Many people know Hands-On Mobile for its mobile games - the company has sold millions of downloads of its World Poker Tour game, and has also released a stream of games based on Marvel superhero characters.
However, the company is now diversifying into mobile user-generated content and social networking, with two new services announced at 3GSM this week. The first is a distribution deal for an existing service called FunkySexyCool, which started in Australia, and bills itself as a “mobile nightclub community”.
“It’s a bit like a game in many ways,” Hands-On Mobile’s Eric Hobson told me at 3GSM. “In essence it’s a flirting service where you vote on people online, and have to work your way to the top in terms of votes. And then there’s lots of ‘money can’t buy...’ prizes on offer too. It’s been really big in Australia, they’ve got 200,000 members there now.”
In other words, it’s like Am I Hot Or Not? crossed with the profile elements of MySpace. Users pay a monthly subscription fee for membership, which lets them post a profile and vote on others for free, but then can pay extra micro-payments for premium features, including commenting on friends’ profiles, posting their profile link on the FunkySexyCool homepage, and SMS alerts to receive messages while offline.
I met the founders of FunkySexyCool briefly at 3GSM, and I’m going to have a chat with them soon to find out more about its popularity in Australia. The voting element should be really powerful in getting people to use the service regularly: it’s taking that MySpace friend-collecting impulse, but giving actual rewards for it.
FunkySexyCool previously partnered with a different mobile company called Mobile Streams to launch in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, but Hands-On is now taking over the reins for the UK and other European countries.
Meanwhile, Hands-On was also showing its new Phame TV service at 3GSM, which on the face of it seems to be identical to what Yospace does – a video-sharing service that lets people upload clips, and then get paid a cut when other users pay 20p to download one of their videos.
Interesting features include advanced search, the ability to tag favourite videos, and a director profile area, as well as voting and comments. Hands-On has announced the service as Phame, but it looks like they’ll try and do deals with brands (for example reality TV shows, so viewers can upload their responses) and mobile operators.
“We’re offering complete moderation,” says Hobson. “We’ll moderate every piece of content before it goes up. YouTube is a giant litigation snowball, and none of the mobile operators want to get involved with that. Well, apart from Vodafone of course...”
I would say that Phame TV runs the risk of Yospace having got there first, but now Yospace is owned by media group Emap, it stands to reason that other media brands will probably want to work with a different provider – which is an opportunity for Hands-On.