sideshow: YouTube-like content is going mobile By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune
Published: October 22, 2006

PARIS Gather around, “towners,” for a glimpse of Hot Dog Boy - “quickest frankfurter eater in town!” Or take a twist with the Pretzel Girl, “real-life office contortionist!” Feast your eyes as often as you want - the carnival is coming to your mobile phone.

Towners is the carnival term for a sideshow audience, but in the cellphone industry, the towners could be people who operators hope will create a powerful revenue stream by uploading amateur photographs and video clips for fellow customers to download and gawk at.

Google reaped international attention for its purchase of the top video- sharing Web site, YouTube, but phone companies in Europe, Asia and the Americas are also exploring the territory for “user generated content,” tantalized by the prospects of making money with low-cost, effective entertainment.

Hot Dog Boy and Pretzel Girl are among some of the sensations that have emerged in the year since the mobile operator 3 created “See Me TV.”

More than 100,000 amateur videos and photographs have been submitted, resulting in more than 12 million downloads, according to 3, which in keeping with this new form of entertainment calls itself a “mobile media company.” But the medium has its limits. To reach all of 3’s some 3.75 million customers, See Me TV acts are warned to avoid swearing, racist comments or making faux horror clips that are just “too gory.”

Phone companies are working furiously to develop systems that will allow social networking or the sharing of material with a layer of human control to filter submissions. “We definitely think there is a long-term business model around it,” said Daniel Winterbottom, a senior analyst with the research firm Informa Telecoms & Media. “Anytime you create a community it’s a way of driving the up-selling of content.”

With the growing popularity of sophisticated telephones, Informa forecasts that globally, operator revenue from such services will rise to more than $13 billion by 2011 from $3.45 billion this year. Asia is the most active region, with revenue from “mobile community services” of $1.8 billion this year, followed by Europe at $721 million, according to Informa. Leading the way are companies like Cyworld in South Korea, a creation of SK Telecom that allows cellphone users to share pictures, clips, music, ring tones and games.

Orange UK started a service this year that asks Britons to submit photos of themselves that could then be shared and voted on in a contest, “Buff or Rough.” They recently increased the degree of difficulty by asking contestants to submit photos with Bollywood themes. The winning entrant, who was to be announced Monday, is Ishrat Jabeen Sharif, a 21-year-old newlywed. Her prize will be a bit part in a real Bollywood movie.

“It’s cheap for the customers and it’s cheap for us because the content is generated by them,” said Alistair Johnston, director of multimedia and marketing for Orange in Britain. “We laugh at it, but we were staggered by the response, with more than one million votes per week. The average use is high, with people browsing through 50 pages and customers going in two or three times a day. The behavior is all about boredom busting.”

Users pay differently for downloading material based on their monthly plans or “bundle” rates; one option is £1, or $1.88, for one day of unlimited use. So Johnston said it was difficult to calculate how much revenue the services are creating, but he said it was clear that “Buff and Rough” and chat forums were the “main motors” behind the company’s growth.

Last week, FremantleMedia, a production company that is a division of the European broadcaster RTL Group, teamed up with the U.S. phone company Sprint to create a subscription mobile channel called Atomic Wedgie aimed at tantalizing young men with recycled video fare like “Baywatch Babes.” The venture is not ready for video sharing because, according to Olivier Gers, general manager of FremantleMedia CQ Licensing Worldwide, “we’re still trying to learn what the medium is about and what people like and don’t like.”

Many operators are asking start-ups to manage mobile video applications. Gilles Babinet, a founder of Musiwave in Paris, which advises operators about how to sell music tracks, has created another company, Eyeka, that provides mobile video and image service along with vetting controls. The biggest concern is posting information “that involves any legal issues or porn stuff or violence,” Babinet said. “Telcos won’t accept that.”

BusinessWeek has a story claiming that Vodafone plans a social networking service, but specific details are regrettably scarce, so it’s not really news—it would be more newsworthy if Vodafone came out and said they weren’t planning some sort of social networking service.

The one detail in the article is that Vodafone plans to offer access to online social networking services: “The British company is in talks with a number of social-networking sites, and expects deals to be completed during the first quarter of 2007.� If accurate, it means that Vodafone doesn’t see the benefit in launching a purely mobile effort, and also does see the benefit in providing access to as many services as possible, instead of only one. Which makes sense, since MySpace is huge in the US, but other countries are dominated by other networks.

 “The time has come for us to offer social-networking services,� says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin. He declined to identify which service Vodafone was talking to, or whether one or more partnerships were expected.� There’s also no mention as to whether the efforts will be a group-wide thing or confined to specific countries, or how access will be offered.
BusinessWeek mentions one of the social networks in talks with Vodafone as being MySpace—but MySpace is making a big push into the global mobile market and is probably talking to any operator that will listen.

—–

Original Article from Business Week

Wireless-phone giant Vodafone (VOD) will let customers use their mobile phones to gain access to online social networking services, BusinessWeek.com has learned. The British company is in talks with a number of social-networking sites, and expects deals to be completed during the first quarter of 2007.

Social networking sites such as MySpace (a unit of News Corp. (NWS)) and Facebook have become a primary communications platform for millions of younger people around the world. They use these sites to create home pages loaded with blogs, photos, music, message boards, video, and more. MySpace, for example, is the second busiest site on the Web, after Yahoo! (YHOO), according to market researcher comScore Networks (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/21/06, “The MySpace Ecosystem”).

That same audience is equally attached to its cell phones. Millions of younger people live without a traditional landline, or use it mostly as a fast Internet connection. As a result, the convergence of social networking and the mobile phone is all but inevitable. “The time has come for us to offer social-networking services,” says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin. He declined to identify which service Vodafone was talking to, or whether one or more partnerships were expected.

Tight with MySpace
Mobile-phone companies have stepped tentatively into social networking. Cingular, which is owned by AT&T (T) and BellSouth (BLS), struck a deal with MySpace earlier this year. Both companies will send customers a text message letting them know when people post messages to their MySpace pages, but users can’t access MySpace itself with their phone.

Mobile-phone startup Helio has a much more extensive relationship with MySpace, but Helio is still a niche player. Helio customers use special phones that allow them to access a mobile version of MySpace with the touch of a button (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/2006, “Social Networking Goes Mobile”).

Helio debuted last in May, and at the moment it’s the exclusive distributor of MySpace Mobile. “Our relationship with MySpace has done very well,” says Rick Heineman, spokesman for Helio, based in Los Angeles. Helio is a joint venture between EarthLink (ELNK) and Korea’s SK Telecom (SKM). The privately held company declined to say how many customers it has signed up in the U.S.

The convergence of social networking and mobile phones creates all sorts of opportunities for new features. Users can take pictures with their Helio camera phones and upload them directly to MySpace, using the wireless network. Helio also has created a new service, independent of MySpace, known as Buddy Beacon. The global positioning satellite technology in Helio phones identifies customer whereabouts. The user can allow up to 25 buddies to track his movements on maps that appear on his friends’ Helio phones.

New Attractions
Industry executives say Helio’s exclusive relationship with MySpace is expected to expire at the end of the year, opening the field for Vodafone and other mobile-phone companies that want to tap the social networking market. Helio is preparing for the competition by preparing a new, advanced version of its mobile MySpace service, Heineman says. Executives at MySpace and Facebook weren’t available for comment.

Vodafone and other mobile-phone companies are looking to social networking and other wireless broadband applications for growth. The growth of their core voice business is slowing down as market penetration reaches the upper limit. In some countries, market penetration is close to 100% or even higher, because so many customers have more than one wireless phone. As the voice business matures, prices tend to decline as well.

Sarin says social networking, mobile advertising, mobile video, and other advanced applications are on the rise. “We expect these services to generate 10% of our revenue within three or four years,” he says. Vodafone generated $29.4 billion in revenue and $6.6 billion in profit during the first half of the year, beating analyst forecasts.

A Wide Open World
Some analysts say it remains to be seen whether social networking will generate revenue for mobile-phone companies. “Cell phones are still primarily used for personal or one-to-one communication,” writes David Schatsky, president of researcher JupiterKagan, in a report. “Services relying on unique features of the cell phone offer better, though modest, revenue prospects.”

Wireless phone companies have been reluctant to open their networks to third parties. In the past, they have offered proprietary, high-margin services such as text messaging. The Internet offers cheaper, open platforms such as instant messaging and social networking. As the cell phone becomes equipped with increasingly powerful Internet browsers and faster Internet connections, the migration of open Internet standards to the wireless world is all but inevitable (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/3/06, “Cingular: Giving Away the Music Store”).

Arun says mobile-phone companies have more to gain than to lose as the Internet and the wireless network converge. “I don’t think there’s a risk,” he says. “We expect each of these new services to generate growth.”

 

Why mobile will be the largest media market of all timeI was asked recently by a journalist what I thought about mobile as a media market and the eventual role that advertising will play with mobile devices. I thought about it a minute and replied, “Mobile will be the largest media market for advertising of all time.” While that’s a rather profound comment in light of the billions of dollars spent in advertising for print, TV, radio and Internet, mobile is destined to be very important - likely the most important - media market of all time. Here’s why.

I was asked recently by a journalist what I thought about mobile as a media market and the eventual role that advertising will play with mobile devices. I thought about it a minute and replied, “Mobile will be the largest media market for advertising of all time.” While that’s a rather profound comment in light of the billions of dollars spent in advertising for print, TV, radio and Internet, mobile is destined to be very important - likely the most important - media market of all time. Here’s why.The entire concept of media markets is to provide valuable content to people while advertisers pay the publishing organization for the rights to “ride along” and get their message out about their product or service. Some times the “ad” is overt and separate from the content (like a TV or radio commercial) while at other times, the “ad” is included in the content (like you see on an Internet Web page) and still other times the ad is done via a product placement in the program itself (like what Ford did in the show “24″ where most of the cars driven by the stars were Ford products).

The problem with most advertising is that it’s a “disconnected” process: Advertisers really don’t know who is receiving the message or often don’t have any direct feedback from a specific ad. Rather, you hear things like “we received xx replies from this mailing.” This was particularly true in print as well as radio and TV. But, with the introduction of the Internet and broad based advertising to millions of people, along came the concept of personalization, i.e. where the ads that are presented to the reader are tied directly to the reader’s interest.

This small concept - narrowcasting of advertisements - resulted in Google making billions of dollars. Their thesis (as well as for Yahoo, Microsoft and others that provide a search application) is that you only provide ads to people about the very things they are looking to find. If I search for notebook PCs, then I’m only given ads about notebook PCs or if I’m searching for a particular gift, I’m presented with resources that should help me find the right gift.

Now, think for a moment about the opportunity that presents itself in mobile. There are around two billion subscribers to cell phones today going to three billion by the end of this decade. Then, realize that the location of each phone will be known to the network, the user and to the applications that reside in the network/phone. If I search for a bank ATM, then the system can detect where I am and automatically show me the ATMs that are closest to where I’m located. If I search for information on fly fishing, I can be shown nearby resources including streams where I might be able to do fly fishing.

When ads were created to run on radio and TV or in a magazine, the entire process has to build in a very high overhead to cover messages going to most of the audience that simply were not relevant. If I heard an ad for a car or new home development, but if I’m not in the market for a new car or home, the ad is truly wasted on me and most of the target audience.

Now, think what advertisers can do with the mobile environment: for the first time, advertisers (both the companies paying for the ads and the media companies that generate and distribute the ads) will be able to directly tie each outgoing message to a specific user. This is the ultimate in advertising: only advertise to people who are interested in hearing your message thus making them relevant a high percentage of the time.  Advertisers get a higher effective response rate for the same funds spent. And, with mobile phones going into just about anyone in the developed world, it’s easy to see how mobile could become the largest media market of all time.

There are some issues, however, that need to get addressed in order for mobile to become a large, successful media platform. First, the mobile industry needs to ensure that only the ads that people want to see actually happen. This is because mobile phones have small displays and every ad is, therefore, somewhat of an insult to the user. It’s best if the mobile phone user “opts in” to the advertising process so that they affirm the ads that they want to see.

Mobile also offers a number of different ways for advertisers to reach their target market, including:

·        Direct ad images in the general us of phone navigation.

·        Results from a search request.

·        Inside a game or other application (via “sponsorships”)

·        Messaging via SMS or MMS.

Mobile advertising started with messaging. Then we moved on to WAP, Video, and now even downloadable applications. WAP-based advertising has been popular in the off-net area. We are just now seeing opportunities in on-deck mobile WAP advertising. Mobile operators such as Sprint-Nextel and service providers such as MobiTV, GoTV Networks and others have embraced mobile video advertising before on-deck, WAP-based advertising could take off.

For off-deck mobile advertising, mobile operators simply act as connectivity providers. They are not involved in negotiations between content publishers and advertisers, have no say in ad placement or format determination and do not get any advertisement revenues.

For on-deck mobile advertising, mobile operators are paid a revenue share if advertising is handled by service providers themselves–MobiTV, GoTV, etc. or keep all the ad commissions if they sell the ad inventory themselves. For some cases, mobile operators may not get any advertising revenues.  In cases where mobile operators themselves handle mobile advertising sales ,content placement, creative creation and management and ad-serving, they will get a large share of advertising revenues.

For mobile search, revenue is shared between search solution providers and mobile operators. In some cases, search solution providers can also take an additional revenue-share from the increased sales through recommendations served through their solution. For advertising revenues, around 50 percent is typically shared by each party. For premium content sales, search solution providers get a lower revenue share-it could even be a single-digit percentage. What’s important here is to note that advertisers will pay a higher price (in CPM) than print, radio, TV or Internet because the advertising is so targeted. The lowest CPMs in U.S. mobile Internet advertising are in the $19-$22 range. This itself is considerably higher than the online CPMs of around $8-$10. On an average, CPMs in mobile WAP advertising are around $35. Similar analysis for mobile video advertising confirms that mobile video advertising is highly lucrative as well.  Advertising within mobile games is exciting if it lowers the cost for the subscribers. Both banner ads as well as Jump pages are currently being offered, and the CPMs are around $40. Revenues are shared between the advertisement solution provider and content publisher in almost equal proportions (about 60/40).

The youth segment and the young working professional is the largest consumer segment for mobile games. Ads need to be developed and targeted accordingly. Frost expects the third-party content model to be the prime driver of such form of advertisement and content distribution, as it will not be easy to convince a mobile operator to give away content for free. On the plus side, mobile operators will still charge for data revenues-and increase in game downloads combined with advertising revenues could actually result in greater revenues than simple content downloads.

Keywords-based auction will have to be operator specific-unless the same search solution provider is working across multiple mobile operators and can determine the popular keywords. It might not be adopted in the initial stages as it will take some time to establish trends. Mobile search engines can be used for very different reasons than on-line search engines. The challenge is to determine which keywords to price higher than the others.

On the other hand, mobile operators have a wealth of information about their subscribers which will likely be more accurate than what is available in the on-line world. Location, demographics, gender, income and others information are some criteria that can be used to target advertisements, and ad-pricing will then change accordingly.

From this, it’s easy to see that mobile media will become the largest advertising medium ever.  Frost offers the following forecast for advertising revenue from mobile media over the next five years:

Written by: (with assistance from Vikrant Gandhi)

J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
VP & Chief Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
Frost & Sullivan
gerry.purdy@frost.com
650-248-9366

From Fierce: http://www.fiercewireless.com/insidemobile111706#jump

The Times Online reports on cameraphone footage showing a robbery taking place which led to the arrest of the culprits, after they posted it on YouTube using the keyword “robbery”. Not so clever.”… The 19 seconds of film, captured on a mobile phone and showing the robber, his friends, the theft and the escape, provided police with all the evidence they would ever need.

… In the film he is shown reaching out and snatching the bemused woman’s glasses before sprinting off down the pedestrianised street. The final shot shows one of the group still filming with a smile on his face as those around him guffaw with laughter”.

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 Source: picturephoning

The goal of Video the Vote is to protect the vote by being the eyes and ears where ballots are cast and counted on Election Day. To participate, all you need is a video camera, a cell phone, and the ability to get to problematic places on Election Day, should something happen. [via Bring it on!]In their own words:

“We will document and report any irregularities that occur at polling places and boards of elections while they are happening, enabling the media and public to watch-dog the electoral process across our country.

In 2000 and 2004, problems plagued the polls in different parts of the country: long lines, eligible voters turned away, voter intimidation, misallocation and malfunctioning of voting equipment. They were underreported on Election Day. Days and weeks later, a more complete picture of voter disenfranchisement emerged—but it was too late. The elections were over and the media had moved on.

Starting this election, citizen journalists—people like you and I—will document problems as they occur. We’ll play them online, spread word through blogs and partner websites, doing our part to make sure the full story of our elections is told.

Watch promotional video on YouTube

Soure: picturephoning