Mobile technology is en-route to take social networking from its infancy to the highest level. Coupled with dynamic marketing strategies, these services will be greatly complemented by viral marketing as well. The potential for growth in this domain in huge and the key challenge now is for those operators to monetize the interest.
Such a business model should be enabled with the right technology. The technology that enables this should focus on a platform that can accommodate thousands of subscriber-created pages, and the content can originate from even non-technical subscribers. The platform should converge web-based technology and mobile technology to offer ultimate ease of use to the interested subscribers to create their own applications.
The marketing effort can then be complemented by publishing the applications and be open to dynamic viewing, searching and rating engines – providing a different flavor to app stores.
The sustainability of a subscriber-created VAS business model will be dependent on technology that can eliminate capital expenditure and reduce incremental costs to the operator. This will funnel thousands of subscriber created applications to the operator, creating a long-tail business benefit.
Sampath Paranavitane is general manager of hSenid Mobile