Wauwee acquired by Mobiluck.com

We are pleased to announce that shortly after reaching 900,000 members Wauwee has been acquired by Mobiluck.com

Mobiluck, a Paris, France, based mobile location based social network, founded by CEO Olivier Chouraki, with a member base of 1,700,000 members (before aqcuisition) has a similar target audience and partly overlapping services. This is supported by the fact that almost half of the Wauwee users already had an account at both services which would take the total combined user base to over 2,100,000 members .

With the integration of Wauwee into Mobiluck, Wauwee users will enjoy location based services and find even more friends in their mobile social network. Mobiluck users will benefit from exciting new features, such as virtual gifts and explore additional active users with rich profile information.

Migration will take place during the next couple of months, lead by former Wauwee CEO Michel Shuqair, now COO of Mobiluck, and is expected to create one of the most desirable location based mobile social networks with roots in Europe but serving a global audience.

For more information, see below press article (French):

http://frenchweb.fr/mobiluck-met-la-main-sur-wauwee-com-et-depasse-les-2-millions-de-membres

Wauwee launched in Optus Australia app store

As of November 2009, the Wauwee rich client application has been launched down under.

Next to Singapore and India, Australia is the 3rd country where Wauwee has set footprint using Cellmania's platform.
This platform serves operators with a reliable and rich distribution network for applications in order to reach their customers even better.

Using Wauwee, the Australia Optus subscribers can share their lives by using photos, chat and messaging boards while built-in e-cards, virtual gifts and games make sure you never got bored on a dull moment.

24access Solutions will continue to distribute it's Wauwee network, with close to 900,000 registered members worldwide to several other appstores when they become available.

Wauwee launches in Singapore and India app stores

Following the general trend in the markets a couple of app stores pop up from almost any carrier and device manufactorer.

Wauwee benefits from the close contacts their company have to work together with the content portal managers to assure that Wauwee meets the commercial and technical guidelines for submission approval.

As a result this month Wauwee was approved by Airtel (India)and Singtel (Indonesia) and is available right now to their userbase.
Included are several versions, ranging from Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Full java client and the exclusive Wauwee Photo Agent.

Wauwee will continue to submit its applications to distribute their mobile social network to add to their large userbase of over 800,000 users today.

Wauwee iPhone & iPod Touch app launches

Wauwee app launched for iPhone & iPod Touch

We're delighted to announce the release of Wauwee for the iPhone & iPod Touch devices. Todays release brings Wauwee to a new audience of smartphone users who can enjoy the social aspects of interacting on-the-go with friends from all over the world. Welcome to all our new users and hope you enjoy using Wauwee on your Apple devices as much as we enjoyed making it!

To get it now: Wauwee in the App Store

New: Hindi and Arabic chat rooms on Wauwee

Wauwee.com has launched two new chat rooms. One for Hindi, and one for Arabic speakers.

As the majority of Wauwee users originate from India, and a great amount of those are brought up speaking Hindi, it is not more than logical that many users already spoke Hindi amongst each other. Another very large group of Wauwee users are from the Middle East and various other countries where Arabic is the main language, making Arabic the third most common language used on Wauwee, right after English (still the only language almost all Wauwee users speak and understand), and Hindi.

User requests
The initiative for language specific chat rooms came from our users. As it is always more easy to speak to one another in your native language but it excludes people that do not speak it, many people felt the need to have a place where they could meet people from their own language area, and asked Wauwee to create such a place.

English still the main language.
Outside of the two new chat rooms, English will still be the common language. Try to refine your search for friends to a specific country, and you will see that there are no countries left that aren’t represented on Wauwee! And as English is the language of MTV and Hollywood, there is almost no one who doesn’t at least speak a few words.

Latin alphabet
There is one big difference between the Hindi and Arabic chat rooms: where the Arabic chat room is filled with the beautiful calligraphy of the Arabic characters, the Hindi speakers are still destined to use the Latin alphabet. The main reason for this is that although the number of mobile phones that support Unicode (needed to display characters other then Latin) are on the rise, they are still a very small minority, and the models that support Unicode AND have the Hindi character set installed can still be counted on one hand.

Good news for Nokia users!

Today Nokia has launched their new app-store: Ovi Store.
50 million Nokia users worldwide will be able to download apps, games and videos directly through an icon in the Download folder of their phone.

We're excited to announce that one of the apps available on Ovi Store is the new Nokia Wauwee app, which, in good old Wauwee tradition, is completely free of charge! This application will grant you super easy access to your Wauwee account, so you'll be able to see what your Wauwee friends are up to with just one button click.

Want to try it? Simply visit store.ovi.com on your phone, and in the search panel type 'wauwee'!

First paid feature on Wauwee.

Alert messages
Although Wauwee is absolutely free for everybody to use, unfortunately we are not millionaires and can’t give everything for free. When users requested a service that would notify them when their friends come online we introduced our ‘Alert Me’ feature. Since releasing the alert feature many users have already set alert with friends and have received SMS messages whenever their friends come online. Unfortunately SMS messages, like all the good things in life, aren’t free…

Still a great deal!
To receive alerts, we ask our users to pay one ‘credit’ per message sent. The first 5 credits are free to each user when you register, and if you want to buy more, you simply send an SMS and your credits will be placed on your account, easy as that. And don’t think for a minute that we’re going to get rich selling you expensive credits! One credit will cost you only 4 Euro cent, about 5 US Dollar cent or 2.70 Rupees – check this online Currency Calculator if you want to know the current value in your currency.

Fun stuff
Got credits to spare and want to surprise your friends on Wauwee? Send them a gift! Our virtual gifts vary from a simple and cheap party balloon to expensive jewelry and cars, only for the rich and famous!

Ambassador selection starts!

The selection of the first round of ambassadors for Wauwee has kicked off! Users from all over the world have taken an interest in becoming an ambassador for their country by simply filling out their e-mail address in our message application. We’ve got over 200 reactions since the take off last week and there are still many coming in…

What ambassadors do on Wauwee is simply log in regularly, chat with other users and in general be active and create a fun and positive environment for other users. In order to do so ambassadors will be given special privileges that allow them to use features normal users don’t. The goal is to promote the service in the regions the ambassadors are from and to recruit more Wauwee users.

When applying for ambassador, users must be aware that they will have to comply with the Wauwee standards. Never use abusive language and don’t upload any content that conflicts with our terms. This is a small request we ask from them and if they are doing well, they will certainly be rewarded.

We salute the ambassadors and ask them to help us promote our beautiful service to all corners of the world. But the most important thing is: be active, have fun and enjoy being a Wauwee ambassador!



Technorati Profile

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.



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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!

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