Momo london event tonight - full details here Monday, December 11, 2006
I'm at mobile monday london right now.
First to present was "See Me TV" which is available on Mobile Telco 3
- . Members of the public can submit their 30 second video captured via their mobile in exchange for 10% of the gross revenues generated from people downloading the clips.
- browsing some clips is free (other than data costs)
- 500k paying downloads a month charged at between 10p-150p a clip, with an extra 5p to comment.
- 16m clips now hosted by see me tv.
- £350k payouts to date to creators.
I confess I don't get this. Sure, I understand the business model and how they are making money from providing an infrastructure. Its the fact that that the content is rubbish (the presenter said this was the most popular stuff he was showing and represented the dawning of genuine reality TV, even though every clip was of someone attempting to do something funny.) I don't know who pays to download this trash but given they have to be over 18 to download, whoever they are their electoral vote should be removed.
Next up is a strategist from Nokia. And I thought some of my stuff was stating the bleeding obvious - "social networks will be big"; "mobile will be very important to the future development of the web". Inspiring & educational - not
(I think momo london perhaps need to introduce the concept made famous by the Gong Show (1970s cult show that repeated in the 1990s) i.e. presenters can be "gonged" off when you tire of them)
Next up was a chap from Intercasting Corp which offers a social network infrastructure. This was an interesting & engaging speaker who churned out stats galore. He described the likely migration from PC to mobile in the social networking arena primarily as a consequence of the youth market who spend their life on the phone.
- 61-80% of 13-19yr olds in UK, US & Canada are members are on myspace, friendster or xanga. Challenge for these sites is they can be fashion trends and dumped as quickly as they became prominent.
- Friendster was dominant, fell away & then bumped up thanks to popularity in the Philipines. Now myspace which had had great growth is becoming untrendy.
- Club Penguin works for tweenies: Piczo is the home for teenage girls, "hi5" is popular with for minority groups, xango suits teenage diarists apparently
- 8X times the number of people are doing sms v instant messaging.
- 3% attrition in kids mobile market because the size of phone bill in a given month results in phone being taken away by their parents who see the bill.
- Apparently 40% of teens will respond to unsolicited SMS messages
- kids increasingly belong to many social networks (in the same way adults belong to many IM services). Their loyalty to a brand is shallow.
Next was Ben Tatton-Brown of Pitch, the first ad sponsored mobile social network/community. It has 52 employees; is 6yrs old & claims profitability. Pitch has 20,000 members who agree to receive 3 multi-media ads per week. 52% of their audience is female and 49% of the audience are aged 16-25. They get 500k impressions per month on their website. Other notable highlights of the presentation included
- Free mms is offered between members
- 10gb free online storage
- You join by texting "pitch" to 87000
- they identified customers want free texts & free content. So they offer 10,000 free items inc ringtones, images & games. This free content is paid for with targeted ads.
- Pitch charges £20 per cpm for banner ads (top and bottom of wap home page) & corporate profiles that are displayed on their wap site. Push ads cost £100-150 per cpm with tariff increasing as the advertiser specifies a more focussed demographic.
- 89% of 5-24yr olds own a mobile phone in the UK (this seems very high to me if you include young kids).
- 2.8m ringtones are downloaded per month in the UK.
- Pitch supports, sms, mms, video streaming, banner ads
Nice-1 described their app that helps you manages nodes (people, sites, channels, services). Its supports messaging, video downloads & mobile blogging/email
Pinppl is a mobile network for blackberry users! .You tag yourself in a manner to help people find you in the community. Once you find someone via their tags, you can message them (unsolicited). Ok, I'm a blackberry addict and I have no clue as to why a blackberry user (in work & usually professional/managerial) would ever want to use this, unless they were friendless - I think we may just be the wrong demographic!
Wow. What a finale. Soonr launched in Nov 2005 and was founded by an alumni of borland & netobjects. They have users in 200 countries, work on any handset & any network because no application needs to be installed. It does require a small download on the PC that exists to synch your PC data to your phone via a central host. Soonr has a google desktop search capability that can scan your desktop remotely from your phone (Orb can do this too) & can support using skype from the mobile.
Soonr AnyTime was launched today & premiered at the event. It uses mobile ajax via mini opera and can operate your home PC from your phone in real time. You can access multiple computers provided they have been shared & friends can even share folders on their PCs with you, and all with no install of anything on the phone. This was an amazingly cool app and I'm installing as soon as I get home to see if this is as good as it looks.
In the announcement section, Vodafone advised that the Home Secretary in the UK is taking consultation on whether social networks should be regulated and specifically whether under 18s should be allowed to participate. This could have huge implications for the market and so its unsurprising all the big social networks are lobbying hard as part og the advisory group.
Thanks to the influence of a chum of mine, Sarah Blow of girl geek dinner fame, I now find myself checking the level of female attendance at events - out of 120 attendees there look to be about 10 females in the audience. That said, there was a considerable amount of angst regarding the registration process for this event as a consequence of the registration list opening at 9pm on evening and being full by about 10.30pm.
Once again, a good and popular event and I'd recommend it.
posted by John Wilson @ 9:02 PM Permanent Link
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