Orange UK, one of the large carriers in the country with 15.8m mobile subscribers, has released its “Fifth Digital Media Index”, containing a set of interesting numbers on the data uptake on their network, and it makes for intriguing reading!
- Music and video downloads increased both by 38%.
- Games only grew by 8% (but at least they grew; anecdotally, some other carriers recorded sometimes dramatic drops in take-up) to a total of 770,000 downloaded games, which equates to a market share of 23% of all UK games downloads (the total UK games market would hence be 3.35m downloads for the year with Orange claiming top spot). From the top 10 downloaded games in 2008, 8 were part of the carrier’s embed programme, which shows – again – that users appear more comfortable if they can try it out before (embedded games normally are trial versions).
- Social network use over mobile increased by 129% in page impressions per month and 48% in unique users. The monthly average number of pages per user was 397. In terms of popularity of social networks, Orange’s Mark Watt-Jones (@MWJ) fed us additional bits via the Twittersphere: Facebook dominates, Bebo is significant, MySpace less so and Twitter grows very quickly (what was the Oprah moment in the UK?)
- An average of 386,000 GB of data have been transferred via dongles and handsets per month.
- Mobile search grew by 120% with 45% of the results being “off-portal”, i.e. outside Orange’s domains.
- Good old SMS still looking good, too: 19% growth with 1.7bn sent every month.
Blackberry maker RIM announced it had raced through the “epic” 50m device barrier. An honourable feat indeed! Symbian fired of a riposte (or was it Symbian-fan-boy-bloggers that did? I don’t know) that it had sold just under 80m devices in 2007 alone (with a total install base of 250m), and the Blackberry story therefore was to be considered as “how very quaint”.
Here‘s a really good piece of analysis of the landscape of mobile social networks. I will not recount the findings in detail here but they reckon that the Internet biggies Facebook and MySpace rule the mobile social networking world already. MySpace is said to have had 1.4bn visits last month alone. Facebook also is beyond the 1bn mark. Impressive numbers! The largest pure mobile-play, Mocospace, a predominantly US-focussed company, recorded 1bn visits.
The article does mention GoFresh (with their ItsMy service) and Peperonity but fails to point out UK company Yospace who power the combined O2/3UK community.
Whilst the mobile-only players all point out that they’re not worried because their offering was better (“he would say that, wouldn’t he, your Honour?”), but advertising muscle may well be an issue: MySpace recently said that they would expect about half of their total traffic coming from mobile within 5 years, and reaffirmed that mobile is one of the most important strategic initiatives for MySpace. I am sure there will be loads of niches in the sector but the bulk of 1.5bn visits (probably steeply rising) is a tough proposition to beat when it comes to ad revenues!
And here’s a somewhat disappointing mobile debut: business network superstars LinkedIn announced the launch of their (beta) mobile “application”. However, the app is a mere WAP site with, alas, all the downsides of that: latency, onerous navigation and the whole info from the website only toned down in graphical appeal.
Now, whilst I am big fan of LinkedIn, this is sub-par. Have a look at what Facebook did for the Blackberry: a small downloadable app (yes, I know, it’s painful but probably for the time being the only way to enhance the user experience on mobile), information reduced to the key things one might want when accessing this from a mobile device and then the option (sic!) to access the full monty via WAP. The one piece of information I couldn’t access on the LinkedIn WAP site was the contact info. Hmm. Wouldn’t that arguably one of the key pieces of information I would want to have when I’m on the road (“well, I’m in London. Why don’t I drop John Doe a line. Don’t have him in my address book as we haven’t spoken in a while but we’re still ‘linkedIn’. Doesn’t work. Doh!”).
With all due respect, dear LinkedIn friends, you’ve got work to do!
A nice piece of rumour was brought out by the fine folks at MoCoNews: allegedly Nokia is in talks with Facebook to cooperate on mobile. And if this was not enough, there is also talk about the mighty Finns taking an investment in Facebook, and this would arguably be somewhat more significant (in cash terms at least) than the $10m stake the Samwer brothers of Jamba-fame acquired last week.
MoCoNews speculates that this could involve something as prominent as the YouTube button on the iPhone. This of course would appear to be a challenge given that most carriers will determine themselves what is and what is not on the handsets that are being sold through their retail outlets. But then Nokia has recently made strides on that front recently (as will be shown below).
A move with Facebook would fit in seamlessly with Nokia’s evolving strategy towards providing entertainment services rather than only being a hardware vendor (albeit the world’s largest by far with a whopping 38% market share globally): 2007 marked a year were Nokia acquired a number of companies and announced a number of initiatives and products that push the company way further down the service provision end than ever before: it acquired digital map specialist Navteq (Finland’s largest acquisition ever), bought the mobile marketing and advertising folks from Enpocket, it struck a content deal with Telefonica and another one with Vodafone, all gearing towards its comprehensive content offering Ovi (see here).
Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s multimedia guru, went on record in saying that the Internet will be the tool that will tear down the carriers’ walled gardens. He continues to preach his ongoing theme (I heard about this the first time 2 years or so ago) that carriers are no entertainment companies and should therefore not fiddle with content. That might well be true, I guess. Now, if it comes to the Internet opening those walls, well, Facebook ranks #7 on the Alexa traffic charts. And, distinct to the (few) higher-ranked sites, Facebook’s clean set-up and approach would seemingly make a conversion to (higher-end) mobile handsets easier than with, say, MySpace (#6).
Finally, Nokia tried to coin the phrase of “circular entertainment” (I blogged about it here where I mocked their “survey” approach) where they hold that, by 2012, 25% of all media would be created and consumed from within a circle of peers rather than from traditional media. If or if not the numbers were correct, the concept is very convincing (read e.g. Jaiku-founder Jyri Engstrom‘s rather insightful thoughts on object-centered sociality). Enter Facebook… ‘Nuff said, I guess…
What a title, huh? Following the hype on the Internet with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and all the others, social networks started to see traction on mobile, too. Jaiku (acquired by Google) showed the way. Twitter‘s next move is waiting to happen. Plazes is waiting in the wings. And then there are all the others still flying under the radar (or, in Silicon Valley speak, operating in stealth mode). These would include people like French Mobiluck and German student-come-entrepreneurs from aka-aki. There is also Finnish venture Ironstar Helsinki whose MoiPal combines mobile, social networks and games.
Most of these companies attempt a rather wonderful thing, namely to bring the networks back into the real world by combining it with location-based (or should one better say: location-sensitive) components. Mobiluck scored early successes with a Bluetooth application that scans the immediate vicinity for other users; think Saudi girls quite literally under wraps having the opportunity to contact that OMG guy on the other side of the club… Mobiluck tells us they scored more than 750,000 downloads of their application, and all with the most basic of seed funding and without marketing. Impressive!
Unfortunately, very little is being published about the actual success of these initiatives. Facebook got some coverage over the release of their Blackberry client, Jaiku more or less went silent since the acquisition by Google (probably working hard to integrate with other Google goodies), Mobiluck and aka-aki is in closed betas, MoiPal continues to grow its proposition but doesn’t engage in much PR so far either (some coverage here though). Twitter seems to get their heads down and work (a brief evangelizing piece in the Guardian was about it). Plazes holds a “camp” in Berlin later this month to develop its propositions further but doesn’t tell us much more either…
On a strategic level, it may be expected that a couple of online and other media players without a footprint in the space might feel inclined to gobble up some of these guys: if Google leads the way (as they do with Jaiku), others may feel compelled to follow. So where’s the big thing?
Social networks are about interaction. Facebook started to gain traction because US college students had an opportunity to organize their social lives. In the US, the relative penetration of broadband is high, whilst advanced mobile use may have to catch up with some European (and Asian) countries. However, the links always are somewhere in the real world, and mobile phones offer the opportunity to actually link back to some real-world beacons, a simple yet incredibly powerful one being location (isn’t it so much more exciting to liaise with that hot someone if you know that he/she is within a couple of hundred yards from where you are?). Your mobile is always in your pocket (yes, check now), and it carries the inherent possibility to identify your geographical location right now. Simple, huh? However, simplicity requires that speed, ease of use and reliability of the service are a given. They are the match points – next to absolute reach of course.
The integration of currently existing tools, most prominently IM, is a given here, and most of the companies mentioned above provide for integration of MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger as it is now known) already. And this makes a lot of sense as it is a convenient and now incredibly established way of communication between friends. The integration of IM into mobile social networks also promotes the convergence of the Internet as it is (or was?) known and mobile devices. People who use IM are normally always online whenever they are on their computers. Extending it to mobile is quite literally a no-brainer and moreover the easiest gate of entry: it is nothing new to users, and it adds a lot of convenience to mobile users.
Technically, triangulation (using signal strength with base stations) seemed to have been the game initially. However, as this was too tough to do (deep integration with every carrier, and for rather sensitive data), everyone from early leaders (remember ZagMe?) all the way to Jaiku, Twitter, etc relied and relies on the crudest of things, namely SMS. Facebook has a rudimentary WAP site and a rather cool Blackberry app but then? Mobiluck uses a combination: WAP site, web access plus Bluetooth (a downloadable app using the handsets’ Bluetooth functionality). This is promising as it utilizes handset-based features, which does away with long-winding negotiations with every carrier and a much easier available dataset of location data. Now, does it also experiment with a deeper integration with everyone’s new favourite feature, namely GPS (see here for the latest on the hype)? Let’s hope so! And let’s also hope that this will be only step 1 of many to make social networks truly social again — by interacting with real people in real life contexts.
At CTIA, Facebook, the new $15bn company, and Blackberry maker RIM presented a downloadable application that powers Facebook on Blackberry devices. This is noteworthy for two reasons:
1. It shows the significance Facebook as gained in older age segments. Facebook is recording incredibly high numbers of new users from “older” segments, and these coincide nicely with Blackberry users who traditionally tend to come from the group of “mobile professionals”. At the same time, RIM will certainly try to add to its cool factor for non-business use, and what better thing to waste your data allowance than Facebook?
2. The really noteworthy thing however is that the Facebook app for Blackberry shows how connected mobile applications should work: it is slick, quick, with good UI and works. This should be a wake-up call to OS providers, OEM and carriers alike: the Blackberry has a very close environment, and it controls much of the in and out. It is therefore comparatively easy to build an application that actually does what it says on the tin. This however is not god-given. With a unification of the crucial APIs on the carrier side and the platforms on the OS and OEM sides, it should be possible to create a basis for this to happen with all sorts of applications. I am very keen to see the first usage data for this app, and I really hope that FB and RIM will divulge this. They could do the whole industry not only the “next frontier in social networks” (Facebook’s Moskovitz) a huge favour!
