We’ve exceeded 1 million members and we’re growing at 6 000 new joiners a day! Here’s the text of our press release sent out this morning:
Paris, France – 29 May, 2009 – Mobiluck, a privately-held mobile services company that offers a location-based mobile social network, announced today that it has exceeded one million members worldwide since the launch of its service two years ago. MobiLuck allows users to find nearby friends, people and places using simply their mobile. It is one of the largest worldwide location-based mobile social networks in the world and the fastest-growing with 6 000 new members per day. Page views tripled over the last three months to 42 million per month.
Mobile social networking is the number one use of the mobile internet worldwide and a billion people will be doing it by 2012 (Pyramid Research). MobiLuck is critically positioned to grab a large share of this growing market. “The service is designed to work on all devices, in all countries, on all carriers, it’s free and it’s a pure mobile web service with no download required,” says Olivier Chouraki, founder and CEO of MobiLuck. “So everyone can use it.”
MobiLuck’s users are average age 23 and come mainly from the US, Europe, India, Middle East and South Africa. This new generation of users is making the most of their mobile, using it as their primary connection to the internet. They want a full social networking experience on the go so they can be always connected with their friends wherever they are. They constitute an attractive audience for brands and premium ad agencies who are currently seeing 2% click through rates on their ads on MobiLuck. By combining volume with the ability to target users by age, gender and location, Mobiluck expects continued healthy growth in this area of the business.
Formal version MobiLuck has been awarded as one of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies. Red Herring Top 100 Global Companies are chosen from winners and finalists of the previous North America, Europe and Asia Red Herring Top 100 Companies. Winning and finalist companies from the previous three years were eligible for this outstanding award. Out of 1,800 successful and highly eligible companies, the Red Herring editorial team deployed a detailed process to drill-down the best companies first to 200 finalists, then to the top 100 winners of this global award. Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration. The announcement of the winners was made at the Red Herring 100 Global taking place in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009. Present among the finalists were elite executives and venture capital leaders from around the world.
“We were so pleased to announce MobiLuck as a Red Herring Top 100 Global Company,” commented Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux. “MobiLuck has proven to be a company excelling in their industry and its ripples have turned into waves. It was difficult for us to narrow down, but we are pleased to have included MobiLuck in our list of promising companies. We look forward to the changes it makes to its industry in the future.”
Well here we are again at the end of another eventful year. We proud to say that we haven’t felt the financial crisis much: we’re strictly a bloat-free zone and have kept a tight rein on expenses and an eagle eye on our KPIs. We now have almost half a million members, growing at between 2500 and 3000 new joiners a day, and 500 000 unique visitors a month sending over a million messages.
We have also recently been selected as a finalist for the Red Herring Global 100, an award “recognizing the financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration of the best tech companies around the world”. The 100 winners will be announced at the event in San Diego from January 14-16, 2009.
Finally, check out Jenaé wearing our MobiLuck t-shirt and saying lots of nice things about us below. In her video you can see part of our new MobiLuck flash movie, the full version of which is on our main website here.
As Michael Caine famously said: “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.” Boy have we been doing that.
We now have over 325 000 members growing at 2 000 new joiners a day. For every three new joiners, there are two invitations sent to friends to get them involved too. People are joining us from the US, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, China, India, Kenya, Norway, Mexico, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and 50 other countries around the world. Well, the service is built to be used by everyone regardless of their country, operator or device.
Here are some of the key things we’ve achieved in the last couple of months:
We’ve increased our user base to 325 000 users growing at 2 000 per day.
We’ve launched our new website at www.mobiluck.com that reflects our vision for the MobiLuck product and shifts the focus away from our original Bluetooth messaging product to our mobile web social networking platform that connects people and places.
We’ve upgraded our infrastructure to dramatically improve service performance, cutting page load times in half and improving the interaction experience for our users.
We’ve implemented a new feature allowing commercial establishments to create their place on MobiLuck so they can be found locally by our users which drives additional traffic to them.
We’ve made huge steps in search engine optimisation allowing people and places to be found in mobile web searches.
We’ve translated the complete service into Russian, Chinese and Arabic with more languages on their way soon. Localised versions of our website will follow.
Plus hundreds of tweaks and enhancements to make the service simpler and easier to use.
MobiLuck has been selected to present at the Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference, one of the most highly praised events by key players in the mobile industry.
This one-day event focuses on the Mobile Web and Disruptive Mobile Innovation and brings together experts and thought leaders from all areas of the mobile ecosystem, including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists.
All Startups have 7 minutes to present in total including a 1 minute video-demo of the product on a mobile phone. During the event, all panel participants and organizers will vote their best Start-up in each category; the winner in each category receives an invitation to present at the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco on November 3, 2008.
I discovered this gem last week although it’s been around for years. It’s the gnomes’ take on how to create a successful business. The similarities between this and the typical web2.0 startup are disturbing …
MobiLuck has been selected as a finalist for the Red Herring Europe Top 100 Tech Start ups! Red Herring’s editorial team has analyzed hundreds of cutting edge companies and selected those who are positioned to grow at an explosive rate. From 200 finalists, 100 winners will then be selected. There’s no official press release on line yet but I’ll post it up when it’s available.
The MobiLuck platform has always offered pretty powerful location based search tools, helping you find people and places nearby based on multiple criteria. But we found that users had trouble discovering and using them. So we’ve now put the most common actions onto a new home page that brings key elements of the service to within just one click away. This is just the beginning; the home page is the same for everybody now, but soon it will be fully customisable. Watch this space.
I was replying to a comment on a post about MobiLuck and thought it would be worth sharing my thoughts here because it’s important to get a few things straight about location based services as they apply to social networking.
Myth 1: Location based services need to have GPS accuracy to be of any use for social networking. You don’t need to localise someone as precisely as GPS does for it to be useful for social networking.Just knowing someone is in the area is already interesting because it’s possible to join them in the near future, regardless of knowing exactly where they are.In fact for privacy reasons, some users would prefer to be only approximately located.Cell ID localisation in cities, particularly with such a high density of transmitters, is therefore a perfectly viable localisation method, and cities are where you find the critical mass of users.
Myth 2: You don’t need LBS social networking to keep in touch with friends living nearby. Friends who live nearby can not be assumed to be near you most of the time unless you all work from home and hardly ever go out.They will be away from home at the times when it is most interesting to know where they are – lunchtimes, weekends, evenings out.In fact it is friends who live in the same city and participate in the vibrant city life who will derive the most benefit from mobile LBS social networking services.
Myth 3: Knowing what someone is doing is more useful than knowing where they are. Ok it’s a trick question: there are always situations when one could be more useful to know than the other but it’s more powerful when you know both things at the same time. What if a friend is watching a sports game at a bar but they’re too far away for you to get there before closing time?Twitter lets millions of people say what they’re doing now, but imagine adding location information to that too.MobiLuck is aiming complete the other half of the equation by sending SMS alerts whenever a friend is nearby.What your friend is doing is often implied in their place localisation (bar, restaurant, cinema, museum, …) however they can also tell you what they’re doing if they wish.
Until the next myth-busting comment response… PS Hang on whilst we iron out the problems some of our users are experiencing with the location selection engine and thanks to Dennis and our users for their continuing positive feedback!
As Mobiluck growth accelerates, with 1,169,438 members and counting, our team is drinking lots of coffee to ensure the happiness of our members. You will find here all the news, stories and announcements of the team !
