Seeing as one of the main subjects for Techscape is Web 2.0 going mobile, we were bound to prick up our ears at LaNetro Zed's announcement that, yes, it's taking Web 2.0 mobile.
The company runs the Club Zed mobile subscription service here in the UK, which has traditionally involved users paying £3 a week for unlimited games, ringtone and wallpaper downloads. However, LaNetro Zed has now introduced user generated content, social networking and communication features into the mix.
I caught up with president and CEO Javier Perez Dolset to find out more. "We're trying to fully integrate the mobile device as a new machine to have full access to the internet, and everything Web 2.0 can offer," he says.
Members of the new community will be able to chat, instant message, send emails, post blog entries and upload their own content from their phones, as well as downloading Zed's existing mobile content. The service works through the Zed website and WAP site, but also through a downloadable application called statiOn which comes in PC and mobile versions.
Dolset says it's taken 250 people 17 months to put the service together – which he says shows why the big Web 2.0 companies have been slow to move to mobile. For now, the Zed community will be funded by subscriptions, rather than advertising.
"People on the mobile prefer to pay a little money rather than have an advertising-driven model," he says. "Mobile privacy is something that people appreciate a lot, so they're happy to pay a little money and have no advertisements."
That said, he's sure advertising will make an impact at some point, if handled with care to ensure people don't see it as intrusive. "It's not something I can see becoming a substantial business in the short-term, but we are carrying out surveys on the issue almost every quarter, and so far the result is always the same."
The interesting thing about Zed's new focus towards Web 2.0 services is the fact that they've been created with a strong mobile angle from the start, which may make them slicker than some of the big guns trying to bolt mobile features onto existing websites.
Then again, the Zed brand is nowhere near as well-known as, say, MySpace, so there's a considerable marketing job to be done to ensure consumers get to hear about the new community and what it can offer them.