meinVZ noch nützlich, aber facebook wird wertvoller

Es wird schon länger darüber diskutiert, wie der Wettbewerb zwischen facebook.com und meinVZ.net in Deutschland ausgehen wird. Anfangs sah es aus, als ob meinVZ.net seinen führenden Platz in Deutschland halten konnte – trotz zahlreicher Rechtstreitigkeiten zwischen den beiden. Mittlerweile hat allerdings facebook.com in Deutschland die Nase vor, wenn man den Umfragen glauben darf.

Gestern habe ich ein wenig überlegt, ob der Trend dahin geht, dass am Ende die Nutzer sich nur auf ein soziales Netzwerk fokussieren, statt viele verschiedene Web 2.0-Dienste zu nutzen, und was das für die jeweiligen Anbieter bedeuten könnte. Da drei Personen aus meinen Bekanntenkreis neulich meinVZ.net und myspace.com verlassen haben, um den Schwerpunkt ihrer internetbasierten, sozialen Aktivitäten bei facebook.com zu legen, werde ich heute kurz schauen, wie es eigentlich in meinen Bekanntenkreis mit der Nutzung von meinVZ.net (95 Freunde) vs. facebook.com (185 Freunde) aussieht. Mal schauen, ob es auch für mich an der Zeit ist, meinVZ.net Tschüss zu sagen.

Mindestens 48 meiner meinVZ.net Freunde haben auch bei facebook.com einen Account. Wenn ich also nun meinen meinVZ.net Account deaktivieren würde, würde ich den Anschluss zu 47 bzw. 49% meiner Bekannten verlieren – ist wohl noch zu früh, um meinVZ.net ganz aufzugeben. Interessanterweise haben aber von meinen 95 Freunden bei meinVZ.net nur 28 Personen also 29% in den letzten 30 Tagen etwas auf der Plattform aktiv unternommen, d.h. beispielsweise persönliche Daten geändert/ergänzt, Bilder hochgeladen oder Buschfunk genutzt. Von diesen 28 aktiven Freunden sind jedoch 18 bzw. 64% auch bei facebook.com und schon sieht die Welt ein wenig anders aus – reicht das aber als Indiz aus, dass alle anderen nur Karteileichen bei meinVZ.net sind?

Das Fazit wäre damit aus heutiger Sicht, dass aktive meinVZ.net in der Mehrzahl auch bei facebook.com vertreten sind, es aber noch zu früh wäre, sich gänzlich von meinVZ.net zu verabschieden, da doch noch fast die Hälfte des Bekanntenkreises an meinVZ.net hängt und den Weg zu facebook.com noch nicht gefunden hat :o)

Virtueller Suizid in sozialen Netzwerken als Befreiung und Geschäftschance zugleich

Heute gibt es eine Vielzahl an Web 2.0-Diensten und vor allem an so genannten Social Networks, so dass man als Nutzer die Qual der Wahl hat, wo man alles dabei sein soll. Da ich beruflich mit diesem Umfeld zu tun habe, bin ich natürlich in vielen sozialen Netzwerken registriert; angefangen bei meinVZ.net und nasza-klasa.pl, über facebook.com und myspace.com, außerdem bei mobile-monday.de und mixxt.de, bis hin zu xing.com und linkedin.com sowie selbstverständlich bei vielen mobile sozialen Netzwerken wie peperonity.com, itsmy.com, mocospace.com und mygamma.com. Wenn man sich die Funktionalität so mancher Web 2.0-Anwendungen anschaut, dann könnte man auch eBay.de, amazon.de, youtube.com und flickr.com als soziale Netzwerke dazuzählen.

Als Nutzer wird man irgendwann ganz schön gestresst, wenn man alle diese Web 2.0-Dienste nutzen will und manchmal sogar muss. Nicht nur die fortlaufende Pflege der eigenen Daten und Inhalte erfordert viel Zeit, um den Eindruck zu vermitteln, dass man noch virtuell lebt, sondern auch das Verfolgen aller Neuigkeiten aus dem Bekanntenkreis bedraf ständiger Wachsamkeit, so dass man bloß nichts verpasst. Mittlerweile bekommt man aber auch wirklich jede virtuelle Aktivität der Bekannten mit; A ist jetzt Single, B hat neue Fotos hochgeladen, C hat den Status von A kommentiert, D hat B mit einer Videobotschaft geantwortet, E hat C zu einem Online-Spiel eingeladen, F ist gelangweilt von D, G sucht ein Zuhause für sein Schaf, H ist schlauer als I, dafür ist aber I beliebter als H, und so weiter.

In letzter Zeit sehe ich aber einige Leute aus dem Bekanntenkreis, die sich anscheinend bewusst von manchen sozialen Netzwerken verabschieden. Zu lesen sind dann Neuigkeiten wie “Matylda just deleted her myspace and studivz account, what an eventful saturday evening” und “Susann just canceled her myspace account! Finally! hehe” oder der Profilname wird umbenannte in „der Matthäus ist bei Facebook aktiv”. Dieses Verhalten verwundert mich jedoch nicht, da ich bei mir im Laufe der Zeit auch eine gewisse Schwerpunktsetzung in der Nutzung bestimmter Web 2.0-Dienst sehe. Abgesehen davon verändert sich bei jedem von uns schließlich auch der Bekanntenkreis mit der Zeit, man wechselt den Job, zieht in eine andere Stadt oder sucht sich ein neues Hobby – alles mit sozialen Netzwerken im realen Leben verbunden, sich mit der Zeit, nicht zuletzt in Folge dessen, ebenfalls verändern. Unabhängig davon ob real oder virtuell, ist jede Veränderung mit Unsicherheiten, aber auch mit Chancen verbunden; wenn ich nun mich von meinVZ.net abmelde, könnte ich einige (virtuelle) Bekanntschaften verlieren, dafür aber mehr Zeit finden, um andere (virtuelle) Bekanntschaften z.B. bei facebook.com zu intensivieren. Mein Respekt an Matylda, Susann und Matthäus, die den Mut für solch einen Schritt fanden – zum Glück sind wir aber noch über facebook.com befreundet :o)

Aus der Sicht der sozialen Netzwerke stellt sich natürlich die Frage, wie man mit solchem Nutzerverhalten umgehen soll, da diese von den zahlreichen Daten und Inhalten der Nutzer immer profitieren. Auch wenn die Nutzer nicht mehr aktiv sind, kann es aber eine Bereicherung für andere Nutzer sein, wenn beispielweise interessante (und zeitlose) Inhalte eingepflegt wurden und diese mit der Deaktivierung der Accounts nicht gelöscht werden. Natürlich klingt es für ein wirtschaftlich agierendes Unternehmen ein wenig beunruhigend, wenn man davon sprechen sollte, dass man Millionen von Karteileichen hat, aber eigentlich müsste dies meines Erachtens sich auf Dauer positiv auswirken – nicht nur die Qualität, sondern auch die Quantität an Daten ist in Web-Geschäft Gold wert. Der Tot an sich ist zwar keine schöne Sache, über die man zumindest in unserem kulturellen Umfeld nicht gerne spricht, aber auch in diesem Bereich hat sich eine “sichere” und “lohnende” Branche entwickelt. Ähnliche Tendenzen sind auch schon seit Jahren mit den virtuellen Friedhöfen im Web zu beobachten, also würde es mich nicht wundern, wenn wir bald auch in den etablierten sozialen Netzwerken virtuelle Friedhöfe sehen werden.

Hier sind noch zwei Blogpost zum Thema “Virtual Suicide”:

• Is Virtual Suicide Quickly Dying or Slowly Coming to Life
• Facebook Takes Another Step Against Virtual Suicide

English Version coming soon…

Virtual Suicide in Social Networks as relief for users and business opportunity for service provider

Social Media in Germany in the early stages

It was my first time joining a BITKOM Social Media Working Committee. After the reception by Florian Koch (BITKOM) we had an introduction into the projected theme, goals and activities. Interestingly we heard that BITKOM itself is not active (yet) in social media, but today I found the BITKOM twitter account with over 200 tweets and 700 followers – quite confusing. The argumentation was to do nothing in Social Media, before you do something halfhearted and fail.

In the first lecture Thilo Többens (Deloitte Consulting) spoke about the “Don’ts” of social media activities, using examples of ryanair.com and bmw.com. Angela Schmitz-Axe (Deloitte Consulting) added the Deloitte point of view on Social Media Eco System. With her statistics she also showed how slow Germany is in terms of using social media in comparison to USA, but also other European countries. Thilo Többens spoke about an adequate and reliable measurement of social media initiatives that needs to consider both quantitative and qualitative metrics for a Social Media ROI. The introduced Key Success Factors for a successful Social Media Strategy were also interesting; e.g. to develop a business case and to establish clear guidelines.

Oliver Stalp (T-Mobile Deutschland) showed in the second presentation the eChannel of the Deutsche Telekom and their social media activities in Sales and Services. They have around 5-6 Mio. unique visitors monthly on the portals t-mobile.de, t-home.de and telekom.de and they are in the top10 of the biggest eShop in Germany in terms of revenues. It seems to be a big challenge in such a big corporate group to synchronise all interests und activities of the different divisions (HR, E&F, Marketing, etc.) and companies. An interesting point was that they have a support forum, but there “costumers help costumers and the Telekom save Money”; web 2.0 is cool, lean back and let the costumers do the work :o)

During the breaks and lunch I had an interesting chat with Jürgen Schulze (i-Val) on data security in Social Media and with Steffen Legler (Deloitte Consulting) on staff motivation. After the lunch Thomas Dominikowski (Empolis GmbH) spoke about the use of Social Media Monitoring in companies. In the following discussion we spoke about the limits of Social Media Monitoring like closed groups and profiles or linguistic feature (sarcasm). Hello Empolis dudes, maybe you see this post in your social media analysis ;o)

At the end the Social Media Working Committee chose their new chairman Claus Fesel (DATEV) and the vice chairman Dr. Benedikt Köhler (ethority), Jens Mühlner (T-Systems International) and Thilo Többens (Deloitte Consulting).

The Agenda of this event:

• Introduction & Agenda
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.
• Committee Structure, Topics and Goals
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.
• Return of Invest on Social Media
    Thilo Többens, Deloitte Consulting GmbH
• Social Media Best Practice
    Oliver Stalp, Deutsche Telekom AG
• Social Media Monitoring
    Thomas Dominikowski, Empolis GmbH
• Elections to the board
    Florian Koch, BITKOM e.V.

Infinitely trapped in the net with web 2.0

What happens with all of your social media profiles after you have left the real world? Today I heard by accident through a mutual contact that one of my over 700 business contacts at xing.com is already dead since almost two years now I didn’t check this information directly at his family and I don’t want to publish untruths, but my deepest sympathies for the passing of Peter Trauth. I met him back in 2006 at the Learntec and I was a little bit surprised that he didn’t respond to my invitations to the Mobile Learning Day 2009, but now I understand. His company 5mo Group AG seems to be deleted and also his domain 5mo.ch and his email don’t work anymore, but his xing-profile is still online.

This incidence makes somehow thought-provoking. What will happen with my content in internet after I have passed away? Will my friends and contents even notice that I am gone? Or will some social media services continue to use my data for business proposes? I mean they can still use my identity to automatically poke other users and send them birthday greetings from my and in this way use my content draw on other people to their services. I suppose even as a nominal member I am still valuable for the social media services; no investor will check if I am alive, but will be happy about one more user in the database. So many questions to answer and the time is running out. It feels a little uncomfortable to use services like mywonderfullife.com and to “plan your funeral, your way”. I think I will keep this blog as my virtual gravesite, but how to hand on all of my social networking profiles to my bequests?

Social Media Optimization for Social Media

Social Media Optimization isn’t really new in the industry, so why not use Social Media Marketing to boost your own Social Service? I have found some Social Media Marketing Tactics on the web like e.g. ‘Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing‘ and ’How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message‘, but also with some hints what you shouldn’t do, like DO NOT go around adding random people as your friends. But why not? I can’t believe that it is unhealthy to surf around and add strangers to your friend list and then try to market your service to your ‘new’ friends. If you browse some of the big social networks you always find people saying that they want to meet new people and make friendships. So it shouldn’t be a big annoyance to say hello and ask if they want to be my friends :o)

To investigate to potential of making new friends with random strangers, I joined the following networks and measured how many friends I will collect within 24 hours. By random I ask exactly 100 people, if they want to be my buddies. But I have to admit that I used a fake female profile for my little experiment:

 
All in all it was quite easy to set up an (fake) account and to add new friends. But in some social networks like itsmy.com and flirtomatic.com you must verify your cell phone number before connecting to other people. And some of the social services seem to have a limitation for adding friends. For example at sonico.com I got the note “You have reached your daily limit of manual invitations” after adding 10 friends, but you still can add friends directly by sending them an invite email. And at facebook.com I got a warning that I am “engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users”. So I had to slow down with my new friends, because in the worst case they would temporary block or even close down my test account. I hope they will forgive me my little scientifically study and will not banish my real me ;o)

The best way to promptly make strangers be your friends is to talk to users that are online, but not every social service offers this functionality like peperonity.com does. The resume for me is that it is fun, because you get a lot of respond, but you have to be careful not to get banish and it just takes time to set up an account and find your new friends. And there’s more to it than that, because afterwards you have to find the right way to generate exposure for your business and not every social network is allowing the promotion of foreign services. For example fotochatter.com deleted my note and link to my service.

Many Aspects to consider by Optimizing Inventory

Some days ago I wrote about Whom should Mobile Social Networks partner with in Mobile Advertising and today I would like to share some experience from the perspective of a publisher with three mobile advertisement optimizer; smaato.com, admarvel.com and nexage.com. Beside smooth technical integration the evaluation of relevant operating figures like e.g. revenue, eCPM or fill rate is for me important. For my daily work I wish – in the best case – to get the figures real time. Maybe I am spoiled by the extensive admob back office and I understand that the optimizer need to collect and reprocess the figures from all their partners, but it still see some improvement of their back offices, so I can better get through with my personal every-day tasks. For example I am missing a more detailed effective cost per mille (eCPM) analysis. In one back office I get the eCPM for the top 10 countries, in the second one I find the eCPM for each advertisement network and the third one doesn’t provide any eCPM calculation. And sometimes there is also some fine tuning to be done, like putting all the figures for the same country together and not to separate them into e.g. Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire :o)
 
Not every optimizer has a daily (one has a weekly) and a country specific (one has only the top10 countries) breakdown of the figures, so a detailed analysis e.g. of the daily click through rate (CTR) in a certain country is not possible. And I must say that there are also big differences in the speed when jumping from one statistic to another between the three different back offices. Sometimes I am also not sure if the figures are completed, because some data are included bit by bit after some days and the optimizers don’t get all information from all their networks. This doesn’t come as a big surprise, because in the best case they have connected you as publisher to 20+ different advertisement sources. But this all makes it more difficult for a publisher to compare the three services in terms of economic performance, but also to compare them to other alternatives, like a direct integration of an advertisement network.

Another good thing for a publisher using an optimizer is the allocations of ad sources to increase the overall fill rate. The experience shows that there are big differences in the three testes systems; for one particular country we had a range from 33,6% over 89,1% to 99,0% fill rate. I know that it’s only one of several performance indicators, but still the test shows, that you should consider various aspects in your decision making. For my personal conclusion I must say, that the cooperation with all of those advertisement optimizers is a valuable experience for me and for a better understanding of our business, but there is still much home work to be done for those new players in the mobile industry. In the last months I heard many different thoughts about the future of the mobile advertisement optimizers and I am really curious about future development.

Email Newsletter as Growth Channel for Mobile 2.0?

If you run a mobile 2.0 business you have a lot of challenges, believe me, and one of those challenges is to find the best way to increase the customer loyalty. In this field you could for example use a regular newsletter as a handy tool to increase the customer retention in user base. But if you dip into this subject you will quite quickly realize how many aspects you have to consider to get measurable results and that there is not really a general recipe for success.

A traditional email newsletter is an approved and basically low cost method in Online Marketing to increase the Customer Retention and to push Sales Promotion. But can you als get the desired success of it from the perspective of a Mobile 2.0 Service? Many people already read their emails on the mobile phone, but keep in mind that there is still a media break which wouldn’t be there if you use e.g. SMS or WAP-Push - but of course those communication channels have other limitations. During my first research browsing the web for case studies, best practices and industry statistics, I found some valuable inspiration e.g. in the presentation ’8 Tips for Producing Email Newsletters‘ by the Strategic Learning Initiative and some field-tested newsletter in the Campaign Monitor Blog. I also found some hints like ‘Tuesday’s works best‘ and ‘do not use free and $$$ in your subject‘ , but to be honest, I believe that at the end you have to make your own experience with your own specific user base.

But what works? I couldn’t really find any useful and practical information for our mobile 2.0 specific field. For our mobile 2.0 segment we need some hard facts with real data about tested tactics in proven strategies, so we can go on improving our business in the big internet combat. I am not an online marketing expert, so I can’t offer you proven best practice techniques, but maybe my first small test is valuable for you anyway :o)

To answer the question if an email newsletter can stimulate the service growth, the goal of my test newsletter will be to drive traffic into a Mobile 2.0 Service. In other cases you could also use a newsletter to build additional user base or use it for service delivery. And to make some learnings transparent and constantly improve the target achievement I will use Click Through Rate (CTR) for the performance measurement during the next tests. I know that this is not the best indicator for overall growth of a service, but I want to figure out if a newsletter is an effective instrument to mobilize your users.

My Key Findings:

There are many parameters in a newsletter that you can modify like e.g. Content, Size, Subject, Personalization, Tongue, Format, Despatch, Frequency, Number of URLs and Form of Address. For my search of the optimal newsletter for a mobile 2.0 service I decided to start with a short (max. 600 Characters) monthly newsletter in plaintext, turning on the following settings month by month:

Statistical overall overview:

Detailed description:

2009.04: In my first field test to find out which day of the week is best – in terms of the reaction quote – for sending a newsletter, I split at random my database into seven equal lists. Then I send the identical newsletter in seven different days of a week, every day at the same time of day to have a comparable basis.

2009.05: In the second field test I made a segmenting of my database into email addresses with and without known name of the recipient. The list where I knew the names I again split into two equal lists, so at the end I could run three test rounds; one with no personal addressing of the target group, one with personal addressing only in the message and one with simultaneous personal addressing in the message and the subject.

2009.06: This time I split the recipient base into two parts. In the one mailing list I ended the newsletter with a short personal question to the recipient and in the other mailing list I just leave this question out.

Back to Evolving the most Successful Online Distribution Channels for Mobile 2.0 Services.

The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

There are several business models for Mobile Social Networks (MSN). Asking users to pay for either community membership or for premium content like virtual goods are two examples. Lately, a few players have been experimenting with different premium models. Nevertheless, it seems to me that our market segment still favours the advertising-based business model.

When thinking about whom to choose as a partner I drew the diagram you see above to visualise which partners and options MSN currently have. In my view mobile social networks now have four different groups of potential advertising partners. In more detail, if you consider the various possible combinations for cooperations between partners, the money we look at can go through 7 different ways through the value chain) as the diagram illustrates. These four groups of partners are:

• Mobile Content / Service Provider
  A direct cooperation with mobile content and service provider can bring higher rates of the effective cost per mille (eCPM) for the social network’s inventory. On the other hand the cooperation requires a a higher sales effort from the MSN. To reach a 100% fill rate (defined here as ads shown by content partner/inventory offered by MSN) your inventory a MSN needs many business partners to gain enough advertising deals. It also takes a high technical integration effort and a lot time to manage the relationships with these partners. One well-known mobile content provider is e.g. Fox Mobile Group (Jamba/Jamster).
   
• Mobile Advertising Agency
  Mobile advertising agencies often work for several big brands and manage cross media advertising campaigns for them. Typically agencies wish to target a very specific audience for a very large MSN inventory volume within a certain period of time. For a MSN these specific types of demands are often difficult to serve properly. Two of such mobile advertising agencies are pi2006.es and glispa.de.
   
• Mobile Advertising Networks
  Mobile advertising networks pool different kinds of mobile players. They have elaborated ways how they can fulfill the specific needs of advertisers and help publishers to convert their inventory into revenues. From the point of view of a MSN their specific disadvantage is that MSN can not directly choose who advertises on on their site. Indirectly they can choose to put to put specific advertisers on “blacklists”. Examples of two such marketplaces are admob.com and adinfuse.com.
   
• Mobile Advertising Optimisers
  Mobile advertising optimisers offer a very tempting comprehensive monetization solution for MSNs. However, they represent a new branch of business in the mobile industry. If one is to believe them MSN can easily manage all their business cooperations and maximize the monetization of their inventory. On the other hand they represent a new part of the value chain which wants a bite from the revenue pie. Nexage.com and smaato.de are among those new players.

It should be mentioned that there is a even more complexity in the value chain. For example some mobile social networks like buzzcity.com offer their own mobile advertising networks. And you also can’t preclude that the mobile advertising optimisers integrate each other. So how does one choose as a mobile social network the right part of this value chain to work with? We don’t really know yet who in the value chain will survive in the long term because the mobile advertising business is still young. We know mobile advertising networks since 2006 (admob.com started in 2006) and mobile advertising optimisers since last year (smaato.de started with SOMA in 2008). Google introduced Adsense for mobile search just the other day. I am sure that we will also see another big movement in the industry when the first mobile ads appear on Facebook Mobile and MySpace Mobile‘s efforts increase in this regard. Facebook has got no ads yet, but just imagine the additional amount of mobile advertising inventory from ‘20 Million Users Now Accessing Facebook Through Mobile Platforms‘.

To me as MSN one must broadly consider of a trade-off between money (content providers, agencies) vs security (optimizers). The best business option for a mobile social network depends much on which strategy in general they pursue. If you go for the big money, you go directly to the content / service providers or/and advertising agency and accept the high business efforts and the risk depending on few big customers. If you aim for more secureness and less work, but at the worst also less money for your inventory, than you go for the mobile advertising marketplaces and optimizers.
 
But at the end, how to chose the right business partners for the corresponding cooperation? For an informed decision you need some criteria; I can think of a set of 14 criteria to bear in mind when selecting one. Firstly we can have a look on basic facts about the potential business friends like company age, references, team and investors. Some operating figures like the market coverage, achieved average fill rate and achieved average eCPM are also of interest. Than we should consider the business aspects like revenue share, contract duration, contractual specials and payment target / reliability. And of course don’t forget the technical issues like integration efforts, performance / scalability and support quality. But at the end it’s all about individual experience with specific business partners, because mostly you have to deal with young players in our turbulent industrial sector.
 
For peperonity.com we have found our strategy and good business partners. Understandably I can’t tell you the details, but I am open for discussion about the mobile advertising ecosystem from the perspective of MSN or a publisher in general. Our mobile industry is just vibrant and full of surprises :o)

(Note: This is my contribution for the ‘FACTS OF THE WEEK NO 1′ at www.mobile-facts.com)

Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social

The Mobile Monday Chapter Düsseldorf invited us to or another very interesting evening about “Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social”. After a short intro by the Master of Ceremony Ossi Urchs (F.F.T. MedienAgentur) and Oliver Lauer (Wincor Nixdorf prosystems IT) Sarik Weber (cellity AG) started with the first presentation on “Mobile Social Networking”. He gave us an overview over different services, like e.g. peperonity.com, and then he spoke about the Evolution of cellity’s Mobile Service; from ‘least cost router’ to ‘Communicator’ to ‘cellity addressbook 2.0′. Sarik didn’t only illustrate their new product, but he also gave us an outlook on the ‘cellity addressbook 3.0′ with more Instant Messaging, Location based Services, Connection to Social Networks, Social feeds and much more. But the main focus of his lecture was on the use of twitter.com by enterprises. There are some considerable advantages for using twitter; access to a very active community, instant feedback, perfect for branding, a great traffic channel and good for SEO.

Christian Schulte (BLUE LION mobile GmbH) spoke about their Mobile Social Network for communication and entertainment called qeep. They started with a client-based solution, but pushed a mobile browser version at the end of 2008 – today they have around 1 mio. users generating around 160 mio. page impressions monthly worldwide. At the moment the main traffic is allegedly coming from South Africa (25%), United Kingdom (23%) and Indonesia (18%). I also liked Christian’s thoughts on the ‘Application- dilemma’ with some Pros and Cons for Mobile Browser Solution vs. Java Application. Afterwards I also asked about the main traffic driver in their four service sections; Chat & Messaging, photo blogging, push tones (a flirt feature) and multiplayer gaming. Interestingly it is the Messaging part, but still blogging and gaming are a important base for the communication between the users.

At the end Tobias Kemper (nimbuzz B.V.) told us about his product called nimbuzz which is an all-in-one communication tool. They try to solve the consumer problem having too many applications for potentially the same purpose. As a user of several different social networks and communication channels I can totally understand the everyday challenge to handle your ‘virtual life’ efficiently. nimbuzz suggest ‘interoperability’ as the solution – one tool to the virtual world. Tobias also brought the revenue-sharing partnerships with e.g. StudiVZ and Spice Mobiles up, which seems to be a very interesting business model for them. You can find the whole nimbuzz presentation at slideshare.net.

Unfortunately the presentation by Gerion Wolff (Materna GmbH) was canceled, but so we had more time for the networking afterwards. I had a great chat with Cornelius Rost (BLUE LION mobile GmbH) about their social network qeep – they are facing similar challenges as we did/do :o)

You can find more Impressions on this Mobile Monday about “Mobile Social Software and Meta Mobile Social” at the ‘mobinauten Blog‘.

Insights on Mobile Social Networking

When we at Peperoni started to build our first solution for the mobile web back in 2000, I saw the business potential of mobile data technologies, but I must admit that today I am pleasantly surprised and very glad about the technological and economic progress in our mobile industry. And in particular the three last years were extremely vibrant for us with our core product portfolio around tools for user generated content with social media components. In the early days we had maybe 10 combatants worldwide, but today our ecosystem gained quite a high complexity with a good deal of new and old technologies and players from all kind of industrial sectors that we never thought would be playing the mobile game with us. But at the end it’s just another confirmation that we chose the right spot for our business activity :o)

In our industry today almost everybody is talking about Mobile 2.0 with Mobile User Generated Content and Mobile Social Networking, but I wonder if in the next years we still will speak about the ‘Mobile Web’ and ‘Mobile Social Networks’. Indeed ‘mobile’ is something special with other/more possibilities than a Personal Computer, but the basic technologies and services have already been there (in the PC World) long before even Peperoni existed. The many impressions and experiences I was lucky to collect in the last years dispose me to start writing about our spot in the mobile industry from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I want to contribute to the ongoing discussion with sharing some practical insights and I will try to address all relevant players along our relevant value chain. For the beginning I will refer to the Mobile Advertisement Business, because today it’s one of the most impotent commercial basis for many start-up in the mobile industry and there is a brand new element in the value chain – the Mobile Advertisement Optimizer. Stay tuned for more post about Mobile Social Networks …