Mobile Social Networking Rising In India? – Qeep Enters India While RockeTalk Opens Up To Public..
Mobile social networking and how is it different?
Mobile social networking is soon becoming a buzz word in India and why not after all India does boast of over 300 million mobile subscribers and social networking is a fad that has moved from Orkut To Facebook but hasn’t died down in India. Infact Indian social networks boast of some really big numbers being added to their database these days. Mobile social networking is limited to the small mobile screens and what you can to with tiny key pads and get your message across. One has to create a different experience on mobile than what’s on the web. Internationally location based mobile social networking is something that many iPhone developers are working on.
What do the statistics say?
The global statistics point towards a brighter future for mobile social networking:
As you can see from the above chart the average penetration is about 1% so even if in India over the next two years this is about 1% of the then 500 million mobile subscribers then the total userbase for mobile social networking would be 5 million users! which is not a small number!
According to above statistic chart by emarketer the future looks even brighter as the penetration and use of social networking is expected to rise from 2.7 % in 2007 to 18.8% in 2012 and even if India is pegged at 5% out of the total 600 million mobile subscribers (approx) by 2012 that would be a total of 30 million accessing social networking on mobile and in 4 years time thats a huge number!
So Who are the Players in India?
Recently BigAdda announced its social networking on mobile via wap, sms and a downloadable app for users and even started marketing the same via a mass media campaign TV, Outdoor etc. There have always been others like Indyarocks and Ibibo who have had sms and wap versions of their online social networking sites.
The Rise of The Standalone Mobile Social Networking Application
Two standalone apps for mobile social networking have been launched recently. By standalone I mean is they aren’t your online social networks porting the social network to mobile as well but they are focussed applications meant for the mobile phones. Lets look at two such apps which launched recently:
Qeep Enters India
Qeep a mobile social network for Java based phone owned by Blue Lion a company based out of Germany has officially launched it app for the Indian markets. Qeep is a freely downloadable application and offers features like Private messaging, photo-blogging and live multi-player gaming. The two Qeep founders Cornelius Rost and Christian Schulte(former executives of T-Mobile International and Nintendo) have stated that India already contributes 20 per cent of the 300,000 members in qeep! inorder to see how many Indian’s might be there I downloaded the app and tried registering with the nickname Rajiv. It gave me an error saying that Rajiv as a nick was taken and Rajiv10 was available! Surely if 9 Rajiv’s have registered the number 3 lakh users from India can be believable! Which is a very sizeable number for a mobile application still not launched in India. It will be interesting to know how many downloads has Bigadda seen given their aggressive offline marketing push. Qeep can be freely downloaded from www.qeep.net.
Also one can check out the video demo of the application below:
RockeTalk Goes Public Beta
RockeTalk which until recently was in closed beta has now opened up to public. RockeTalk is also a downloadable app which has features like instant text, voice, picture, video messaging, sharing of content and interact with mobile communities. The RockeTalk application is currently available on over 100 Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile devices more devices being added every week. Besides for the regulars networking features on mobile RockeTalk also plans to add IM chat compatible with Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, AIM and ICQ in the near future. RockeTalk can be downloaded at http://www.rocketalk.com/get_it_now.php.
RockeTalk is founded by Rajiv Kumar in 2005 who is an IIT Mumbai alumni and and ealier built and sold Bluetooth® software company WIDCOMM to Broadcom in 2004. RockeTalk headquartered in San Diego, California, USA with offices in Delhi, India and has raised $7.1 million from iSherpa Ventures, EDF Ventures and Mission ventures.
Here is a presentation that explains what all can you do on RockeTalk
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Hi,
Interesting article! I remember few months back talking to a friend wherein we were discussing about why and how social networking on mobile can be more powerful than on internet, it’s good to know about independent mobile networking apps entering India now. I was aware of Qeep but wasn’t knowing about Rocke Talk. Bigadda definitely got noticed recently because of its huge offline promos. With mobile penetration being phenomenally high as compared to internet penetration in India, mobile networking might become the next big thing in India. But the question is, “are these apps supported by all kind of mobiles”? We take the figures of mobile penetration but is there any data which can inform us about the % of high-end handset users in India? At the end, not all handsets support such apps and features.
BTW, I know I’m late in commenting on the new layout of Watblog but I think it’s very neat and has made the content navigation further easier, I really liked it
Hi
Thank you very much for Writing about RockeTalk. Since its launch we have seen increasing traction in indian market and the voice and picture messaging is a instant hit with our users. it was exciting to see how easily users adapted to a new way of messaging and how new use cases are being formed everyday. people are Using RockeTalk for Lifecasting, instantly sharing things around them through pictures and video’s, asking about shopping suggestions and even opinion on hairstyle’s. we also got videos posted by users in kashmir about situation there ,so the response has been phenominal. we would love to know about your experince on RockeTalk
Hello kanupriya
Your reservation on phone support by Standalone applications is bang on the target. often when citing figures about india being the second largest telecom market in the world ppl forget that a great chunk of handsets which makes it a second largest market are ultra low priced handsets which does not help the cause of standalone apps or for that matter wapsites too. for deeper penetration it is important that application developers not only keep on increasing the supported phones but also to make lighter applications which will attempt to cover maximum phones. At RockeTalk we today support more then 100 phone models with many phones models being in the range of Rs.5000 only and we are commited to give RockeTalk access to many more phones.
I invite you to expereince RockeTalk
Regards
Sameer
http://www.m.rocketalk.com