Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM & Mobile Devices

Last session of the day is a panel discussion. Panelists include Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.

BJ: Spent last 8 years in Asia (4 years in Japan, 3 in Korea and 1 in China).

Information Arbitrage: Identifying most successful best practices.

Some history: Mobile SNS (Social network services) are not new. ImaHima ("are you free now"). In 2001, they had 250,000 users.

What changed? numbers and speed of data access. Also, what you can do with phone. Mindset of people using mobile has changed.

It works: Japan is #2 economy, #1 mobile society. 80% penetration of 3G. China is #1 mobile and Internet population. QQ has 500 million users. Cyworld has 35 million and mixi has 90 million compared to 200 million Facebook users.

Mobile users: 50mln for QQ, 3 mln for facebook, cyworld 45 mln,

Revenue: fb: (50 mln), QQ 250 mln

FB is focused on profile page, IM and groups. QQ has avatars, paid games also.

Sticky feature: FB (applications.
QQ: IM digital currency, pmt system.
Cyworld: real friends, digital currency , pmt systems
mixi (footprints)

Business models: FB: ads, QQ (digital goods, paid games, mobile VAS)
cyworld (brand pages, digital goods.

Revenue mix (ARFU: avg revenue from users):
fb: 0%?
QQ 87%
cyworld: 80%
mixi: 5%

Mixi has more page views on mobile than PC. Mobile CPM is half the price of PC.

Community and Social networks are turning into full-fledged media. Cyworld is the nicest mobile application in social networks.
These top mobile SNS in Asia won't "invade us" as they are busy in home markets and they lock cross cultural expertise. Cyworld started and closed operation in Europe.

Myspace has started operation in China, Japan and Korea but so far has failed to gain traction revenue wise.

How to make mobile social networks work:
1. high speed network and flat fee: (No one from large mobile network present in the audience.)
2. Proper payment systems: seems a low hanging fruit.
3. Girls: it's not rocket science.
4. Companies and Schools: Because employees and students spend so much time on it that their computer access is blocked and so they turn to using mobile services.

benjamin at plus8star.com

Panel Introduction:

Ben Keighran (BK) ben at bluepulse-inc.com
Launched in December 2006. built world's largest social messaging platform.

Gregory Cypes (GC): gregory.cypes at corp.aol.com
QQ is trying to break into US market. GC is tech lead for open AIM. Big component of open AIM is mobile. AIM does over a billion IMs a day with 80 million users.

Craig Dalton (CD) (craig.dalton at hookmobile.com)
Hookmobile in mobile development for last years. Now in multimedia messaging. Created a platform to integrate messaging with social networks that takes away complexities such as device recognition. Just launched platform in April.

Chris Butler (cbutler at dash.net):
They do crowd sourcing. People can do Yahoo! mobile search from their car. Twitter from the car :). Working on facebook apps.


What's view on social network on mobile in US?

CD: XHTML is going to die.

BK: Browser is rapidly getting faster and is faster than it was ever before. iPhones, Android and Safari are fast. Create it as a browser based application.

GC: Every application needs SMS strategy.

BK: SMS gives you a huge touch point and advantage but times are changing.

How do you think operators are positioned? Do they hinder or support initiatives.

Careers are changing, they are opening up more. Interest around the browser is very great as it allows companies to come together and create standards.

Google has made cost of information really low.