Watch out for modern features!

Having great features is important for mobile social networks. It doesn’t just show the effectiveness the feature has, but it must also sustain this effectiveness in the long term.

When mobile social networks started, they had standard features like sending e-cards or placing wallpapers in users’ profiles. But as the technology advanced, more and more features were born and a new era of social networks began.

There has lots of advancement taken place in today’s mobile social networks. One example of a feature that has seen success is the chat room where you can have a group conversation with people all over the world. This phenomenon thanks its existence to popular group conversation programs like Skype and MSN. This trend is also showing in upcoming economies like India where chat rooms are very popular whether it is about social networking, making new friends or dating. We just cannot spend a day without chatting or interacting on our phones with new friends now…

Another popular feature that is used frequently is mobile games. Mobile games have become a standard feature for social networks because of the attraction to play games with friends via your phone so you can play anytime anyplace. There is much demand for mobile entertainment in countries like India where mobile gaming is a real success. When you are bored and nobody is online, you simply kill your boredom by playing games and having fun.

We conclude that the development of entertaining communications features has been rapid and the adaptation of new technology has played a major role in it. Features like chat rooms and multi-player games have made it easier to satisfy our desire for entertainment and fun on the go. However, we don’t know what surprises the future will bring as the development of new technology continues.

So stay tuned.



Technorati Profile

Wauwee popular in India

Almost half of all users on Wauwee come from India. And not only because there just ARE a lot of people from India, but also because Wauwee perfectly fits their needs!

Wauwee.com started out with campaigns running all over the world, but specifically targetting Europe and the US. Mainly just because those were the regions we knew the most about, being an Amsterdam based company. To our surprise however, after one month of campaining we found that the top 3 countries our users originated from were India, Romania and Indonesia!

Where most 'western' users have online PC's at home and on the job, those countries have skipped most of the fixed web period that took flight in the 90ies in Europe and the US, and went straight for wireless. This meant that mobile phones rapidly became THE means of communication. When mobile internet became available, India was one of the frontrunners in that area.

An often heard compliment Wauwee.com gets from their users, is that where most mobile communities are in fact spin-offs of existing PC communities, Wauwee.com takes the lead because they are targetting only mobile phones, thus ensuring users they won't ever miss out on features that are only available on the PC sites. Not a small advantage for users that do not have easy access to an online PC!

Finally we found that one of the much appreciated aspects of Wauwee.com is its easy availability. Especially in countries like India, where incomes vary widely, the range of mobile phones used is immense. Focussing mainly on Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, we see users surfing the net on end-of-the-millennium-devices like the early Nokia 6-series, to the latest and greatest in the world of mobile phones. The power of wauwee.com lies in the fact that it is offering a completely browser based application with small but clear icons on an easily loadable white background, thus providing its users with a great interface no matter what phone they are using!

Technorati Profile

Word-of-mouth rocks on mobile but be careful with mobile payments

We surveyed our users recently and got some very interesting results we would like to share with you. Firstly, 68% of our users already invited friends to Wauwee.com which shows a strong interest in spreading the word about Wauwee but also brings up a deeper point. The sharing of Wauwee was mostly done via word-of-mouth. We had no real stat on what this number was because word-of-mouth is difficult to measure online. However our survey shows word-of-mouth is very powerful when it comes to mobile services, particularly those services with a low barrier to adoption. Sharing a service with your friend is as simple as pulling out your phone and showing them around your world then your friend can immediately signup and be instantly engaged with the service on his/her mobile phone. This is more difficult to achieve with traditional online services where you tend to perform the viral aspect via email in an asynchronous fashion hence the lack of user coaching amongst friends. This is a powerful trend and one we plan to keep a close eye on in order to continue on our growth trajectory.

Another finding from our survey showed a large number of users would like to buy something via premium SMS. In today’s world, most ecommerce is performed via the internet with credit cards however mobile savvy users prefer buying via SMS when buying something on the phone versus using a credit card which is not all that surprising but nonetheless a problem to solve for Mr. Visa if he wants to play in the mobile space. Hooking up with the likes of the iTunes App Store is also a pretty neat way to achieve mobile payment but not so for countries like India where most of the vast mobile internet population don’t have credit cards in the first place. When we started Wauwee.com as a mobile social network we had no idea India would become our largest growth market, it just took off like a rocket from day one. Most of our Indian users tell us they prefer to have the full functionality of a social network on their phone rather than a slimmed down version because they don’t have ready access to an internet connected PC. This makes sense when you look at the broadband penetration rates in India versus the mobile subscriber uptake (60m broadband versus over 300m mobile subs and growing daily!). Users want to engage fully with a service on their phone which requires payment processing to be achieved in a seamless way on the phone. Mobile users have grown accustomed to pay for topups and games via SMS or a phone call and hence we need to be serving this market wisely. The alternative to go with carrier integrated billing is not looking rosy right now! Stay tuned for more on payments and also India in future posts.

BlackBerry App World Launch

We are delighted to announce our inclusion in BlackBerry App World at launch. It is available to all BlackBerry users with a trackball or touch screen BlackBerry in the US, Canada & UK. To get App World on your BlackBerry browse to www.blackberry.com/appworld on your BlackBerry or visit 

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/appworld/download.jsp#tab_tab_download

You will find Wauwee in the Social Networking and Sharing category so go right ahead and check us out!

Over night we saw quite an increase in registrations as a result. We track the source our users and we can see that BlackBerry is rapidly moving up in our most popular devices. We are working with other App Store providers and hope to have more to announce in the coming weeks on this front but meanwhile we're all big BlackBerry fans...

Introduction to Wauwee.com

Hi and welcome to our new blog.

Through this blog we aim to provide lots of insight into what we see on a daily basis from our growing community of mobile internet users. We plan to share much of this information with you, the community of mobile internet enthusiasts as part of our learning and hope to hear lots of feedback from each and everyone in terms of helping us along our path to building Wauwee.com into a vibrant social community for people all over the world.

Let me start out by introducing the service and our team. Wauwee started out as an accident. We were originally working on the Wauw.fm service which allows streaming of radio, music, photo download/upload from a PC to your mobile phone. Great product but before its time. However once we released the photo sharing element of the service we noticed a dramatic increase in usage. Suddenly we had tapped into an emerging trend and so we set about focusing on what our users wanted (which involved several surveys and lots of late night txt messages :) As a result we decided to seperate the photo sharing features from Wauw.fm and build Wauwee.com. We did this April 2008 and since then we've not looked back. Our enthusiastic users pushed us to build social features like chatting and profiles so they could engage more easily with their friends. We are very happy to report that we have over 500,000 signed up users in March 2009 and lots more joining every day. Considering we have no marketing budget thats quite an achievement.  And thats not all, our growth is now above 100,000 users/month.

Let me take this opportunity to introduce the team who bring Wauwee to life everyday and continue to excite our users. Michel is our CEO and pretty much chief of everything :) Jan takes care of our advertising sales. James handles the engineering effort. Fake designs all our inhouse graphics and is often seen on the Support Wauwee for some reason! Remco keeps the backend running along with Pierre who churns out the web services and Jozsef who builds our phone apps. Last but certainly not least is Naoman who has joined us for his marketing internship and does a great job helping us better think about marketing and communications to our international audience.

We do hope you subscribe to our blog and stay tuned for much more to come.

The Wauwee Team