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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

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 apps, Blackberry 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

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Posted in 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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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

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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Posted in Mobile Applications, Mobile Services | Comments

NokiaChristmasPartyWatch: No new news from loose lips

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Unfortunately we’re the bringer of bad tidings, no new intel or info was really obtained on the night. Apart from besides Nokia being a former wood pulp miller, they also used to make Wellington boots.

Despite our feverish attempts at cajoling information out of various astute well training and affluent members of the Nokia team, we came away with nothing new I’m afraid to say .

We did try our very best attempts at Jedi mind control tricks, with conversations going along the lines of:

“How’s things?”
“How have you been?”
“Nice venue for an event”
“How close in the leaked product line we saw of late to the actual product line up?”
“Have you been to this venue before; did I mention it’s a nice place”

To …

“Thanks for inviting me, it’s greatly appreciated”
“Hope the evening was a success”
“Was the leaked images of the E75 today, the handset that’s a successor to the E90 close to the final model”
“It’s a really great venue, have I mentioned it’s a nice place?”

We tried to be as subtle as would could, basing our tactical approach of questioning along the lines of the following. “The best way to open a letter is to throw a brick at it, from a very large height.”

Next week is their Nokia World event, in which we are of attendance and hope to bring you better news.

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Posted in Mobile | Comments

Normal service resumes at some point

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I arrived back at MIR Towers to find the internet connection down and the phone line dead. Joy. I don’t think I will be able to upload anything for a little while — definitely not the usual 1 or 2 gig of video data I was planning. So standby. Future of Mobile footage coming soon!

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Posted in Mobile | Comments

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