Mojungle, one of the best implementations of a mobile-to-web content service I’ve ever seen, is for sale on ebay, with bids starting at US $60k — or around £35k GBP.
I’ve cut and paste some of the text from the ebay ad (link below):
Why is Mojungle for sale?
The decision to sell Mojungle was a difficult one. We’ve encountered unanticipated and growing personal and business obligations not allowing us to make the full time commitment needed to build Mojungle into the strong brand we know it can be.
What is Mojungle?
Mojungle let’s you record your memories and share your life as it happens using your mobile phone. You can send text/photos/videos with captions to your Mojungle player posted on any web site (MySpace, Blogger, etc), and more.
We are not able to post links within our eBay listing due to potential terms of service conflicts, but we believe you can figure out the URL for the Mojungle site 🙂
How does Mojungle work?
We have created proprietary software that accepts, parses and processes media sent from mobile devices in real-time. Mojungle can support virtually any SMS/MMS/E-mail message sent from any mobile phone through any carrier. We chose a platform that revolves around SMS/MMS messaging to achieve the greatest possible penetration. The extensible, rule-based architecture makes it amenable to keeping up with a constantly changing mobile landscape.
The Flash player is capable of displaying text messages, images, and video sent from mobile phones (with associated captions) and can be placed on any web site by pasting the appropriate embed code. A personal Mojungle player is created for a user as soon as he/she sends a message to the service. The player displays media in real-time and enables viewers to browse the album, initiate a slide show, repost images/video to other web sites, and leave comments. The player displays content dynamically via an XML file.
Comments are, optionally sent directly to the user’s cell phone. The user is able to respond to a comment and the response gets posted on the site and back to the previous commenter’s cell phone. This illustrates Mojungle’s two-way communication capabilities.
The Mojungle front-end is built with PHP on a MySql database. The HTTP server is lighttpd. The parser is built using a combination of JAVA and PHP. The Flash player is built for Flash Version 8 and above.
I reckon they’ll get quite a few bids. I’m sure of it. There’s quite a few potential uses I could think for the technology from the top of my head. For instance: Any one of the social networking sites around the place should definitely snap it up as a front-end for their stuff.
If you know anyone who might be interested, send them to this ebay link.
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if anybody wants a web/mobile service like this then iTAGG will build you one for £30K. and we’ll throw in a domain name for it too!
steve
Apart from the aesthetics which are quite pretty, I suspect the mainstay of work has been done on the image conversion software and the transcoding of video presumably on the fly. If I didn’t have a job already, I’d be tempted to take this on. The work done on that side of things alone is worth a fair amount. As is It’s not going in exactly the right direction for me though, and I’d want to tweak the direction.
The major aspect about mobile social networks is building them, not the technology deployed. Creating, managing and increasing the size and quality of the community is THE science which will differentiate each of the players in this market.
Good technology will sell, and I hope these guys get a good price for their work but, [as they may have already found] building the back end does not guarantee that the user numbers will flow into the service.
I would NEVER bid on a technology package unless I had the opportunity to complete a thorough technical due diligence. What if a major element of the code base was infringing others? What if the design could not scale?
I think it is difficult to buy such a software system under such circumstances of an Ebay auction without protecting oneself. But I do acknowledge that at least some startups are being more pragmatic about the choices they have and using this method to complete a journey on their latest project.
My view is to the guys behind MoJungle “Move on, start another one and keep pushing”
I tried mojungle when you first mentioned it, I don’t know what it is but there is just something about it… I can’t find a fault with it but… well, it just lacks that WOW factor!
I too am interested in it, but would rather have a due diligence phase. One interesting thing is people using it to propagate their spam. Guess it could easily be automated, or monitored and spammers kicked out. Very interesting, though.
I reckon there’s a good opportunity for them to white label their interface and offer it to lots of different companies and services.
Ewan,
I think you can be white labelled. Spread yourself around a bit :0)
And please own up to the Orange adverts. LISTEN everybody Ewan is a closet actor with an equity card, he does radio voice overs for Orange…………………… and probably others………..
It still kills me every time I here it
Can anyone recommend me?
I need an free sms service for my homepage.
I am seeking one with the option to change the design(for a bit).
Thanks a million!