Mobile Musings, Mostly

A quick recap of the 7/28 Mobile Monday New York event held at the Samsung Experience Center in NYC. The topic of this event was “Viability and Monetization Potential of Social Networks”.

The event started with a series of 5-minute presentations by three companies..I have provided brief overviews below. Further on, I will offer my personal take on each of them.

• MOBOW : Are you an absolute microblogging/livestreaming addict ? If yes, then MOBOW might be a way to get your fix on your mobile device. Deepak Das, MOBOW Co-Founder talked about unleashing the potential of the address books on your mobile device. Mobow is tapping into the lifestreaming services bandwagon (like friendfeed, iminta, profilactic, identi.ca). But with an additional twist - they integrate lifestreaming onto your mobile device and within the context of arguably that most “social” asset, your address book !! They augment the typical phone conversation by integrating location, presence awareness, feeds (from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn…) , etc. into your address book. They claim to have a WindowsMobile client ready, and are working on a RIM and iPhone version, and are also looking at leveraging XMPP .

• Next2Friends - As the name implies, Next2Friends is about live video streaming from your mobile device. Playing in the same space as the recently transitioned-to-beta Qik , Next2Friends has the usual embed-in-3rdparty web sites. Plus using Bluetooth-based proximity for targeted applications (yes, marketing was mentioned…), and also white labeling the entire application suite (for businesses/corporations looking to develop communities around their offerings or for specific events like product launches).

• Skyhook Wireless - Skyhook uses their database of several million WiFi access points, in addition to GPS data and cell tower triangulation as part of their hybrid positioning system (XPS). So unlike the previous two, they are primarily an infrastructure player who talked about their recent foray into providing location smarts for 3rd-party apps and websites through their Loki offering. It is available for developers through a Javascript API, or to end users via a downloadable application.

  Both MOBOW and Next2Friends are playing in a relatively crowded space. For MOBOW, figuring out how they can differentiate against and compete with the existing lifestreaming services (including Jaiku), getting an iPhone app out soon, adding XMPP into their roadmap, and leveraging GNIP are just some of the challenges in my opinion.

  In a similar vein, Next2Friends competes against Kyte and Qik. I do find Next2Friends white label idea intriguing as it opens up the opportunity to help organizations (from both a B2E and a B2C perspective) leverage these technologies. See this post from Jeremiah Owyang for a related discussion on how traditional Content Management System (CMS) vendors are angling to get into the social software space. Also check out the entire MoMoNY event captured via live video stream by Next2Friends, here.

  Much like WHERE , Skyhook wants to tap into the convergence of social software, location, and neogeography. And it seems like they have put a decent amount of effort into the Loki platform. As always, adoption will be dictated by how they evolve the platform, the reach they can get, and how they can set up the revenue model. As a personal user of the WHERE app on my iPhone, I can attest to the utility of such an application.

  These presentations were followed by Lubna Dajani providing a preview of the results that her organziation, Stratemerge is conducting on the “viability and monetization potential of social networks“. If you are interested in participating in this online survey, you can do so by going here.

  This was followed by a panel discussion on social networks moderated by Lubna and featuring six participants. The panel covered a variety of topics including privacy, potential winners, carrier attitudes towards social networks, role of advertising. The discussion was for the most part, fairly civil and stayed within script in terms of opinions from the various players (device OEM, carrier, ISVs, VCs), except for a little bit of back and forth on whether users really read the T&Cs from their carriers and how much control carriers continue to exert on innovative mobile applications.