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Posts Tagged ‘2.0’

eBuddy – mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Hi its James from mjelly here at Mobile Industry Review with another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week”.  This time we’re going to take a look at ebuddy – which might be the next big European startup success story to follow in the footsteps of Skype and Last.fm.  I spoke with the CEO Jan-Joost Rueb earlier this week and he filled me in on the latest and greatest on their absolutely stunning user metrics and some interesting stuff about how powerful mobile is becoming as a platform relative to the PC-web.

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What is it

eBuddy lets you log into your IM networks like AIM, Googletalk, MSN Messenger and ICQ as well as the Facebook and Myspace social network chat systems from a single account.  The service also integrates with mobile photo-sharing.

Initially the service was based on a PC web messenger but was extended to mobile with the launch of the Mobile Messenger Java app and a mobile web site Lite Messenger which is optimized for XHTML mobile browsers as well as the iphone, ipod Touch and Sony PSP.

eBuddy is truly international with support for 37 languages and offices in Amsterdam, London and San Fransisco.  The company has raised two rounds of funding, Series A (5m euro) from Lowland Capital Partners, and Series B (6.5m euro) from Prime Technology Ventures.

The mobile IM space is really hotting up and eBuddy faces a range of international competitors which we have previously covered here at Mobile Industry Review like Nimbuzz, Mig33 and Heysan as well as some strong local players such as Mxit in South Africa.  However, as the CEO Jan-Joost points out, ebuddy is the one to beat in this space with really massive traction – here are the latest numbers:

- 11m downloads of the ebuddy mobile application, growing at the rate of 1m downloads per month
- average user logs in 30 times per month
- 3m monthly uniques on mobile, growing at CAGR 195% (2004 to 2008)
- processed 45bn messages in 2008

eBuddy was founded in 2003, in the depths of the dot com nuclear winter, at a time when people were writing off mobile internet as a failure – so its a great success story for these difficult times!

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Why is it interesting?

As a converged service working across online and mobile eBuddy offers an interesting case study of the relationship between the two platforms as mobile gets stronger and stronger.

In some markets, such as Indonesia, eBuddy’s mobile traffic is 2-3 times its web traffic, providing more evidence to support the view that mobile is going to be the primary online access channel on a global basis. eBuddy is also finding that they are able to build a web brand and web traffic as a result of their presence in mobile – this is the inverse of the way things normally work e.g. facebook mobile building off the strength of the PC site.

Whilst eBuddy haven’t started monetising their mobile traffic yet there is clearly a massive opportunity both from mobile advertising and from user-payments – Jan-Joost mentioned a Chinese IM player called QQ which is already generating $700m p.a. in mobile payments revenue in addition to $300m in advertising.  There are other examples such as Mobile Gametown in Japan which have also successfully proved this model.  With many online web 2.0 sites struggling to build revenue streams it could be services with a big presence in mobile like ebuddy that prove to be more commercially attractive.

The other thing to note about eBuddy is that they are one of the first mobile services to really get viral effects working on a massive scale in mobile.  Historically, mobile services have had to invest in high cost customer acquisition through carriage on operator portal decks or off-net advertising.  With eBuddy, every time someone logs into an IM network using the system their status is changed to show that they are using the service – which has amplified the word of mouth effects of a great service.  As a result, the huge traction that ebuddy enjoys has been achieved with fairly limited marketing spend.

What this all adds up to is a European start-up in the mobile space that could well achieve a major exit in the near future.  ebuddy would be a great fit for an international telecoms company, handset vendor or one of the major online players so watch this space…

You can download ebuddy and ebuddy Lite on mjelly, which is a directory of mobile applications and other stuff.

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Posted in Mobile Data, Mobile Presence, Mobile Services | Comments

Cellufun – mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, December 19th, 2008

Cellufun – mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Hi its James from mjelly.com here at Mobile Industry Review with another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week”. This week we’re going to take a look at Cellufun – one of the emerging mobile games 2.0 superstars. As usual we’ve managed to get hold of some exclusive stats direct from the management especially for Mobile Industry Review readers.
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What is it?

Cellufun is a mobile games company that provides free downloadable and mobile web-based games over a mobile internet portal. The typical games they provide are either mobile versions of popular classics (with no licensing fees!) like Chess or Blackgammon, or their own multi-player original games like “Call of the Pharaoh” which won Best Game in the 2008 Global Mobile Awards. All of the games are funded with advertising/ are free to the end user. They also have a big focus on community at Cellufun, a lot of the games are multi-player and they also make a big deal of high score tables, forums, player profiles and so on.

Most of the action on Cellufun has been carried out off-portal on their own mobile site, but they are now beginning to get some big distribution deals. For example they recently got carriage on the Metro PCS portal, and are also providing AOL with a white label mobile games site.

The company is based in New York, they were founded in 2005 and raised a $3m series A round from Longworth Venture partners in mid 2007.

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Why is it interesting?

Cellufun are really kicking up a storm in terms of traffic and usage – here are the latest stats for November – hot off the press:

- 5 million uniques a month
- one million registered users
- 160 million pageviews per month, up from 100 million the previous quarter

Pretty amazing reach for a mobile web service and clearly its a really sticky service with users, judging by the volume of page views.

Cellufun are similar to Myxer, which we profiled a couple of weeks ago here on mobile industry review, in that they are taking a mobile 1.0 service (games) and completely re-engineering the consumer proposition and business model. The 1.0 mobile games value chain is based on premium games, usually created using high cost franchises from console platforms or movies, which are sold via operator content stores. Cellufun is completely different; it typically creates its own game brands which it offers for free and funds with advertising and focuses on building a strong community around the games. This enables them to push mobile games into completely new segments – its very similar to what casual games companies like Miniclip have done on the PC web.

Despite the recession, Cellufun is the type of startup that you could really see being acquired in the next year or two for big $$. They could be a target for a big games company like Electronic Arts, a large mobile games publisher, an aggregator and service provider like Jamba or Buongiorno or even one of the major online companies. Watch this space.

We are taking two weeks off for Christmas and New Year but see you in 2009 – we already have some really exciting mobile 2.0 services lined up to tell you about. Meeeaaary Christmas!

You can find Cellufun and other mobile games sites at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)

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Posted in Mobile Services | Comments

Trutap – mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Hello – it’s James from mjelly.com touching down here at Mobile Industry Review. Trutap is a mobile startup that’s been in the headlines quite a bit lately and it’s this week’s “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week”.
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What is it

Trutap is a mobile application that does four main things. Firstly, it aggregates all the major IM networks, similar to other services like Nimbuzz, ebuddy, heysan, mig33 and so on. However, that’s only 25% of what Trutap does. Trutap also provides a mobile gateway into all the major social networking, blogging and photo services, a community platform with profiles and other social features as well as a content platform which pushes out news and links on a daily basis.

Overall Trutap currently supports at least 8 IM networks, 10 blogging and photo sites, 8 social and digital lifestyle services and 8+ content channels which means it provides a gateway to well over 30 different digital communications, social and content platforms.

So – Trutap is a lot more than the simple IM aggregator that some people think it is.

Trutap have also shared a few facts about the service so far:

- 250K users with a good industry activity rate
- 80% of users are in Indian, Asian and African continents
- 70% of new users have updated their status, location and even home town within Trutap
- Facebook messenger is growing at a huge rate, now bigger than Google Talk on their network

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Why is it interesting?

Trutap has been in the news recently because all staff have been put on notice. They were unfortunate that their current investor got hit hard in the Credit Crunch and is no longer investing anywhere… so the company has been effectively orphaned. Not a good time as we all know, and therefore raising more cash at short notice has been a difficult task with VCs focusing on trying to support their existing portfolio.

Trutap has taken a fair bit of stick from some quarters, but it’s got to be said that the new version of the service, which they built with the mobile development agency Future Platforms is really rather good. There are some fantastic user interface elements such as the scrolling navigation bar at the bottom of the screen which allows you to easily cycle through the different functions. A lot of people have critised Trutap for not going for a mobile web model from the start but if you look at the software they’ve built it really would be very difficult to deliver the same features and user experience over that platform.

Trutap spent the last year rolling out the first version of the product (aggregator of IM and Blogs) and building the second version (social network) which launched a few weeks ago. The first version launched in November 2007 so they’ve actually built a fair bit in a short space of time and comparing their take-up to competitors like ebuddy (10m downloads) is a bit unfair as Trutap have been going a much shorter time. The app has also been ported for a massive amount of handsets to provide a really wide potential user-base. Basically Trutap are positioned really well to begin really ramping up users and usage with the v2 app – its just unfortunate that the cut-off in funding has happened at this point.

Trutap has also begun to develop a couple of very interesting new ideas – the community system is planned to evolve into a virtual gifting and currency system, similar to the very successful model developed by the Japanese site Mobile Game Town. Secondly, Trutap has begun to create a platform for content brands with a number of partnerships underway including with a large mobile media business. These sorts of developments could seriously boost Trutap’s revenues and user-base if they get the chance to fully develop them!

Trutap is also one of the most popular apps in the mjelly directory so it seems there are quite a few fans of the service out there. Let’s hope Trutap manage to keep going and finish the job – all the best of luck to them.

You can find Trutap and other mobile software on the mjelly at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)

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Posted in Mobile Services | Comments

Myxer – mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Greetings, James from mjelly.com here -  its Friday and that means another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week” – our regular run-down of the most upfront mobile sites, apps and software.  This week we’re going to be covering one of the biggest mobile media sharing communities out there – Myxer.com.  Again, like a lot of stuff we cover, this is a mobile site which is really popular, but not many people in the mobile business have really heard of it.

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What is it?

Myxer is a community for sharing ringtones and other content.  Bands and individuals can upload music which myxer converts into the right formats for downloading to mobile – think youtube for ringtones and you’ve got the idea.  The service is mainly driven by a PC website but it is also available over the mobile web at m.myxer.com.

Whilst there are quite a few similar sites Myxer has really taken things to the next level in terms of its technology platform.  It’s created myxer tags and myxer codes to let users embed their content on social networks like myspace and on blogs and so on using HTML and flash-based widgets and badges.  They have also managed to get SMS triggers working across all the major US networks to let you push content to your phone from the web.   In fact, Myxer is now the fourth largest source of SMS in the US after American Idol, Google and American Greetings.

The company is based in Florida and they’ve raised a serious amount of money – $6.5 million in September 07, following an earlier $3m round.

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Why is it interesting

Whilst there are lots of mobile content sharing communities out there, myxer is the one that has the largest usage and traffic.  They have – 15m users, 1.7m content items on the site, 100,000 content providers and a massive 32 million mobile downloads a month.  One million downloads a day is pretty impressive in a content area (ringtones) that a lot of people consider to be “dead”.

What myxer demonstrates is that there is still plenty of life left in the ringtones market – it is just the business model and user experience that is changing.  Whereas the likes of Jamba developed a ringtone value chain based on subscriptions, promoted by heavy marketing investment, myxer is using a different approach based on user-generated content and viral distribution via widgets and social networks.

There may be other areas of the mobile market that could do with a similar change of approach, for example, java games have never managed to really hit the mainstream user and broadcast Mobile TV appears to be almost completely still-born.  It may be that new startups like Myxer appear with a different way of engineering the value chain and start to take these services into new areas.

You can find myxer at mjelly which is a directory of mobile sites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)

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Posted in Mobile Services | Comments

Apple all is not well, is it?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

It’s all a bit gloomy for Apple really. Julia reported last week about Apple being sued, and today the Advertising Standards Authority have rapped them for some dodgy advertising.

Apparently the claim that the iPhone can access “all the parts of the internet” is giving a misleading impression to consumers, according to ASA. This has led to ASA banning the advert, so it will no longer be shown within the UK.

I’m not going to start slating Apple, but it doesn’t look too good now does it? They’re getting sued, since the 2.0 release and the 3G release there have been numerous complaints, and now they can’t even get the advertising correct.

It appears that Apple’s lack of functionality with Flash and Java seems to be the main issue behind this; because although the pages may be reached it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be displayed properly. Apple denied that this was a case of false advertising, and that they never claimed that all parts of a website would work with the Safari browser.

In a way it’s a shame Apple have had this, although I may not be a fan of the iPhone or the company as a whole; it’s disappointing to say the least to see a company that did so well with their original release of their product to this.

Apple, I’m rooting for you here… Sort this out!

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Posted in Apple, Mobile, iPhone | Comments

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