Hi this is James Coops from mjelly, we’ve just launched a new directory of mobile sites and apps and the good folks at Mobile Industry Review have kindly asked us to do a weekly post highlighting some of the amazing new mobile stuff that we are finding out there.  We’ll be focusing on the so-called mobile 2.0 apps and mobile sites, which combine mobility with some kind of social element, as these are generally the most exciting.

Each week we’ll be showcasing a different site or application for you to check out, either because its innovative in some way, has been very successful or it’s the sort of thing you might want to download or bookmark on your mobile.

To kick off, our mobile 2.0 service this week is Peperonity.

What is it?

Peperonity is a mobile site builder and community that lets the user create a mobile web site with text, images, files and interactive elements like a guestbook, voting and messaging.  The site is a bit like a hybrid of livejournal and myspace on mobile that makes it really easy to create a website through your phone as a personal page or in an area of interest.  There are also some central community services including a super-busy forum, live chat rooms, a media gallery and so on.  Whilst Peperonity is most definitely “mobile 2.0″ it was actually founded way back in 2001 and survived the mobile internet nuclear winter of 2001-7 without taking any VC funding.

Why is it interesting?

To be fair, most Mobile Industry Review readers are probably not the target users for Peperonity, which  mainly attracts a younger audience, particularly in the hyper-growth mobile markets like South Africa and India.  However, the site is worth getting to know if you’re in the mobile biz, based on the huge traction that it has achieved.

Pepperonity has the kind of mobile traffic that a lot of big media companies can only dream of, and is claiming over 400m page views a month, over 5 million personal pages have been created on the site and there are now over a million registered users.  (Source: Wap Review).  As a result it is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest driver of inventory on the admob mobile ad network and is rumoured to have a minimum guarantee deal on ad space for over a million US dollars a year.

Despite all this Peperonity has a fairly low profile, even within the mobile industry, and deserves to be more widely known, given that it’s a real benchmark for anyone looking to build a successful mobile internet site.

That’s all for now - see you next week for another mobile 2.0 service

You can find Peperonity on on mjelly, which is a directory of mobile things at mjelly.com on your PC and m.mjelly.com on mobile