On MocoSpace’s impressive growth rate and mobile social networking

Well; it’s raining funds here in mobile advertising and networking market. After Smaato and Blyk, it’s MocoSpace which caught everyone’s attention a couple days back with two back-to-back milestones.

Firstly, it got a $4 million funding from a pool of investors which included General Catalyst, Pilot Group, and Michael Dearing, a former eBay executive. Secondly, MocoSpace recently went past the magical figure of 2 million users for its mobile social networking service. There is still a lot of scope for improvement as far as MocoSpace is concerned, but you’ve got to give it to those guys. Their mobile based social networking service gets over 1 billion page views every month. Believe me, that is just too big a number for a firm like this.

The user base of MocoSpace mainly consists of young, urban crowd who are into social networking as if their life depended on it, and it is evident from the number of page views this service gets every month.

What intrigues me the most is this – there are not many smart phones available in the market, at least as of now, and a majority of mobile users use ordinary handsets. In other words, mobile web experience will not be as good as it will be on a smart phone. If this kind of growth is possible at this stage, I wonder what would be the growth rate when more and more people start using smart phones in future. There’s a goldmine to be explored; that’s for sure.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, Mobile Social Networking.

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Blyk to enter the Dutch market

Few people in the world will be as happy as Pekka Ala Pietila and Antti Ohrling, the founders of Blyk. Blyk, the well known ad-funded mobile phone network, is planning to expand its territory into the Dutch market and has laid a strong foundation for that in the form of additional funding from Goldman Sachs and Kuwait’s Industrial Financial Investments Company.

Both Goldman Sachs and Industrial Financial Investments Company think Blyk has a great chance in the Dutch market and have provided with a large additional funding to support its operations. Not just that, both these companies have also got a considerable stake in Blyk, which makes Blyk even stronger financially.

In case you don’t know, Blyk stormed into the limelight by offering free text messages and free talk time to customers who opted to receive mobile adverts in their mobile phones. Blyk will host its mobile phone network in the Netherlands through Vodafone. The service is expected to be launched later this year.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, Blyk.

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