The MobiLuck Diary

MobiLuck exceeds 1 million members

2009-05-29T10:20:00.003+02:00

We've exceeded 1 million members and we're growing at 6 000 new joiners a day! Here's the text of our press release sent out this morning:

Paris, France – 29 May, 2009 – Mobiluck, a privately-held mobile services company that offers a location-based mobile social network, announced today that it has exceeded one million members worldwide since the launch of its service two years ago. MobiLuck allows users to find nearby friends, people and places using simply their mobile. It is one of the largest worldwide location-based mobile social networks in the world and the fastest-growing with 6 000 new members per day. Page views tripled over the last three months to 42 million per month.

Mobile social networking is the number one use of the mobile internet worldwide and a billion people will be doing it by 2012 (Pyramid Research). MobiLuck is critically positioned to grab a large share of this growing market. "The service is designed to work on all devices, in all countries, on all carriers, it’s free and it’s a pure mobile web service with no download required," says Olivier Chouraki, founder and CEO of MobiLuck. “So everyone can use it.”

MobiLuck’s users are average age 23 and come mainly from the US, Europe, India, Middle East and South Africa. This new generation of users is making the most of their mobile, using it as their primary connection to the internet. They want a full social networking experience on the go so they can be always connected with their friends wherever they are. They constitute an attractive audience for brands and premium ad agencies who are currently seeing 2% click through rates on their ads on MobiLuck. By combining volume with the ability to target users by age, gender and location, Mobiluck expects continued healthy growth in this area of the business.

MobiLuck Awarded Red Herring Top 100 Global Company

2009-01-20T16:09:00.004+01:00

Informal version :D
Yeehar we won !

Formal version :|
MobiLuck has been awarded as one of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies. Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies are chosen from winners and finalists of the previous North America, Europe and Asia Red Herring Top 100 Companies. Winning and finalist companies from the previous three years were eligible for this outstanding award. Out of 1,800 successful and highly eligible companies, the Red Herring editorial team deployed a detailed process to drill-down the best companies first to 200 finalists, then to the top 100 winners of this global award. Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration. The announcement of the winners was made at the Red Herring 100 Global taking place in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009. Present among the finalists were elite executives and venture capital leaders from around the world.

“We were so pleased to announce MobiLuck as a Red Herring Top 100 Global Company,” commented Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux. “MobiLuck has proven to be a company excelling in their industry and its ripples have turned into waves. It was difficult for us to narrow down, but we are pleased to have included MobiLuck in our list of promising companies. We look forward to the changes it makes to its industry in the future.”

500 000 members

2009-01-05T15:11:00.003+01:00

Just a few minutes ago we signed up our 500 000 th member! A major milestone and one that deserves a big celebration. Congratulations to all the team!

MobiLuck Growth Accelerates

2009-01-01T12:28:00.000+01:00

Well here we are again at the end of another eventful year. We proud to say that we haven’t felt the financial crisis much: we’re strictly a bloat-free zone and have kept a tight rein on expenses and an eagle eye on our KPIs. We now have almost half a million members, growing at between 2500 and 3000 new joiners a day, and 500 000 unique visitors a month sending over a million messages.

We have also recently been selected as a finalist for the Red Herring Global 100, an award "recognizing the financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration of the best tech companies around the world". The 100 winners will be announced at the event in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009.

Finally, check out Jenaé wearing our MobiLuck t-shirt and saying lots of nice things about us below. In her video you can see part of our new MobiLuck flash movie, the full version of which is on our main website here.

Happy New Year to everyone!

MobiLuck growth is taking off

2008-10-06T12:49:00.015+02:00

As Michael Caine famously said: "Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath." Boy have we been doing that.

We now have over 325 000 members growing at 2 000 new joiners a day. For every three new joiners, there are two invitations sent to friends to get them involved too. People are joining us from the US, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, China, India, Kenya, Norway, Mexico, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and 50 other countries around the world. Well, the service is built to be used by everyone regardless of their country, operator or device.

Here are some of the key things we've achieved in the last couple of months:

We’ve increased our user base to 325 000 users growing at 2 000 per day.
We’ve launched our new website at www.mobiluck.com that reflects our vision for the MobiLuck product and shifts the focus away from our original Bluetooth messaging product to our mobile web social networking platform that connects people and places.
We’ve upgraded our infrastructure to dramatically improve service performance, cutting page load times in half and improving the interaction experience for our users.
We’ve implemented a new feature allowing commercial establishments to create their place on MobiLuck so they can be found locally by our users which drives additional traffic to them.
We’ve made huge steps in search engine optimisation allowing people and places to be found in mobile web searches.
We’ve translated the complete service into Russian, Chinese and Arabic with more languages on their way soon. Localised versions of our website will follow.
Plus hundreds of tweaks and enhancements to make the service simpler and easier to use.

Quack quack.

MobiLuck selected for Mobile 2.0 Europe

2008-06-16T09:11:00.003+02:00

MobiLuck has been selected to present at the Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference, one of the most highly praised events by key players in the mobile industry.

This one-day event focuses on the Mobile Web and Disruptive Mobile Innovation and brings together experts and thought leaders from all areas of the mobile ecosystem, including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists.

All Startups have 7 minutes to present in total including a 1 minute video-demo of the product on a mobile phone. During the event, all panel participants and organizers will vote their best Start-up in each category; the winner in each category receives an invitation to present at the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco on November 3, 2008.

Fingers crossed!

Still collecting or already in phase 2 ??

2008-04-25T12:31:00.006+02:00

I discovered this gem last week although it's been around for years. It's the gnomes' take on how to create a successful business. The similarities between this and the typical web2.0 startup are disturbing ... ;-)

(hint: underpants = active users)

...

MobiLuck selected as finalist for the Red Herring Europe 100

2008-03-23T20:47:00.004+01:00

MobiLuck has been selected as a finalist for the Red Herring Europe Top 100 Tech Start ups! Red Herring’s editorial team has analyzed hundreds of cutting edge companies and selected those who are positioned to grow at an explosive rate. From 200 finalists, 100 winners will then be selected. There's no official press release on line yet but I'll post it up when it's available.

New Home Page

2008-03-17T15:12:00.003+01:00

The MobiLuck platform has always offered pretty powerful location based search tools, helping you find people and places nearby based on multiple criteria. But we found that users had trouble discovering and using them. So we've now put the most common actions onto a new home page that brings key elements of the service to within just one click away. This is just the beginning; the home page is the same for everybody now, but soon it will be fully customisable. Watch this space.

Location based myths

2008-03-05T15:19:00.007+01:00

I was replying to a comment on a post about MobiLuck and thought it would be worth sharing my thoughts here because it's important to get a few things straight about location based services as they apply to social networking.

Myth 1: Location based services need to have GPS accuracy to be of any use for social networking.
You don't need to localise someone as precisely as GPS does for it to be useful for social networking. Just knowing someone is in the area is already interesting because it's possible to join them in the near future, regardless of knowing exactly where they are. In fact for privacy reasons, some users would prefer to be only approximately located. Cell ID localisation in cities, particularly with such a high density of transmitters, is therefore a perfectly viable localisation method, and cities are where you find the critical mass of users.

Myth 2: You don't need LBS social networking to keep in touch with friends living nearby.
Friends who live nearby can not be assumed to be near you most of the time unless you all work from home and hardly ever go out. They will be away from home at the times when it is most interesting to know where they are - lunchtimes, weekends, evenings out. In fact it is friends who live in the same city and participate in the vibrant city life who will derive the most benefit from mobile LBS social networking services.

Myth 3: Knowing what someone is doing is more useful than knowing where they are.
Ok it's a trick question: there are always situations when one could be more useful to know than the other but it's more powerful when you know both things at the same time. What if a friend is watching a sports game at a bar but they're too far away for you to get there before closing time? Twitter lets millions of people say what they're doing now, but imagine adding location information to that too. MobiLuck is aiming complete the other half of the equation by sending SMS alerts whenever a friend is nearby. What your friend is doing is often implied in their place localisation (bar, restaurant, cinema, museum, ...) however they can also tell you what they're doing if they wish.

Until the next myth-busting comment response...

PS Hang on whilst we iron out the problems some of our users are experiencing with the location selection engine and thanks to Dennis and our users for their continuing positive feedback!

When virality is just for its own sake

2008-03-03T12:37:00.001+01:00

I've long held the view that 'fun' viral applications that don't actually provide a real benefit to users are just a fad, a bubble waiting to burst. Although it's just an early sentiment, and maybe a manufactured one at that according to the article today at Techcrunch, the message in this video that people are getting bored of Facebook strikes a chord with me. These viral applications, and certain aspects of Facebook itself, are playing primarily on novelty and vanity. I expect the novelty will wear off fairly quickly. As for the vanity, well that's here to stay. It's just a question of how long it takes for people to learn to be a little more sophisticated about their online personas.

Embedded Video

Over 1000 people joining MobiLuck daily

2008-02-22T15:28:00.005+01:00

A quick look at our stats in between the mega-networking of last week at the MWC Barcelona and the repercussions (promises to keep) this week shows our MobiLuck Online user base growing at over 1000 new users a day and some days we've had over 2000 new joiners. We now have 125 000 registered users on the mobile website.

Meantime, since there's already plenty enough commentary on this year's Mobile World Congress (and we're too busy making things happen instead) I thought I'd show you a photo of some business types ignoring a whopping great big fountain.

What should come first, critical mass or a business model?

2007-12-21T12:49:00.000+01:00

Reid Hoffman, chairman and president of products at LinkedIn, recently said at a conference that web service companies should concentrate on building a critical mass of users before they worry about how to make money (I assume he’s referring to services where the concept of a ‘critical mass of users’ is important – such as those with a strong element of social networking and user generated content for example).

There are lots of successful companies that did not monetize their users until a long way down the line. Just look at the biggies: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace … and what is their primary business model? Advertising and premium services. Yet so many VCs keep telling me that the business model has to be nailed from the start, and by the way "advertising is not a business model." From what I can see, advertising is making lots of people very, very rich indeed. Advertising on the internet and mobile is exploding. Advertising certainly is a business model and a very lucrative one at that.

If you have the critical mass of users. Which is starting to sound like bubble1.0 again: then it was about getting as many visitors as possible to your portal, now it’s about getting as many members as possible in your social network. It’s an improvement this time round, though, because users will be more engaged and you know intimate details about them such as the colour of their underpants. And a big company that already knows that this sort of thing works might buy you.

But since you’re not one of the first web2.0 companies that could attract lots of new members at a low cost because it was all so new and cool and there wasn’t much competition, there’s a tough challenge ahead: you need to expend lots of resources in the early stages to build critical mass with precious little return. To have the best chance, you need to develop partnerships that can enhance the service and bring more reach, have the resources to develop your offering faster than someone else can copy it, and make sure you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s a crowded market, and few will survive long enough to reach the tipping point.

The Crunchies

2007-12-11T12:31:00.000+01:00

Nominate us for the Crunchies awards! Here's the lowdown from Techcrunch:

"Together GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch are pleased to announce that nominations for the inaugural 2007 Crunchies Awards are now open.

We created twenty award categories to recognize the year’s most innovative technical, creative and business accomplishments of key companies, products and people. We hope you’ll agree that the award categories are good reasons for celebration and fit for a proper ceremony.

We invite you to submit your favorite companies and products for consideration. Read the the official rules. Nominations will be open through midnight pst Wednesday, December 12. Finalist voting will open Thursday, December 13 and run for approximately one month before the awards ceremony on Friday, January 18 in San Francisco."

Note: these buttons have now been disabled as voting has closed

The Official Press Release :-)

2007-11-19T12:16:00.000+01:00

MobiLuck launches social network: bump into your friends with radar alerts!

Today MobiLuck launches their new location-based socialising service that lets you share where you are with your friends and alert each other when you’re nearby, all on your mobile phone or computer.

Are you often asked “Where are you?” on the phone? Are you sometimes looking for your friends? Partner? Children? Colleagues? Would you like to know if a friend is in the same restaurant? Bar? Nightclub? Concert? Would you like to bump into friends more often? Would you rather avoid some people? We often need to tell others where we are, to know where someone is, or to see if there are interesting people nearby. MobiLuck answers all these needs. Knowing where people are is our mission!

Where are my friends?
Say you’ve just arrived at the cinema. You connect to MobiLuck and select the cinema as your location. Your friends and MSN contacts can then see where you are. They also get an alert by SMS if they are in the same area so they can get in touch and maybe join you to watch the film. Meantime you browse the people radar and discover another friend who is already there and send a message or call them in one click.

Make new friends too
Your radar also shows another MobiLucker in the same cinema! Nice photo … cool profile! You send him a quick message “Hey there :-)” and a few messages later you meet up. Fancy a meal together after the film? You click on ‘Sushi’. There’s one that’s highly rated 400m away: “Best in town” … and you have the map to get there. You’re going to have a great evening!

Privacy first
MobiLuck lets you protect your privacy, whether it's your location or your personal details. You can reveal what you want, to whom you want, when you want. You can even ‘teleport’ yourself and pretend to be somewhere else!

Simple and free to use
MobiLuck is available now in all countries on all networks on all mobile phones. You don’t need a GPS or smart phone. Your just need access to the mobile internet. And it’s free – outside of the usual operator charges. Try it now by visiting wap.mobiluck.com on your mobile phone or www.mobiluck.com on your PC!

Press contact: patrick.lord@mobiluck.com +33 1 44 89 47 10

Will you be my friend?

2007-10-30T11:18:00.000+01:00

Twitter's tagline used to be "what are you doing now?". But a recent look at their site reveals a change in posture. Now it's "what are your friends doing?". It's a subtle but telling shift. Twitter used to be about broadcasting yourself, becoming an overnight star in the web 2.o microcosm. Micro blogging to massage the ego. The experience was also rather like playing with fireworks; many have regretted that 3am tweet from the bar in a 'lucid' moment read by thousands of their 'followers'. Although you can still play with rockets in the street if you want to, Twitter now seems to be advocating that you hold a more sensible bonfire party in the garden with your mates instead. I wondered if this new tack was because their bulk sms bill had started to arrive on a trolley. Certainly there were too many inane comments addressed to nobody in particular; tweets probably best kept within a circle of friends. But I think the real reason is because friendship is naturally viral and self-sustaining whereas broadcasting to strangers is not. And that's one thing that Jaiku got right - they were a Twitter for friends. The Twitter team may be breathing a sigh of relief right now...

And it's no coincidence that MobiLuck is all about friends too, hence our tagline 'Closer to my friends'. People benefit most from MobiLuck when their friends use it too. Recommendations are usually made to friends, who in turn trust the information. And at the heart of it all is the human desire to be admired and respected by others and their friends in particular. So all these types of services should give users the means to express themselves - and show off!

Of course the concept of a 'friend' is being redefined by social networks and by Facebook in particular, where any contact is called a friend. Will we have to start making a distinction between 'real' and 'online' friends? I think it's inevitable.

New shop window

2007-10-25T17:02:00.000+02:00

Our new homepage is now online!

You can now sign up and play with the application within the phone window on your PC, send a link to your mobile or to your friends to invite them, and download the mobile application as before.

It was time to bring it up to date with the new service. but we couldn't completely redesign it from scratch because we wanted to preserve its power to bring tens of thousands of visitors a day looking for downloads for their shiny new [insert model here]. Our old, web~1.0 website generated 500 new service registrations and 1000 downloads a day for zero effort. An important factor in this is the block of 20-odd phone models on the front page and the fact that behind the home every one of over 200 types of phone has its own page. Multiplied by 8 languages.

HaE bAy.b

2007-09-07T11:46:00.000+02:00

When it comes to texting, it's clear that some of our users are initiates and some are pros. The initiates send messages and chat to each other like I do: They use T9 on their phones or a basic amount of phonetic txting. The pros are from AnOthr wUld altogether. It's quite difficult to read their messages because of irregular capitalisation and unfamiliar phonetic combinations of letters used. Try some of these out:

HeLlO hOwz it?hEhE! HeEhe tz aiiTe n yEW. YeA itz kOoL jSt At hOmE kikN bk iN mA rOoM!wAt bOut U? PweTiiE muj d saMe hea. i waNa n0e m0a bWt cheW ...

OK that was the easy stuff. Now try this:

HeHe awW mwAHr yiiP shuA huNii mwAHrz k0ntAK me weNeva k ...

We discussed this for a while trying to understand why they use capitals so much. Is it to accentuate parts of the words? Is it to look cool? Are they acidentally tapping the case switch button whilst typing like crazy?
We think we've worked it out: It speeds up typing. When you want to type two letters that are on the same phone key, you normally have to wait about a second for the cursor to advance before you can type the second letter. But if you change the case the cursor advances immediately and you can type the second letter without waiting. So in a typical text message a 'pro' user probably does it 5-10 seconds faster than anyone else. It seems that switching on and off the capitals becomes second nature after a while hence the alternate capitalisation of letters throughout the messages rather than just for those letters that share the same key.

There's always one

2007-09-05T17:25:00.000+02:00

After much searching I discovered surveymonkey, a neat online questionnaire service that I'm now using to get user feedback. For a low monthly fee it provides everything I need to create and analyse almost any type of questionnaire I might need. The only problem is that it's only possible to complete the questionnaire on the web. And a large proportion of our users don't have access to the full web, just WAP on their phones. So I'm waiting for the mobile WAP version soon please ...

Here's some positive feedback so far:

"Simple, easy to use, new, useful, a great tool to keep in touch with my friends and socialize with new people in the real world"
"that you can talk to friends anythime you want"
"u can c if ur frends r near"
"I like it because u can chat with people all over the world and realize how many people r interested in alot things that u find interesting too!"
"EVERYTHING"
"i want mobile myspace type mobiluck but instead of browsing who is online i wanna browse who is in the night club im at or who is close by. would love to start smsing good lookin chicks who have just caught my eye"
"lets me chat to mates on msn"
"I like the concept of knowing who is near my location"
"how easy it is to use"
"its fun and co-roperative"
"its versatil"
"just unsubscribe me"

Oy, who wrote that last comment?! Oh well I guess we can't please everyone.

Clara is popular

2007-08-27T11:10:00.000+02:00

Clara has been around for a while. She is a purchased copyright-free image, used initially to help us demonstrate in screenshots and press releases that you can use the bluetooth MobiLuck application to find pretty women. It was a natural step to transition her to the online WAP version, give her a profile and even virtually locate her either at our offices at MobiLuck or at a restaurant in Paris. But we didn't plan how we would respond to the hundreds of messages she is receiving in her mailbox asking for her phone number. So now she automatically replies to messages, saying: "Hi, you found me! Now you can have fun finding other people nearby and sending them messages. Just set your current location and see who else is around! You can also find places like bars and restaurants that are nearby too! If you get stuck, click on the ‘?’ tab in the top right of your screen. Good MobiLuck!"
Apart from saving me from hours of creative writing, it also helps explain the service to users.

Opaquevertising

2007-08-07T20:03:00.000+02:00

In mobile and internet advertising, if you want to know how well your campaigns are working and be able to fine tune them to perfection, what do you need to measure?

You need to take a whole-process view from ad wording to country/channel/device placement to impressions to clicks to visits to registrations to loyal returning users. And to track this you need to put in place measures that link your mobile advertising agents' statistics to your own server-side stats - no mean task, given that the way they break down the information isn't the same as yours.

Mobile advertising agents typically provide some basic stats like CTR, CPM and CPC. But they don't provide enough breakdowns to enable you to properly measure the quality of their publisher network. Why should they? Their incentive is to sell you clicks, not customers. The value-added part is left to you sitting in your dark room with your poor server to help work out the rest.

The classic measures offered by most mobile advertising agencies are:
- How many people see the advertisement and for what price: Impressions / day & CPM (Cost per thousand views = Spend / 000 Impressions)
- What is the level of interest in what the advert is promising: CTR (Click-through-rate = clicks / impressions)?
- How much does it cost on average to bring a visitor to your site: CPC (Spend / Clicks)

Unfortunately these measures are practically useless without an appreciation for the impact on your registered - and more importantly, active - user base. So you need to know:
- What is the registration rate for your service? Registrations / Visitors per day
- How much does it cost per acquired registration? CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
- How much does it cost per returning loyal user? CPLU (Cost per Loyal User)

And if you want to know how best to target your advertising you need to measure this whole-process 'funnel' (Impressions/day, CPM, CTR, CPC, Registration Rate, CPA, CPLU) in terms of - ie broken down by - the advert wording, presentation method (banner or text or in-game insert…), timing (Sat, Sun or weekday…), publication channel (portals, communities, search, games, downloads, adult...), target country, target manufacturer / device / platform, visitor demographics, and so on …

No mobile advertising agent gives you enough information to work this stuff out. So you need to be clever in how you set up your advertising campaigns with these companies. Try out different combinations of ad wording, country / channel / device targeting and track the results. Find ways to link server visit stats to the agencies’ click stats and give them a hard time when the figures don’t stack up.

And really make sure that server-side you’re doing your best to track the source and behaviour of your visitors, registrations and returning users. It will pay off in the long term.

Backpacker dynamite

2007-07-25T10:52:00.000+02:00

TNT magazine is an excellent way to find last minute inexpensive labour in London. We put two free adverts in the 'general work' category yesterday and we've had lots of replies today. TNT is well known and read by primarily Australian, New Zealand and South African backpackers visiting London: just the people who have the time, flexibility and need for money to pay their living costs, extend their stay or get their last ticket home.

Madvertising

2007-07-21T16:06:00.000+02:00

Our first mobile ad campaign generated over 1000 fraudulent clicks and flushed our daily budget down the pan in under 2 hours. Good job it was just a test run on a 1 cent CPC for a max 10 dollars spending limit. [update: it turns out that only about 100 of the clicks were fraudulent; the agency we were using had an unexpectedly high publisher inventory in india which even at the lowest possible CPC rate gave thirty thousand impressions in 2 hours. We were not actually charged for fraud clicks. They were registered by our server but were not counted in the agency's spending reports] The prime suspects? India blatantly in first place followed in a distant second by an unabashed South Africa. All the other english speaking countries were either asleep in their GMT +/-8 time zones or weren't paying hundreds of workers to speed-click on adverts for a dollar a day. It clearly pays to be cautious when starting out with this high risk advertising medium. We now need to do more extensive tests. With global advertising everyone is in different time zones so we need to run each campaign for at least 48 hours to be able to start making comparisons. That way each country will have 'experienced' the adverts for a full 24 hours during the same day of the week.

Tour de Paris II

2007-07-17T11:15:00.000+02:00

The Cell ID collection in Paris begins today. We have a willing candidate ready to walk over 100km round the heart of Paris covering 20 square kilometres from Bastille to the Arc de Triomph and from Opera to Montparnasse. He’ll be carrying three mobiles, one with GPS, and each connected to a different operator network. The GPS phone has to be held out to continually receive a signal, the other two will be in his pocket, capturing time-synced data to re-synthesize back at base with the GPS coordinates. It’s a somewhat risky affair, because they’re nice phones and could be attractive to thieves ... but at least he won't be stopping on every corner to decide where to go next: the whole itinerary has been worked out to ensure that we get maximum coverage for minimum distance walked based on an earlier test we carried out at Bastille. The results will come through each half day and by this time next week we’ll have a complete database of tower cells in the main areas of Paris. Then it’s on to London to do it all over again – but this time it will be 200km on foot because London is enormous!

Multi launcher

2007-07-10T17:59:00.000+02:00

We started by launching a closed beta followed by an open one. Then a quiet launch in june, a soft launch today and next up: the 'go-live' launch. And that won't be the end of it. Each of these milestones is not really a launch. More like part of a string of marketing activities to bring in various segments of the target market to the beta service when it's ready for them.
It’s like starting out with a rowing boat on a stream then adding an outboard motor as it becomes a river, a cabin and a steel hull as the river widens and picks up momentum and propellers and lifeboats as it joins the sea. Good luck to anyone who launches their rowing boat straight into the ocean amongst the sealiners.
[This is not an official launch communication. We're working on the lifeboats.]

Mobile Monday Anniversary Barcelona

2007-07-04T23:01:00.000+02:00

Rudy De Waele was kind enough to invite me to the Mobile Monday Barcelona first anniversary event on Monday. Great venue, cool city ...

I met Ajit Jaokar, a really great guy with an always-on blackberry keeping on top of his enormous inbox, writing notes for his blog Open Gardens, and responding to requests for speaking engagements to talk about mobile web 2.0, and Lucia Garate, a lovely lady from Vodafone who presented their Betavine project.

In the panel discussions, one question from someone in the audience that I remember in particular was: "For mass-market offerings, particularly those using social-networking, how can you achieve critical mass? How can you make money?"

In the blogosphere there is lots of talk about both the technical aspects of increasing user interaction, content generation and viral spread through the use of APIs, widgets, plugins, mashups, referencing, blogging and so on, and the marketing aspects of how to develop a unique selling proposition and deliver a targeted product that offers a real benefit to customers. It’s important to remember the basics of product and marketing strategy before jumping into using the latest techniques to boost your effectiveness in execution.

Those companies that have already developed a huge online presence are often the best placed to extend their social networking services to mobile and achieve a critical mass by playing off their existing online user base. Of course their particular service has to translate or extend well to mobile usage. Alternatively a company could offer a service that takes 10 seconds to understand and use and create lots of effective buzz using a very simple message (for example Skype: ‘Everyone around the world can talk for free’ or Twitter: ‘What are you doing now?’). Thirdly a company can target a slice of the market with a service that meets a particular social networking need such as dating, keeping in touch with friends, IM, business networking, and so on and focus on being the best.

The big companies ought to have found a way to make money online already. Going mobile is expensive. The ten-second services typically go for free with the hope of finding a business model later when they have gazillions of users. Few succeed thanks to the critical mass problem. And the targeted services should stand a good chance of success if they carve out their territory, relentlessly focus on their user’s needs and apply the rule of market pressure = force / area. The more resources you focus on a more targeted segment of users, the greater your impact.

Two types of buzz

2007-06-29T18:36:00.000+02:00

Whilst talking to a friend of mine who works for Come&Stay it was clear why we should pay more to attract mobile visitors than internet visitors. It's because they're already mobile web users looking for the sort of service we provide ... on a mobile. And that also reinforces my belief that our early adopters are not the people who get goosebumps using Twitter. They are not people wanting to broadcast their trazes on the internet for other web2.0 enthusiasts, wannabes and curious surfers. They are people who don't know or don't care about web2.0 or mobile2.0 but who do like exploring their mobiles to do fun, cool and yes, even useful things. It's interesting how much time companies spend trying to create buzz in this techno ecosystem that does not reach the early adopters they are really targeting. Of course they want to attract the attention of bloggers, companies and investors. But it's better to win over real customers first.

Spamr.com

2007-06-21T18:25:00.000+02:00

I'm really intrigued by these services that let everyone shout to the world about who they are, where they are and what they're doing. There are a couple of well-known sites touting their wares on their front page in the form of a long list of user contributions that looks rather like my junk mail inbox.

"I'm starving. Having a hand full of pretzels and getting ready to dig into my salad."

We are very keen that MobiLuck is not used for spam, indesirable content and for stocking up our server with rubbish. I am much more concerned about the quality of the content. Although it's intriguing to see the sheer volume of activity going on with these other services, I expect that as the buzz calms people will start to realise whether it's a fad or a value add.

The 20 : 80 rule

2007-06-19T21:13:00.001+02:00

When you're desperate to launch your product but it's not 100 percent ready what do you do?

Well it doesn't have to be 100 percent for a start - that's what the ‘Beta’ caveat was invented for. But it may not need to be 50 or even 25 percent ready either. The nice to have features can wait if your core feature set works, is sticky, and embodies your USP. When Apple released the iPod Shuffle they drew the line there. Screen? Nah. Radio? Nah. Alarm clock with snooze function? You kiddin’ me? It had shuffle. And lots of memory at a great price (and it looked nice too).

Products and services tend to accumulate features over time. It's easy to dream up add-on features to an existing product - whether or not they're really all that useful - and you’ve the benefit of user feedback too. It's almost impossible, without incredible foresight - and risk - to jump straight to the 'endgame' product: you bypass real world time-tested user experience, and you risk confusing people. What if the first mobile phone ever released was a GPS WiFi Bluetooth IR TV 3.5G touch screen Web / WAP browsing Mp3 video jukebox digicam videocam calculator notes calendar to-do word processor Email IM SMS MMS Push-to-talk VOIP telephone? Would you understand what the hell it was for? Would you even realise you could make phone calls with it?

Of course this could never have happened – because one can only deliver what is technically and cost-effectively feasible at the time. Yet this is exactly the issue we face in the brave new world of web2.0: We all like to think that we know mostly what the endgame looks like, and all the necessary features for success are just a few lines of code away from our fingertips.

“We offer an online community, via internet and mobile channels, API's and mashups, chat and SMS and email and IM and viral invitations and presence and photo sharing and a blogging engine and link to your Myspace page and use tags and offer free content and run competitions and viral videos and mobile TV and a rating system and ...!” Bof. What does your company do again?

Most likely 20% of your feature set represents your USP and the value you offer to your customers. The remaining 80% is mostly a way of getting traction in the web2.0 jungle. Deliver the 20% first and the 80% later.

What is MobiLuck’s 20%?
Find who is near to you. Find what is near to you. Meet them. Go there.

DIY bike tours

2007-06-15T22:08:00.000+02:00

One cool feature of our service is auto-location. Of course we need to have the relevant geolocation data to do this and that's where someone with lots of spare time and a bike comes in handy. The team has already been collecting location data wherever they go in Paris but in order to get really good coverage of a city in a short space of time you need a more concerted effort. One free online advert in a backpacker rag later we've already got people lining up. They're going to get paid to discover the city in more depth than any of its inhabitants. They ought to be very fit by the end of it too: there's hundreds of kilometres of road to cover...

When marketing = product design

2007-06-13T22:24:00.000+02:00

Being a high tech start-up developing a social networking product, there is only so much honing of the marketing message and writing press releases and advertising that you can do. It takes lots of time and money to do it competently and sustainably. More importantly, most marketing effort in the early stages ought to be spent on the product.

You have to make hard decisions about the priority features the product should offer to really excite early adopters. You can't just toss in a load of nice extras and expect the whole to miraculously become more than the sum of the parts. Too many features dilute the appeal.

You have to look at how to make the product sticky for your target audience so that they will want to keep connecting to your service to get their regular 'fix', and so that they will want to tell their friends about it and get them hooked too.

You need to think about how to make it integrate and sit comfortably with the other products that your customers use ... and anything they use that is too similar needs to be blown out of the water by what yours can do. If they're comfortable with the three old tools they know that can do the same thing already they're not going to switch. But you make it less painful if your product does it better, offers new cool features, and integrates better with everything else they use. And of course it had better be dead simple to use even the most powerful features.

So in the marketing domain we haven't been doing much promotion; in fact we're doing next to no communication at all and focusing our efforts on getting the product right. We're getting tons of new registrations a day all the same. And we're getting feedback from customers to help us improve (even if they don't know it: our detailed stats are showing how they use the application too).

In this connected generation it's our customers who are empowered with the most effective marketing tools, and it's up to us to give them a good reason to use them.

KPI

2007-06-11T23:40:00.000+02:00

We spent a couple of hours today reviewing the launch plan and preparing for tomorrow's board meeting. One thing that investors want to see is KPIs. We need to show that lots of people are using our service, that they're not all signing up once never to return again but are actually using it, and that their numbers are stacking up by the bucketload. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Reminds me of bubble1.0 where the volume of visitors to your website was considered the holy grail. This time round, the red herring is the number of active members of your online community. There are now hundreds of me-too start-ups without a business plan or a business model hoping to wave as many adverts at as many people as possible whilst they whistle through their ‘community’ from registration to emergency exit stopping only to look at a few pretty boys’ and girls’ profile pics along the way. Their visitors are all frequenters of their competitors’ communities too. If their offering is not something unique that their customers would happily pay for if it didn't just so happen to be free then they're facing an uphill struggle all the way.

A recent article on Two Point Oh on how to create a thriving web2.0 business listed 10 tactics for success:
#1. Create a sense of community
#2. Have a simple proposition
#3. Ensure viral growth
#4. Do continuous R&D
#5. Build a platform for advertisers
#6. Let the outside in and the inside out
#7. Own the audience
#8. Don’t forget to be profitable
#9. Get your content mix right
#10. Sell something

In my opinion the last point is the most important of all: Sell something. If you can't figure out what you’re selling to your customers you don't have a business - you have an expensive hobby.

So another KPI for us will be: how many of our customers are buying our premium service and how many are just clicking on adverts on their way out the door?

Bluetooth still has bite

2007-06-08T22:39:00.000+02:00

MobiLuck built their reputation on Bluetooth, or rather on bending and reconfiguring it to make it do what was then impossible: rapidly detect multiple devices and transfer lots of data between them almost simultaneously.

Bluetooth has evolved since those early days in 2003, and the MobiLuck team, not forgetting their roots, have made sure they remain on top of this technology (and on top of how to hack it!). So whilst launching our new consumer products we're also applying our expertise in mobile advertising via bluetooth to help business clients deliver cool marketing campaigns.

Case in point: Last night at Le Baron, a hot club right now in Paris (they describe it as 'branché' meaning 'plugged in'), we helped FullSIX deliver 3 minute videos, music files and brand logos via an automatic bluetooth distribution terminal to the punter's mobile phones on behalf of a clothing brand, Zadig&Voltaire. Magic!

Break it Down

2007-06-07T20:35:00.000+02:00

We're planning many methods of publicising our new product that won't break the bank. What are some of the options?

- Mobile advertising. Still in its infancy and possible to get a good deal to reach users either globally or in specific countries or by specific phone / model / manufacturer / publisher type. Lots of companies popping up all over the place. Some examples: Admob, Admoda, DeckTrade, Google Mobile, ...
- Internet advertising. We get thousands of visitors to our website, and thousands of downloads of our bluetooth software per day...
- Existing users. They deserve to be at the top of the list, they like our Bluetooth product and we generate revenues from this. We have a huge email list and an active forum as a platform.
- Blogging and other bloggers. Time to get the referral services fired up: Technorati WTF ('Where's the Fire?'), Reddit, Digg (too damned difficult to get seen now!), StumbleUpon, Ping-o-Matic, del.icio.us ...
- Partnerships and alliances. Of multiple types. Content swapping, API 1-/2-way swapping, cross-promotion, joint development, client cross-referral, ...
- Events. The most expensive way of marketing but highly targeted at specific audiences. Best done in conjunction with partnerships to get a good deal.
- Viral spread. Give users a way to invite friends and even strangers to join them in using the service.

This list is not exhaustive of course but the devil is always in the detail. You have to understand the potential reach versus cost of each approach broken down by various factors such as geography, phone model, age, usage etc.

I can feel a very large spreadsheet coming on...

Meet Clara

2007-06-05T20:34:00.000+02:00

Lutin labs started the usability tests today. They recruit ordinary people off the street as testers and video them trying to accomplish set tasks on the wap site on a mobile phone. Then they analyse the video plus a questionnaire completed by the person to see where the ergonomics need improving and make recommendations. First results come through tomorrow.

Meanwhile more new people are signing up every day and some have been sending messages to Clara, our resident supermodel ;-) One person made her one of their contacts. I may have to start getting inventive in my replies soon...

3 days out of my life and 30 off it

2007-06-04T18:52:00.000+02:00

Time to look back on the end of last week at TheNextWeb ... three days at stress levels I've not known for a long time.

Key objective: a successful launch presentation on Friday in front of 350 avid bloggers, twitterers, video journalists, entrepreneurs, investors and clever people. We ploughed our way through all waking hours and most of the sleeping ones testing our product, improving our presentation and correcting bugs until right up to an hour before the presentation. We almost dropped the demo because TheNext was sadly separated from the Web for much of the morning, only to become miraculously available at the last minute.

It was an omen we should maybe have heeded. We connected to our WAP service in advance ready for the demonstration. Having got the room interested in our dream and motivated into action to connect to the service so we could project their profiles up on the big screen, Olivier and I launched the demo and then *bam* ... I could not continue the connection. Yours truly had two minutes left on the clock to describe our pride and joy in flowery prose invented on the spot. What happened was brought about by our request that everyone connect at once; everyone pulled out their mobiles and started connecting at the same time. The server had to face an enormous instantaneous load equivalent to 24M visitors /day; as a consequence, the server would not let me continue my session online ...

The resident 'grumpy old men' whose role it was to grill us gave us a hard time: "Looks like MobiLuck wasn't so lucky this time..." But we answered their questions well. We have a plan to attract users and use viral techniques to spread the service via IM, alerts and SMS invitations. And when asked how we defend our technology against competitors Olivier said "We have 4 patents" and they shut up. They didn't go near our secret weapon: 1/2 million users and a successful mobile application on 180 phone models in 200 countries and 21 languages around the world...

And what was really great was that everyone we met afterwards that evening said they loved what we stood for, and the demo was bad luck but it happens to everyone at some time. Peaks are always very difficult to manage because of the CPU power required in short bursts, and we're still fine tuning the service as I write.

We left TheNextWeb feeling exhausted but having made it through a tough challenge and it's just the beginning. The service is launched. Sort of stealthily. http://wap.mobiluck.com/beta ...

The pressure mounts

2007-05-30T23:05:00.001+02:00

So now we're selected as one of only 5 companies doing a 'showcase' on Friday and we're in respectable company ... so there has been plenty of work to do today on the presentation. I'm so busy I barely have time to write the diary entry for today so it'll have to be finished tomorrow on the train to the Netherlands.

It's all got to be done by midnight or failing that, ASAP

2007-05-29T22:42:00.000+02:00

Today was 'we want your pitch by midnight' day. The ASAP items have to wait until tomorrow morning. Everything has really shifted up a gear following our award of a spot on the start-up stands at TheNextWeb (see the cute Web2.0 style rosette). Tv4b want to do a video interview and want materials in advance. Quartier Numerique need stuff for their launch in Paris. We need a press release ASAP for printing tomorrow to take to Amsterdam ... because it's now official that we're launching our new service at the conference. We've got 60 seconds to announce it on stage so it's got to be slick. And Stephane and Marc are working like mad on the WAP service (still testing all the links on that stringball diagram from last week, no doubt) whilst Olivier grapples with a live development environment doing demos at Where2.0 in California: One minute you can see me in the contacts list, the next ... poof! ... no it doesn't bear thinking about ...

People and Places Close to You - if you're in Amsterdam

2007-05-28T20:30:00.001+02:00

This week it's the run-up to TheNextWeb conference on Friday and the team is very busy improving the WAP service ready for flawless demonstrations. We've been selected for a spot on the start-up stands and we'll be setting up a laptop with wi-fi access and handing out 'mobiti' tatoos ('mobiti' is our little mascot, a green man in a flying saucer).
There are scores of little changes to make to the service, each aimed at making it that little bit more intuitive, easier to understand, quicker to navigate through, lower on data bandwidth, easier on the eye on a small screen. Meanwhile I've been populating the places database with a few tourist attractions and restaurants in Amsterdam so that when we demo the place localiser we don't get a blank screen. And I'll be geolocalising them when I arrive Thursday. What a good excuse to go checking out the hot spots in Amsterdam on work time ...

Innovate Europe 07

2007-05-25T20:22:00.000+02:00

Nothing of any interest whatsoever happened today. At least not in our neck 'o' the woods. It was noses to the grindstone, well-greased elbows and lots of coffee. So during this short intermission, check out Olivier's presentation at Innovate Europe 07 demonstrating our new service.

Sexy models

2007-05-24T21:23:00.000+02:00

We just added nearly 35 models to our range of supported phones for the MobiLuck application. That means more than 180 different models supported. And every new supported model is a new segment of users who will discover MobiLuck Online...

Flat out WAP

2007-05-23T22:44:00.001+02:00

I walked in the office this morning to see Stéphane (our CTO) poring over a tangled stringball of a diagram that he tells me is a map of all the pages and links on the wap site.

There are hundreds of connections and "we're going to test every one of them". It would all be a lot simpler if we were developing some hierarchical site that holds the user's hand taking them step by step from need to fulfilment. But we're not. We're building a WAP site with a flat structure - a dynamic, interactive service where every page can present information in multiple ways according to the context and history of the user's behaviour. The radar screen for example can be a flirt finder or a pizza locator or an IM contacts list. It's a headache but it's rewarding to see the result - coming soon to a screen near you.

Lost in translation

2007-05-22T20:20:00.000+02:00

Yesterday Lison found another state subsidy that we can use to keep costs down. Lison is Olivier's wife and company accountant extraordinaire (she recently published a book on the subject) and she's always up to date with the latest government incentives to foster innovation. This one lets us hire a developer at a quarter of the cost ... once they approve our R&D plan. Problem is, we had to translate all the plans we wrote in English for investors and partners into French. Which became today's main task for me. And I wish I'd started by doing a global replace of 'user' with 'utilisateur' and 'mobile internet' with 'internet mobile' because 40 pages later I ended up with a right major headache to nurse whilst standing up on my hour-long metro trip home.

Getting ready for TheNextWeb 2007

2007-05-21T19:16:00.000+02:00

Just got moving organising our presence at TheNextWeb 2007 conference in Amsterdam on the 31st May - 1st June this year. We'll see who gets selected for the speedpitch and stands (limited places only) but we're ready to show what we've got to everyone because the only platform we need is the mobile phones in our hands.
Olivier's battered N70 looks like it's been through the first dotcom bubble plus a sheep dip for good measure and mine looks like it's just fallen out of the box (an N95 and it keeps crashing ... must get the firmware updated). Still, WAP looks like WAP so no problem there - and our WAP looks rather nice compared to most...
So we're wondering whether to go for the coffee intro or the dinner and clearly the dinner wins hands down. Is anyone going to shake the foundations of web2.0 wisdom now that everyone knows or thinks they know what it's about? No of course not, they're going to simply make the most of the networking opportunity over dinner. That's what it's all about. Bring on the erwtensoep and the herbal cigarettes.

Welcome

2007-05-19T09:31:00.000+02:00

Welcome to the MobiLuck Diary! Having recently joined as Marketing Director I decided to start a diary to document the process of developing and launching our new mobile 2.0 service. Happy reading.