The
mobile community wants to be
MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and
E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users
with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Yesterday,
itsmy announced they’ve now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels – one
for each of its top 10% of content uploading customers.
Itsmy social network users are offered a free mobile home page as well as
mobile blogging capabilities, private messaging with pictures, and mobile
television channels to connect with one another. Itsmy users also have quick
access to download mobile content like wallpaper and games, which clearly draws
a crowd. The content is provided free to itsmy users since targeted ads finance
the network, which so far has been a very successful strategy. From January to
May of 2007, 250 million mobile ads were served by the network and the user
response to banners was 10 times higher than on the “regular” internet.
Click-through rates on some of the best mobile campaigns would continuously top
out in two-digit percentages.
Now itsmy is ready to offer even more content, specifically by venturing into
the realm of mobile broadcasting. With the launch of this new service, itsmy
hopes to bring personal broadcasting to mobile devices everywhere. Says Antonio
Vince Staybl, itsmy.com CEO, “Our mission is to give users more
entertainment, more live experience and less clicks. With this absolutely
groundbreaking service we push personal mobile broadcasting to the next
level.”
So, It’s Ustreaming for Your Phone?
Not exactly. What itsmy has done is
create a way for any registered member with at least 10 content items, like
pictures or video, turn that content into a mobile “TV show” with one click. If
all of itsmy’s active uploaders do so, this would be 100,000 channels. What’s
unclear is how many of these users have actually tried the new feature yet.
In order to create a channel, the process is simple. Content items are
combined with ready-to-use sound files as well as ten different “TV” designs,
using themes like “Rock,” “Comedy,” or “Love.” Every show is between 30 seconds
and 2 minutes and can be viewed by streaming or download. Users can promote
their show by sending out invitations to their friends via SMS or email. By
surfing with their mobile phones to their personal itsmy.tv address (for
example: http://yourname.itsmy.tv) users’ friends will immediately find their TV
show. The sites and shows are enabled for all mobile phones which support mobile
video. This mobile network can be viewed on any mobile phone by visiting http://mobile.itsmy.tv.
The Kids Love It
While mobile social networking may not appeal to everyone, the younger
demographic (12-25) is definitely eating it up – a million users is nothing to
sniff at. And the potential is there for so much more. According to Mikko
Saarelainen, itsmy’s Chief Strategy Officer, “Only 6 percent of all cell
phone owners have ever used mobile internet and only 2 percent of the entire
subscriber base of mobile operators have ever tried to surf in 3G
networks.”
This will likely change as newer mobile devices come out with improved web
browsers and more affordable data plans. On the other hand, mobile devices
offering the “real internet,” like the iPhone, may instead encourage mobile
users to hit up Myspace itself, instead of a MySpace-like mobile clone.
