Mobile communities could fill 3G pipes

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"Cell phones have become essential accessories," said Anil Malhotra, chief alliance officer for Bango, a company that helps wireless-content providers charge users for accessing their content. "And they're also perfect capture devices. You can take pictures, record sound, send text messages. It's a great tool for creating your own content."

What's more, those in the teen and twentysomething crowd--the biggest users of online social networks--also happen to be some of the heaviest users of mobile data services such as text messaging and downloadable ring tones.

As major mobile operators in the U.S. roll out their new 3G wireless services, more people are using them to create their own mobile Web sites. A German company called Peperoni Mobile and Internet Software, which since 2001 has provided software tools that let people all over the world build their own mobile Web sites, said it has seen an increase within the last six months of people using its software to create their own mobile Web pages. Though the company has only about 500,000 users today, it says it's signing up new ones at the rate of about 20 percent to 25 percent per month, many of them in the U.S.

When people publish a mobile Web site, they don't want to think about which phones people will use to view it. That's why network operators and cell phone makers need to work together to make it easier for users to have a unified experience.

--Marcus Ladwig, chief operating officer, Peperoni

"Phone penetration in the U.S. has pretty much caught up with Europe in the last couple of years," said Marcus Ladwig, chief operating officer for Peperoni. "And now we're seeing a lot of these people wanting to use the capabilities on their phones to share images and other things, so they're using our tools to build their own mobile Web sites."

Peperoni struck a deal earlier this year with Bango to allow its users to set up shop on the mobile Internet. Bango's technology lets people who've created mobile Web sites charge for content they distribute on their site.

Fixing the bugs
Experts say these are still the early days for the mobile Internet in general. And there still are significant issues that need to be worked out. For one, cell phone makers have been building products with different mobile Web requirements, which makes it difficult for software developers to adapt existing Web pages for the mobile Internet.

"When people publish a mobile Web site, they don't want to think about which phones people will use to view it," said Ladwig. "That's why network operators and cell phone makers need to work together to make it easier for users to have a unified experience."

Another problem is that the sophisticated cell phones capable of taking pictures and playing video and music are expensive, with some costing as much as $300. Additionally, people uploading or downloading information from these social networking mobile Web sites will also have to pay for the bandwidth they use while doing so over the mobile network. Prices on data packages vary between $10 and $25 per month.

And even though mobile operators want people to use their new 3G services, they've been reluctant to give up control of where customers go on the mobile Internet. Some carriers, such as Verizon Wireless, restrict users to their own menu of services.

And some experts, such as Forrester Research's Golvin, are skeptical that cell phones will ever be able to offer enough functionality to replace PCs when it comes to creating and sharing content.

"Cell phones are great enhancements and tools for existing bloggers or for people who are already sharing photos online," he said. "Cell phones might be good for updating sites on the fly, but the PC is still the best place to sit down and organize your content."

[LKLai]

mobile community

You are spot on. In other parts of the world right now, mobile community applications are driving data usage.

My company's service, myGamma (a mobile community portal. http://wap.mygamma.com), clocks an average of 1.5 million wap pageviews a day. That translates to a massive 4,500 megabytes of data a day. In Asia and Europe currently, mobile data is largely via GPRS, a 2.5G network. But with 3G coming online soon and relatively cheaper costs, we expect data usage to skyrocket in tandem with the introduction of video and audio streaming within our community.

With our service, we have also discovered that we have reached a unique audience - people who otherwise have no access to the internet if not for their mobile phone! So for all the talk about handsets offering a lesser internet experience compared to the PC, this is not a problem at all with this group of users. It's a whole new market out there! At least, this is the experience out in Asia where there are lotsa more people with cellphones than computers.

[xb45c]

I can confirm LKLai's comment, I run The Mobile Life http://www.themobilelife.com a provider of mobile internet services such as mobile communities and I just returned after a week in India. Out of 1.3 billion people the mobile penetration is only 20% and most of the Indian users first experiance internet through their mobile device. Regards, Chris