April 21 – LBS and Mobile SNS event wrap up
Posted on: April 30, 2008 – Filed under: Shanghai
With over 145 guests, including numerous VCs, startups, media agencies, MNCs (Nokia, Alcatel etc), large IT consulting firms, and market intelligence companies, LBS and mobile SNS momo event was the second most successful event of mobilemonday shanghai’s 2 year history.
A big thanks to Interfax for providing a well-suited LBS report, which complemented very nicely the panel, and to the speakers (Mu Rong, Jeff Lin) and Panelists (Iris Hong, Raymond Feng and our two keynotes). The panel was moderated by Bruno Bensaid.
Photos here
Take aways/downloads
Bedo’s innovations are coming from a powerful friend and profile matching algorithm implemented on top of a location-aware platform. The idea is to meet people who match your expectations/profile, locate them geographically and communicate with them anonymously (if needed) over IP (Bedo has designed a VoIP gateway over GPRS). Push to talk and broadcast-to-many are key features of the service. Revenue comes from premium features but mostly advertising from POI etc.
– Download the presentation here
Gypsii, a 2008-Navteq Global LBS Challenge Finalist, is positioned as a mobile lifestyle service. Gypsii is coming from a mapping and GPS background. Their focus and expertise is about sharing life experience (hence the UGC component), rather than communicating real-time with people in the vicinity (Bedo), though it is possible too (via sms, IM, or simply phone of course). The geo-tagging component plays an important part, as well as the “search venues and POI” and directions on how to get there. Search is an important component of Gypsii’s offering.
– Download the presentation here
Conclusion
Location-based services is a (or I would be tempted to say) THE natural evolution and must-have feature of all new SNS and UGC (User Generated Content) based networks. China is still too early here for mobile, as usual, but considering the sheer size of online SNS in China (if counting Tencent, we talk of at least 270 million accounts created, or otherwise 51.com, in the vicinity of 60 million), let’s hope that mobile location-aware components of existing online SNS should pop up pretty rapidly, with Yahoo as a trailblazer (with YahooConnect) in Asia. Note: YahooConnect is not available in China.
See you on May 26 for another landmark event on Mobile Search!!