I caught up with Christophe Hocquet, CEO and co-founder of Kiboo on Friday morning, to talk about the company’s work in the mobile social networking space, and a new service just launched called Buddymob.
Mobile social networking has been pointed at by many an analyst as the most exciting and fruitful of mobile spaces for some years now. It’s never appealed to me entirely; as I’m not 100% mobile centric and don’t run my life through my handset. However, as I spend more time in a large city where my friends are fairly widespread – the concept of permission-based location search certainly does.
So, enter Kiboo. The company was founded in 2005, and is focussed solely on developing innovative mobile communications. Their first success was Moblr, a WAP-enabled community that exists to this day across Europe. Moblr is a content and contact service that allows you to ‘view, publish, chat and meet for free, while on the move or at home’. The network has 32,000 users (which is actually closer 19,000 when you look at the activation vs. download rate) – and is still going strong.
Moblr is best known for allowing users to upload video clips, which can be accessed and shared for free from a mobile phone. You can also browse through a video catalogue to view the latest releases for a small fee.
However, with the introduction of the iPhone and Android platform came increased potential for this space. Flat rate tariffs, dedicated market-places and a focus on user experience meant that Kiboo needed to evolve its Moblr offering.
The plan was initially to create Moblr 2.0 on the Android platform. But, as the company worked on the re-write, they discovered that the technology allowed for new features to make the application far richer. As Christophe puts it; “whereas Moblr is reasonably closed, Buddymob is completely open.”
A large part of the development stage was taking a big bet on micro-blogging becoming increasingly popular, as a direct link to Twitter has been built into the Buddymob app. With the almost unbearable mainstream coverage of the site of late, it seems they’ve done well. Users can also post a range of text and geo-tagged multimedia content to thier live feeds, simultaneously post to multiple social networks, keep up to date with friends' updates and chat via a pretty swish integration with MSN, GoogleTalk, AIM and Jabber.
Direct Facebook integration is due to arrive in March, and Yahoo, Skype and MySpace are in the running for later on in the year.
I have to say, Buddymob is very similar to ZYB (in style, as well as functionality). But as far as I’m aware, there is no integration with Android from Vodafone-owned ZYB just yet. Like ZYB, Buddymob is free to use, and will be ad-funded using a combination of location-based and personalised adverts.
At the moment, after just a few months since the launch of beta in December, users are averaging 3 hours of use a day. In fact, Buddymob reached the top 5 on the Android Market's ‘social’ category list within hours of the launch. So much interest was stirred up with the first 3 days that the application had to be removed due to over-subscription.
To date, the BuddyMob beta trial has recorded over 10,000 download requests and currently has more than 5,118 active users. Once they’ve developed the app for additional handsets and these figures increase, is it just a matter of time before someone snaps up Buddymob - or even Kiboo - too?