Mobile Monday notes – Three’s SeeMeTV, Nokia, Intercasting, Pinppl, Soonr

Alex, CTO at SendMyTxt was at Mobile Monday yesterday and, apart from a spell where he was left dribbling after seeing Soonr, recorded copious notes of all he saw. Faaaaantastic. Kudos. He’s kindly allowed me to reproduce them for your viewing intrigue here:

First up was Martin Monteiro of 3 UK, or ‘Three UK’, as I like to refer to them here.

Demonstrating product called ‘SeeMeTV’. Launched in October 2005, SeeMeTV a user generated content portal for 3 users. Content creators MMS their clips to shortcode 32323, users can browse the content for free and get charged between 10p and £1.50 to download a video clip, can rate the clip for free or leave a comment for 5p. Creator gets 10% revenue paid via Paypal. In October 2005, they got 500,000 paid downloads, since the start the service has got over 10 million purchases. So far £400,000 has been paid out via Paypal in revenue share to content creators. The service is quite popular, with some users downloading 20-30 clips per visit. There’s a 30 second limit to a video clip, and all clips are human moderated before publishing, with a service age restriction of 18+.

What I reaaaally wanted to know is if Martin got up and showed the audience Budding Brenda from Basingstoke doing her thing with her rampant rabbit to all and sundry?

10 MILLLION purchases? Wow.

Not just a pretty face, eh? 😉

I would reaaaaaallly like to know if that’s 9.9 million 18+ purchases with 100,000 purchases of a video of some kid riding into a tree.

Then Alex caught Stephen Johnston from Nokia Corporate Strategy. I can’t remember if I’ve met Stephen. I met a really tall chap from Nokia at Swedish Beers a while ago and it could have been him. Anyway… now this is interesting:

Nokia has it’s own profile on Myspace (http://www.myspace.com/nokia), run by a 16 year old male in Malaysia. They use it to connect with their ‘youth’ audience. A stack of interesting statistics followed in the presentation, highlights including: 4 billion mobile users predicted by 2010, with 90% of the world’s population being in an area with mobile coverage by then. In 2007 Nokia predict the device ownership of ‘smart’ mobile devices will overtake the ownership of laptops. 850 million people use Nokia handsets daily, and their CEO was quoted recently as saying that Nokia ‘plans to be an Internet company’.

They’ve got a 16 year old running their MySpace page? Pure genius. Pure total genius. Love it.

Following Stephen came Sean Kane, VP at Intercasting.

Discussing ‘Mobile social networks’. Intercasting offer a social networking platform for mobile carriers. Between 61-80% of 13-19 year olds are members of a social networking site, like Myspace, Bebo, Friendster, etc. However, it’s a mainly PC dominated world at the moment. With mobile social networking, the general feeling from the target audience is that data costs are too high, so a more open flat rate data plan (or cheaper tarrifs) are needed. Carriers need to launch a free or flat rate data plan for ‘pay as you go’ subscribers, which in turn make up the bulk of the mobile social networking target audience. Also mobile social networking needs to be standardised, whereby a service can be accessed via any mobile network or platform – and not just limited to one particular carrier or being ‘web only’. In a recent survey, 40% of teenagers said they will reply to an unsolicited social network message, which raises concerns over safety and privacy. However, if carriers were to offer a social networking platform with a low or zero data cost, they’d find they’d recoupe lost revenues via increased SMS and MMS usage, driven by the social network platform.

I would have been right at the back yelling WOOP WOOP WOOP GO SEAN GO SEAN the moment he mentioned ‘free or flat rate data plans for payg customers’. We definitely need some sort of standards.

Then came Paul Anthony, founder of Pinppl.com — a wickedly good service.
Offering a Blackberry-based social networking platform using the concept of Blackberry PINs. In beta at present, with just word of mouth has already reached 500 users. No software required, uses built in Blackberry browser.

It absolutely rocks. The only issue I have is that I’ve swapped from the Blackberry to the Nokia E61 so, alas, I can’t really participate. If you’re on BB, make sure you’ve got a profile on Pinppl.

And then, finally, the Soonr bit.

There were a couple of other presentations that weren’t exactly much to write home about.. however there was a spectacular demonstration by SoonR. It was so overwhelming that I didn’t manage to take any notes, but it’s definitely gone down in my list as ‘the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long long time’. Check it out yourself, soonr.com.

I’ve had a ton of people talk to me about soonr recently, including a chap called Adrian (who’s doing a Q&A shortly and uses Soonr like no tomorrow). I’ve tried it although, alas, I’m on an Apple so, whilst it looks to be a genius piece of kit, I’ve yet to take a bit of time and really use it. Do check it out though.

Alex, kudos for recording the notes. Very insightful!