Another firm I was pleased to catch up with at 3GSM was Clicmobile. The company builds cross-platform communities with social networking and user-generated content elements for clients.
As an example, Clicmobile powers Yootribe, a French social networking service aimed at a “young and playful” audience.
The online part includes profiles, videos, music and links to friends, but from day one it’s also had mobile elements, including text alerts and invitations, and location-based features letting users track friends who are nearby.
Since then, Clicmobile has signed two more deals. One’s with Nokia to create a professional community around mobile advertising, tying in with the latter’s Nokia Ad Service venture, and the other is with an unnamed Hollywood firm to create a social network for professional actors.
“We’re not really targeting the big MySpace type communities,” says Alex Kummermann, Clicmobile’s CEO. “Our platform is more about segments and niches, each with their own specific approaches.”
It’s also about cross-platform communities, rather than mobile-only. Kummermann claims that although mobile-only communities do exist, none have really made a breakthrough anywhere outside Japan and South Korea, and it’s difficult to market them.
“We really believe there are some ways you’re going to interact with other people that are much more convenient on the Web,” he says.
“To create a profile and add a lot of content with your mobile phone is time-consuming, whereas online it’s easy and more efficient. But mobile is an enhancement, another way to get more benefits out of it. We work to look at how it is really useful, what value you can add when you are using your mobile phone to make it fit the end user in the best way.”
Clicmobile’s social networks might not be competing directly with MySpace, but the fact that the latter is getting into mobile through deals like its recent one with Vodafone is clearly relevant. Kummermann is watching MySpace’s actions closely, not least because a year and a half ago, Clicmobile pitched the idea of extending MySpace to phones, only to be rebuffed.
Kummermann thinks the company needs to move swiftly and intelligently now, though. “Big social networks are like mushrooms,” he says. “They grow very fast, but they die very fast too. MySpace is not as attractive as it was one year ago - some users have moved to Facebook or whatever. The challenge for MySpace is to keep the user base from moving to other websites. A good mobile strategy can help in that, but if they miss the mobile move, they might die quite fast.”
Quite. I was really interested in Clicmobile’s use of location-based technology in its social networking services, but Kummermann seems quite downbeat on the tech hassles of getting this to work reliably. He points out that using Cell ID (tracking your phone by its position according to your operator’s masts) isn’t accurate enough for pinpoint detection, while GPS is much better, but doesn’t work indoors.
“Combining the two worlds, in what we call Assisted GPS, is one solution, but it’s still not ready to be marketed in an easy way, because most phones don’t have it,” he says. “Right now, location-based features are more to give contextual information about what could be available nearby, rather than saying ‘turn left, walk five metres and I can meet you’. It’s not accurate enough, and won’t be for another couple of years.”
For that reason, it’s not easy to tie in location to social networking services on mobile, at least not yet. Clicmobile started one project in 2005 focused on location, but later stopped it due to the above problems, as well as the fact that users tend to be reluctant to share their location with others.
Kummermann is more optimistic about the likely impact of advertising, particularly if it provides users with clear benefits in reducing the cost of buying mobile content or accessing their social networks. However, he makes the sensible point that data tariffs are a real problem here: if you’re paying for every kilobyte of data that you download to your phone, you won’t put up with ads swelling that total.
“Mobile advertising will cover some of the costs related to the Web on mobile experience,” he says. “When we reach this point, mobile advertising will be a big success. 2007 is the starting point. There are some companies investing a lot in this area - for example Nokia is going to be a big player in this sphere.”