Posts Tagged ‘mJelly’

Mobamingle - a Japanese mobile internet success story expanding internationally

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Happy Friday! James from mjelly.com here at Mobile Industry Review for another “Mobile 2.0 service of the week”.

So far we’ve covered mobile 2.0 apps from all over the world from Mig33 in Australia, Itsmy in Germany, Mocospace in the US to ebuddy and Nimbuzz in Holland and this week we’re going East with Mobamingle - the international version of THE SMASH HIT Japanese mobile service Mobile Game Town.

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What is it?

Mobamingle or Mbmgl was launched in Q4 last year by the Japanese mobile internet giant Dena as an attempt to repeat the success of Mobile Game Town in the US and Europe.

For those who don’t know Mobile GameTown is one of the world’s most successful mobile internet services.  The site is based around a mobile avatar community with the usual chat and social features.  However, Mobile Gametown (or Mobage Town for short) also provides a range of flash games and other services like mobile story telling - a new kind of mobile user-generated content format.  The site has:

- 10m plus users

- 15 bn monthly page views

- $200m in annual revenues from a mix of advertising/ affiliate deals and sales of its internal currency

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Mobamingle provides a very similar service aimed at the US and other countries including the UK, and Europe.  All the main features are there including all the community elements (groups, forums) as well as the mobile story-writing feature.

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The main big difference is that Mobamingle doesn’t yet offer the huge range of flash-based free mobile games that have been key to growing traction for the service in Japan.  Even today, support for, and awareness of flash in mobile handsets is pretty low in the West.  However, Mobamingle DOES feature the full-on cutesy Japanese style avatars!

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Why is it interesting?

Mobamingle heralds a new wave of Japanese mobile businesses expanding internationally.  The first wave was all about big acquisitions, such as the service provider itouch being acquired by For-side in 2005, or the string of acquisitions that Index made between 2004-5 (123 Multimedia, Mobliss).  The second wave is going to be different - sites and services which have worked in Japan are going to create international versions and use the learnings and technologies they’ve developed to succeed.

Having Japanese players enter the market is going to mean local players have to really RAISE THEIR GAME.  Dena is reportedly investing $3m in the international launch of mbmgl and the site is amazing usability-wise with some great design touches and a BEAUTIFUL mobile UI.

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These new services could also help to spread new mobile business models in the US and Europe.  For example, Mobile Game Town’s use of virtual currency is already being adopted by US and European mobile startups like Heysan, Itsmy and FlirtomaticIf sites like Mobamingle can help get consumers used to the idea of paying for mobile services beyond ringtones and other personalisation content then the whole industry could see a huge boom in revenue.

The launch of Mobamingle can only be good news for the mobile web - it’s a massive bet that mobile internet is taking off in the US and Europe and that consumers are ready for mobile-only social services like this.  We have been waiting nearly a decade for the success of Japanese mobile internet to be replicated over here and it looks like it might finally be happening.

You can find Mbmgl on mjelly, which is a directory of the top mobile sites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)

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itsmy.com - mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Hello hello James from mjelly here.   Itmsy.com are the world’s leading “mobile-only” social network and they are our Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week.   I have been a massive fan of the service since they launched and when I spoke to the Vince (the CEO) and Jukka (the CTO) earlier this week it became clear that itsmy.com are building something *really amazing* on the mobile internet.

Here’s the lowdown…

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What is it?

itsmy.com is a social network and community site with the typical features such as profiles, forums, media-sharing and chat.   However, from the start, itsmy has focused on entertainment elements such as video (personal TV channels) and providing content downloads (e.g. games, animations).  Itsmy are a bit like the “MTV of Mobile” in this respect, rather than just a mobile chatting and social networking site.  This is their way of differentiating the service from competitors we have previously covered on Mobile Industry Review such as Mocospace and the big mobile IM and chat aggregators like Nimbuzz, Heysan and ebuddy.

The site is ONLY available on mobile, there is no version of the site designed for PC use and users cannot access the mobile site except through their phone browser.   The CEO Vince explained that this is because they want to really link itsmy with mobile and make it something special that you can only access through a particular device.  Building just for mobile browsers also allows them to optimize the service for the mobile platform and identify users to create a safe and clean social environment.

Unlike a lot of mobile social services, itsmy is focused on the big Western markets and the majority of its users are from the US, UK and Europe.  The service is localised for each country and uses additional location information to show people other users from their local area.

What itsmy have proven over the last two years is that there is a role for MOBILE-ONLY social services even as the likes of facebook, myspace and bebo roll out their own mobile extensions.  They have over 2 million registered mobile users and 4.5 million user pages containing 10 million user-generated content items.  The stats from a recent survey they did of their users are pretty interesting:

  • 39% never used a PC-based online social network
  • average of  25-35 messages a day sent
  • most active users logging in 10 times per day to the mobile internet
  • some users spending up to 2.5 hours per day browsing the internet on their mobile

The service was launched in 2006 by GoFresh, which is a privately held German company.

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Why is it interesting?

I could wax lyrical about the stuff itsmy is doing all day, here’s a couple of things that make them a really interesting mobile 2.0 startup:

Itsmy data shows that we are entering a boom in mobile internet

Itsmy.com makes a lot of use of data and analytics which gives them some really useful information.  For example they track page views and logins by customer and by operator which has shown that when an operator launches a flat-rate data package or data promotion there is an immediate uplift in usage from their customers. Itsmy have even noticed individual users using the service a lot initially then stopping (bill-shock!) then returning 6 months later and using the service more than before (once they have a cheap data package).

What this suggests is that there is a massive opportunity ahead on the mobile internet as more and more people get access to lower cost or flat rate data plans - we are only really at the beginning of the growth in mobile internet take-up and usage.  Already itsmy.com are reporting really strong growth in 2009, which is really positive for the mobile industry.

Itsmy is pioneering new types of mobile advertising and marketing

Over the last couple of years there has been a big boom in mobile advertising as networks like admob have rolled out.  Right from the start, itsmy have taken a really different approach to mobile advertising.  Firstly, they have avoided using ad networks on a large scale across their site as they feel that the quality of advertisers (e.g. ringtone companies, gambling) is too low.  In addition, CPC-based mobile advertising means that users leave the site whenever they click on an ad, which detracts from the stickiness of the service.

Instead of relying on third party ad networks, itsmy invested in building their own ad platform “itsmy.biz” which allows them to provide highly targeted advertising across their community, focusing on rich media ad formats (video, in-game advertising), virals, branded content and integrated sponsorship campaigns.  As a result, itsmy.com can go direct to big brands like Reebok, Vodafone, Ford and Universal and offer them a really unique mobile advertising proposition.   They have left a lot of money on the table over the last two years, by following this approach, particularly as there is a total ban on ringtone ads on the site, however, the benefits are now starting to come through as more advertisers sign up to work with them.

So good to see mobile startups like itsmy thinking of the long-term and having a lot of integrity - a real contrast to some of the big names of the mobile 1.0 world!  That’s it for now.  See you next week when we’ll be covering South Africa’s hottest mobile startup. ..

You can find itsmy.com on mjelly, which is a directory of mobile websites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)

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.

Dabr - mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Happy New Year! It’s James from mjelly here with the first “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week” of 2009.  If 2008 was “The Year of Mobile” then 2009 is “The Year of Mobile 2.0″ and we’ll be tracking it all here at Mobile Industry Review.

To start the year with a bang this week’s featured mobile 2.0 service is dabr.co.uk.

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What is it?

Dabr is a mobile web interface to
twitter – the micro-blogging and social networking service of the moment, and is built on the twitter API.  It provides a range of features that the standard
m.twitter.com mobile site does not for example:

- the ability to “retweet” (i.e. quote other people’s twitter messages)
- support for in-line twitpics
- profile pictures
- search
- follow and unfollow (believe it or not m.twitter.com doesn’t let you do this!)
- view followers

Unlike other similar services like m.slandr.net the dabr is completely free of advertising.  Dabr is based on open source code developed as a personal project by David Carrington, a Maidenhead-based web developer.  David built the first version of the site in just over a week and has been continuing to develop it since then.

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Why is it interesting?

Dabr has built up a large and passionate following with people like Mobile Industry Review’s own Whatleydude
championing it and bigging it up on twitter.  As a result, the traffic is growing at a pretty hefty rate with a 150% increase in page views between October and December 2008.

Dabr is also an example of the power that APIs can bring to the world of mobile.  To date, APIs and developer networks have mainly been largely confined to the world of PC’s and web 2.0.  Until now, mobile hasn’t really begun to exploit the advantages of this kind of open approach to data and services.

One of the issues for web players moving onto mobile is that mobile extensions require extra resource, particularly if multiple versions are need e.g. a mobile web site and Symbian/ Android/ iphone/applications to cover all the different device types.

What dabr shows it that by offering an API, web players can push the development effort required to build mobile versions to external developers and third parties.  Twitter has really benefited in this area with developers creating a whole raft of different mobile twitter services including 
iphone twitter appsBlackberry twitter apps and more.

This is also happening in the case of Friendfeed (the creator of gmail’s latest startup) where an external developer used their API to build FFtogo.com, a 
href=”http://mjelly.com/site/3454-Friendfeed”>Friendfeed mobile site
- before even Friendfeed had managed to build their own in-house mobile version!

Another point worth making is that the mobile network operators have been very slow to develop API’s that could allow services to be built more easily, for example, to pass information on subscribers to allow more targeted advertising, or providing easy access to location feeds.  What dabr shows is that APIs can really bring a lot to the table in terms of developing the mobile web ecosystem and need to be rolled out much more rapidly and widely.

You can find dabr on mjelly, which is a directory of the
best mobile sites and other stuff

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)

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)

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)

mjelly Service of the week - mippin.com

Friday, November 28th, 2008

After a week’s hiatus (I was lucky enough to be relaxing on the beaches of South Goa) it’s James from back with another Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week.

This week it’s the turn of what might well be the UK’s no1 mobile 2.0 startup - mippin logo

What is it?
Mippin is a mobile aggregator for blogs, news feeds, video and other content from the web, which it “mobilizes” by optimizing for mobile and putting it in a single portal for users.  The portal has around 42,000 sites indexed across over 80 different content channels such as “mobile news”, “celebrities”, “sports” and so on.  There are also mini widgets you can insert onto your mippin home-page to customise it such as weather, flickr and twitter feeds, horoscopes etc.

Publishers and bloggers can use mippin to create a mobile feed of their site, for example, at mjelly we use mippin to mobilize our http://mippin.com/mjelly.

Mippin make it really easy to do this - you can effectively create a mobile site out of your RSS feed in a few minutes.

Mippin also recently launched some nice social features including user profiles and social filters such as recommendations.  You can follow specific users and see what they are reading and enjoying.  Right from the start mippin has built in sharing functionality to let you email or SMS stories to your friends or blast
them over twitter.

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Why is it interesting?

Mippin is doing something pretty unique in the world of mobile - whilst there are loads of messaging apps for example, there are very few mobile sites that are really trying to aggregate and mobilize content in this way.  

Mippin is also interesting as a case study of how moving from a downloadable application to a mobile-web based platform can pay dividends.  Mippin started life as “Refresh Mobile” or “Mobizines” which was an early attempt to help brands put their content onto mobile through developing mobile magazines which could be downloaded as a java app. Since moving to a mobile web platform the site has really taken off and is now getting some serious traffic, which we can’t disclose, but suffice to say they are one of the biggest mobile news and information sites in the world.

The stats we can let you know about are pretty impressive - Mippin has active users in over 200 countries worldwide, on over 2,000 different types of device and the average UK user visits the site once a week with a growing number of users visiting once or more a day.  The record was 750 page views in one single
session on a Motorola V3!!

Another interesting point, Mippin find that iPhone users are “prolific” in their consumption on the site, another bit of evidence that shows that just because you have a mobile browser that can handle full webpages, it doesnt mean there’s no need for mobile optimized sites.

Mippin is a fantastic service that really stands out from the crowd - defo one to watch - it will be an ideal acquisition target in a year or so’s time for a newspaper or web portal looking to build scale on the mobile web.
See you next
week!

You can find mippin on mjelly, which is directory of the best mobile websites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)


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