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Andreessen funded mobile video streaming service Qik (USA)

  • August 26th, 2008
  • 9:11 am

Marc Andreessen (Founder of Ning) and Ben Horowitz (VP and GM of HP’s Business technology oragnisation) have funded Qik (mobile video streaming service). The amount is not yet disclosed. The live video streaming field is very competitive, Qik has integrated a bunch of services, that is Twitter, YouTube, Mogulus, MySpace, Orkut and Justin.tv in its service. The service allows users with a camera phone to stream live video, and get feedback from other “followers” online. It is admired among the bloggers and other citizen journalists.

Social networking moves into mobile space(India)

  • August 13th, 2007
  • 8:43 am

MySpace and Facebook had net-savvy American youth connected. Orkut floored the Brazilians much before our desi netizens tasted its social networking prowess. But with more Indians hooked on to mobile phones than PCs, social networking applications are all geared up to enter the mobile space.

Despite the apparent failure of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to replicate the success of SMS, social networking, m-communities, m-blogging and multimedia chat are about to make a splash in mobile phones. And where else to do that but in India, which had 18.5 mobile users in July 2007, according to estimates by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). This figure is well poised to cross the 20-crore mark by the year end.

For today’s connected generation, the mobile phone is the constant companion. Besides, the software providers have realised that the total installed base of PCs in India, which today stands at about 2.2 crore, is only a tenth of the mobile user base. India, they are convinced, could replicate the American story, where 33.2 per cent of the crowd in the 18-24 age bracket post their photos on websites through mobile phones.

In September 2006, there were only 85 lakh internet subscribers in the country. With access to internet-enabled computers limited thus, India’s net-savvy generation will switch to social networking on the mobile in a big way, believes Mr. Rakesh Godhwani from Qualcomm, a firm ready to offer CDMA mobile users social networking content on the BREW platform.

Why social networking? “Fifteen per cent of the traffic generated for Orkut is from India. A huge 5.5 crore SMSs were generated for the Indian Idol show. Twenty per cent of mobile phones in India have cameras,” said Mr. Godhwani.

Having captured 28 per cent of the mobile phone market, the net-connected data-ready CDMA handsets were the obvious choice for Qualcomm to launch the application. “We want the cellphone to become the window to the world.”

San Diego-based RockeTalk was among the first to launch a social networking application specifically for mobile phones. The application will soon be available on CDMA phones in India. It can already be downloaded as a free application on GSM phones.

The end-to-end social networking application based on the BREW platform for CDMA phones, will offer voice and text chat, video and photo sharing, blogging, and the ability to start and join communities through the phone, said Rocketalk’s Vikram Natrajan.

For people used to Orkut and other web-based social networking sites, the RockeTalk concept shouldn’t be tough to decipher.