Most companies can only dream of a fan-site keeping a list of must-add features to the next version of their products.
Apple has just such a fan-site: pleasefixtheiphone.com.
It’s clean and easy.
In the site’s own words: “This site is not affiliated with Apple. It’s a modern love poem from iPhone fans who just want to improve their iPhone.”
Buzzd.com is a site that offers people ways to find out or shout out where the fun is.
Take your mobile phone specify the nearest zip code and buzzd will tell you what’s buzzing. Once you’re somewhere cool, shout it out to your friends and to the community (they get the ‘buzzes’ on their phones). You can also check-out if there’s not someone in the neighborhood you’d like to meet.
What’s cool about the idea is that it offers people real-time reviews (check-out) and allows for swarming (shout out). When someone likes the band playing in the bar they are having a drink, they can shout it out.
More on the feature here.
The challenge will be to have enough people using the site. The more people on it, the more interesting it becomes to also join.
Last Monday I went to the second edition of Mobile Monday Belgium. There were many people (48 registered, some didn’t make it but most did).
Unfortunately the Pumbby presentation was canceled because Jean-Paul de Ville called in ill. Fabian Tilmant from Cleverwood gave a presentation on the three key ingredients required for a successful mobile initiative (content, ads, platform) after which Tanguy De Lestré did a debriefing of the Stockholm MoMo gathering he went to.
Listening to the many attendees during the après-powerpoint was interesting indeed. There are many initiatives that are being set up to help the breakthrough of Mobile Internet like for example loyalty programs where you can exchange your loyalty points for mobile internet air-time. Many parties are looking for innovative business models that will make mobile internet more affordable for the public.
Being among other mobilistas is great. You see how everyone struggle with and tries to overcome the wait for the big mobile wave.
Next MoMoBel will be mid-February.
Some other dates for mobile initiatives that were mentioned (both formally and informally):
ABI Research reports (via Marketwatch) that MySpace and Facebook are getting more and more traction in the mobile space. Analysts believe that a significant group of people will chose not to select a new mobile social network, but will use the mobile offering of the network they are already signed up to and in which they have already invested significant time to build relationships. This may result in fewer opportunities and become a big hurdle for newcomers that hope to build a new general mobile social network. Specialized mobile social networks based around a specific theme or interest, or new mobile social networks that include a killer location-based feature, will still have a good chance to build their own audience.
It will be interesting to see if such observations translate to similar movements for European social networks such as Netlog, Hyves, and Skyrock, to name a few. Some mobile operators offer the application to access Facebook on Blackberry pre-installed (e.g. Belgium’s Proximus corporate offer), which helps the uptake of Facebook mobile even more (although one can expect Blackberry users to be more interested in LinkedIn Mobile pre-installed).
Last Monday I went to the first mobile Monday in Belgium. Actually some years ago an attempt to kick-start MoMoBel was made, but it slowly died as not enough traction could be generated. But as the mobile market is maturing rapidly this time around will probably be successful.
Do come by, you can get to know other Mobile aficionados, have a drink and learn a lot about what’s happening in the Belgian mobile space (actually that’s where I learned that De Redaktie was working on a mobile version of their site as posted before).
The next Mobile Monday will be November 17, for more info go to the MoMoBel wiki.
Every now and then we’re going to review a Mobile Community or a Mobile Social Network and let you know what we think of it, like it or not ;p
The first we took a look at is: itsmy.com
Here’s what it is advertised to be: the US and UK leading mobile community – More than 2 million users. It’s off-deck.
Reading this I was of course very tempted to try it out.
It’s a pure mobile-phone-only site, no old-webbish version.
I registered and didn’t immediately provide a phone number. This was a bad idea in retrospect, because the validation of my phone number afterwards didn’t work (a second attempt to register with the phonenumber, failed -therefore something must be wrong with the mms-stuff). So now I’m thinking I’m missing out on all kinds of features that are for validated users only. That’s a shame.
The basic features to which I do have access and which I tested are:
Some of the features for validated users only are:
Messaging is basic, you need to go to your itsmy inbox to see whether you’ve got new messages or not. No sms alerts.
They date from last year, but are pretty iumpressive:
• 600.000 mobile internet homepages.
• 500 million page-servings per month.
• Support for 3100 cell phones and browser types.
(source: http://www.contentfutures.com/archive/newsletter-template/newsletter44-07-11-07.html)
The site is a brand of Gofresh (http://www.gofresh.de) “the mobile social company”.
The site is ad-supported. In a bold move, however, they are giving the users control over the ads they want to see (src: http://www.inquisitr.com/970/itsmycom-gives-users-control-over-ads/)
I couldn’t find any figures on how much they make with these ads. But Antonio Vince Staybl the CEO of Gofresh made the following statement in 2007: “If the development of social mobile advertising keeps the current pace of growth, the traditional advertising industry must pay attention not to be overtaken by us.”
If I look at the usage figures, then it is a very lively community.
The support team, however, seems to be dormant or on permanent leave (I asked them to help me get my account verified but never got an answer)
The site itself is a bit dry and not really fast on a mobile (nope, not even on 3,5G I’ve checked 
). But it is really feature packed, and can be fun to use to share pictures and video’s among friends.
Here’s an impressive example:
Pictures speak more than a thousand words, and also more than a two dimensional square of specks like this two-dimensional bar-code:
.
The concept is so intuitive and so simple that it is certainly one of the killing applications of the near future: take a picture of anything you’d like to know more about (be it a person, be it a logo, be it a movie poster), send it by any means (be it MMS, e-mail, IM) to a Visual Search Engine and wait for the information, coupon or whatever to come back.
Some companies in the VSE market:
Visual Search Engines are not that new, but only now we’ve reached a point where the “common” phones are being equipped with reasonable cameras and internet usage on mobile phones is increasing; the combination makes MVSE a powerfull tool in many areas: marketing, policing (think face recognition), social networking. For the latter MVSE could mean less maintenance for SN users: they can upload pictures and the MVSE can automatically annotate them with relevant information and links, thanks to this information the pictures can then be sent to the relevant people in your social network for instance.
We’re bound to see MVSE boom 
Recently I have been trying out last.fm in combination with Mobbler. Mobbler extends scrobbling to your mobile phone (see also MyStrands and Pocket Scrobbler).
What would happen, now that an increasing number of phones have GPS on board, if you would do the same with GPS locations you are visiting. Have your phone sends visited locations to the “last.gps” service to be shared with others. Visited locations not being when you push a button, but when the phone detects you have been somewhere more than 10 minutes. If sufficient people do that, then you can find people with similar visiting lists, build location “playlists” related to a certain interest, and recommendations to locations to visit.
Current GPS tracking solutions handle mostly about “Where are you?” now. and uploading favorite place information is aimed mostly at bars, restaurants, concert halls and the like. Why not see where people have been in a historical sense, and base the network on that?
A drawback of course is that geographical locations both where you are now and where you have been are considered to be much more personal information than what music you are listening to. But if you get some interesting itinerary advice from like minded people that have been there, it might be worth the loss in privacy.
If you happen to come across such a service please let me know.
Plazes just announced that they have been bought by Nokia. This appears to be a smart move by Nokia, as they can now integrate user-recommended location information to their Maps via Ovi, giving their maps even more meaning (‘See what others have to say about this destination’, ‘Friend recommended places on your route’).
Social networks have integrated the ‘What are you doing?’ question that Twitter posed at an enormous speed the past year. You can tell everybody what you’re doing, and you can do it from mobile, for example on ShoZu.
Meanwhile, the trend in mobile phones to integrate more and more features has now firmly embraced GPS (see for example the N-series by Nokia and the new iPhone 3G, but also Blackberry, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are offering devices with GPS).
Mobile operators have offered a method to determine handset positions for years already but this has never really taken off on a large scale.
With more technology in place to determine positions, one can expect (and sees already) a plethora of location-based / position / routing services being developed, of which several are trying to answer the question “Where are you?”, frequently integrated within a mobile social network service. These days we see mobile social network services such as Sniff coming up that effectively use mobile operator network-based methods to determine someone’s position, next to pure play GPS-based ones such as bliin.
It is interesting to see that there are companies trying to patent this: Networks In Motion Issued U.S. Patent for Social Networking Applications Using GPS-Enabled Wireless Device. One can have doubts that this kind of service can be patented, and it seems a patent that is difficult to enforce, but it clearly indicates that there is money to be made with these new services.
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