AlwaysOn panel: mobilizing your social network

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AlwaysOn panel: Mobilizing your social network

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford 2008 Tech Startups Entrepreneurship

This panel, moderated by Adam Zawal of INmobile, examined whether social networks are merely features of existing applications and services, or are they a more fundamental element of the mobile ecosystem? The panelists were:

    John Faith, GM & VP for Mobile, MySpace
    Mauro del Rio, Chairman, Buongiomo
Babur Ozden, CEO, ZipClip
    Kamar Shah, Head of Marketing Services & Software, Nokia
    Shawn Conahan, CEO, Intercasting Corp

A consensus that the US is way behind in mobile; as demonstrated by very weak 3G signal in the conference hall - comparison made to Bejing, Istanbul, and other cities around the globe. Nokia big on social networking for mobile, acquisition of Symbian just the start. Involving social networking with content; relevancy of advertising, music, the giants like Nokia and the carriers themselves. Shawn sees social networking as an evolution in our communications value chain, with the 3B mobile users WW as the TAM, vs the 500M networked PCs WW. We'd dispute that analysis a bit; however the point is valid; mobilized TAM is much larger. He sees the social networking providers trying to move into the lead position as the "first link in your mobile asset chain" through deep integration into APIs e.g. address books per Plaxo.

It was interesting that the two most disruptive products / initiatives in the real world of mobile - the iPhone, and the Google Android initiative received only scant mention in all this talk about the future of mobile social.

The panel was unanimous in seeing advertising as the top business model (revenue source) for mobile social; with subscription services being #2.

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