Mobile gaming community MocoSpace is releasing the results of a new study focused on virtual goods consumption and engagement by age. The report found younger gamers (25-35) spend the most time playing social games, but gamers over 45 years of age buy exponentially more virtual goods than their younger counterparts. The study surveyed nearly 500,000 gamers on MocoSpace’s network of 22 million users.
Basically, MocoSpace is reporting that age directly correlates with amount of money spent on virtual goods within social games. The older the gamer, the more virtual goods were purchased. Gamers over 35 years of age, who made up 18 percent of gamers surveyed, were responsible for 42 percent of all virtual goods spending. In contrast, 18- to 25-year-olds, who made up 43 percent of those surveyed, were responsible for only 18 percent of virtual goods purchases. → Read More
Mobile social network MocoSpace is launching a $1 million HTML5 Mobile Game Developer Fund to accelerate the development of games played on smartphone browsers.
MocoSpace develops a web-based social network that counts over 16 million users and three billion page views per month. While the network, which launched in 2006, was previously only mobile web-based and prided itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, the site has evolved into smartphone apps as well. The company just raised funding to expand into mobile social gaming as well, specifically for developing browser-based mobile social games. → Read More
Mobile social network MocoSpace has raised $3.5 million in a round of strategic funding from SoftBank Capital. This brings the startup’s total funding to $10.5 million.
MocoSpace develops a web-based social network that counts over 14 million users and three billion page views per month. While the network, which launched in 2006, was previously only mobile web-based and prided itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, the site as evolved into smartphone apps as well. The site makes money with its virtual currency and through advertising and mainly reaches the 18 to 34 age demographic. → Read More
Mobile social network MocoSpace, which has over 11 million registered users, has made its first foray into the world of smartphone applications with an Android app.
MocoSpace, which launched in 2006, was previously only mobile web-based and prided itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device. The site makes money with its virtual currency and through advertising and mainly reaches the 18 to 34 age demographic. And MocoSpace claims to generate 3 billion pages per month, with users mobile users accessing the site over 5 times per day on average. → Read More
Mobile social network MocoSpace now has a count of 11 million members, with 500,000 members forming new friendships every day on MocoSpace. The startup’s mobile only social network targets users who have non-smartphones that have simpler interfaces.
MocoSpace, which launched in 2006, makes money with its virtual currency and through advertising and mainly reaches the 18 to 34 age demographic. The site claims to generate 3 billion pages per month, with users mobile users accessing the site over 5 times per day on average. The site is also generating interest from musicians using the site to share their music, with over 200 artists submitting music on MocoSpace every day. Though not nearly as popular as Facebook or MySpace. MocoSpace is now one of the largest mobile-only social networks. → Read More
This Valentine’s Day, make sure your loved one isn’t texting another love interest while you are out on a date. Mobile social network MocoSpace has released a study today revealing that one out of three MocoSpace users admitted they have flirted with someone else using their phone while on a date. MocoSpace surveyed close to 20,000 of their 10.3 million members for the report.
When asked if they had ever used their mobile phone to break up with someone, 57% said yes, with 48% of those using a text message to end the relationship. 90 percent of users said their “About Me” information is most important after pictures in making the decision to take the first step toward connecting with someone on MocoSpace. 79 percent said the recession had had no effect on their dating habits. And 60 percent did not have a date yet for Valentine’s Day, with 80 of those respondents do not consider it a priority to find one. → Read More
Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October. Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile phone. If no one else is online, there’s little point in you being online, either. And presence detection is another (technical) problem. Even if people have joined the network, how do you know when they are near you? But once it does happen, look out. You could be in a bar and see who’s single, who thinks you’re cute, who wants to talk to you, etc. (if they choose to share that information). Forget meeting via an online dating site and then organizing an awkward in person meeting that usually falls flat. Instead, you can do the online an real world thing simultaneously. We’ve kept an eye on the new startups launching in this space. Check out Rummble, Mig33, ZYB, Mocospace, Aka-Aki, Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, Mobiluck, MeetMoi and Imity, just to get warmed up. But none of them yet have critical mass (Mig33, however, is turning into a very large cheap VOIP provider on the side). LimeJuice now joins the group with a unique product. Users can actually join on the fly, via SMS. And the company is sponsoring party after party at bars and clubs in San Francisco to get users to try out the product with lots of others at the same time. The test results are encouraging – people are using it. A lot. How It Works The goal is to allow people in a bar or other social gathering to learn a little about the people around them, and flirt via the mobile network as a way to break the ice. The details are what makes LimeJuice interesting. It’s dead simple to join and use. First, users can register for the service via SMS. That means if just one person in a bar is a member or even knows about the service, they can tell others and quickly get a core group to join. When you create an account, you tell it something distinctive about yourself (tall blonde, red dress!) so that people searching will be able to → Read More
There are plenty of mobile apps that let you snap a picture and share it with your friends or the world—Zannel, Umundo, Mocospace, Pikki, MobyPicture, Yahoo Go—but one that does an especially good job at just sharing pictures among your friends is Radar. The service is run by Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco startup that has raised $4 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Whenever you snap a picture you want to share, you send it via e-mail to your Radar account. It appears immediately, and everyone you’ve invited as a friend can see the pictures and comment on them—either online or on their phones. The best way to use Radar is to download the application to your phone (it just added a custom iPhone app today). Whenever you log in, you see a stream of thumbnails of every picture you and your friends have posted. The commenting interface is pretty slick (you can plug it into AIM for instant notifcations of when a new comment has been posted to one of your pics). It the key to Radar because it turns each picture into a conversation starter. This only works, of course if you A) have friends on Radar, and B) they post pictures on a regular basis. Radar, which launched more than a year ago in the summer of 2006, has only 600,000 users worldwide. But that number has been doubling every month for the past three months. So we might be at an inflection point here, especially as more capable phones come onto the market that can take advantage of its Web-like features. Radar serves 250,000 pictures and videos a day. Eighty percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices (it also has a regular Website), and 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S. While most of the conversations and photos on Radar are private, you can choose to make them public. And today the company is also launching a public gallery, where advertisers can try to entice Radar members to subscribe to their photo streams. Right now, there are photo streams for the upcoming movie Hitman, pictures of frivolous but funny merchandise from iWoot, top video picks from Vimeo, and CEO John Poisson’s own Radar stream. There will soon be Radar channels from Hendrick’s Gin, iTunes, and the stealth Web video series Nowhere Men (which will focus on a group people “missing” since 2002 and → Read More
We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence detection and information exchange with other users. This is the Holy Grail of mobile social networking, and one of the main reasons for taking the networks off the desktop/laptop environment in the first place. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar. Knowing when your friends are around, and having the ability to meet new people who share your interests (even if it’s just that you are both single), will drive massive usage of networks. But, as with many new services, a chicken and egg problem looms. Until everyone is using this, there is no real reason for anyone to use it. Meetro, an instant messaging service that finds friends based on location, has struggled to gain users over the last couple of years for this reason. Technical barriers aren’t an issue – cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones. What’s harder is just plain getting a critical mass of users. The Failures There is a trail of failed attempts at getting this right. Nokia released Nokia Sensor nearly three years ago. It broadcasts information about yourself to others via bluetooth. Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else, although it is still available for download. Google’s Dodgeball is another example that’s fallen flat – it tells friends (and friends of friends) who are within 10 blocks of you where you are and what you are doing. The New Experiments A bunch of new startups are giving this a shot, too. In a post yesterday TechCrunch UK mentions Germany’s Aka-Aki, Paris-based Mobiluck and MeetMoi (the lone U.S. startup). Another startup is Copenhagen-based Imity. It’s not surprising that most of the innovation → Read More
Forget watching the big social networks slug it out for market share. People want to take their social networks with them when they step away from the computer. That means applications have to be mobile friendly. Most of the big networks have mobile versions of their site, with stripped down functionality. Facebook has, hands down, the best mobile application if you happen to own an iPhone. But for the most part, competition in the desktop arena has limited the amount of attention any of the big networks are giving to the mobile world. That might just give some runway to new startups focused solely on mobile. We recently covered ZYB, a Danish startup that just launched a mobile social network on the back of it’s mobile address book backup service. The specifics of their service largely limit them to Europe, where users have more freedom to add applications to their mobile devices. In the U.S., one of the stronger contenders is MocoSpace, a Boston based startup that launched a mobile-only social network last year (see coverage at MobileCrunch from April 2006). The service is very easy to use from a mobile phone. Registration is dead simple – it took about 20 seconds on my iPhone earlier today. Right away MocoSpace starts to suggest possible friends based on proximity, online status or random selections. You can then add photos and video from your phone (or upload them from a desktop/laptop computer), chat with friends, and create a stripped down “blog” which is similar to Twitter in functionality. MocoSpace says they are serving close to 500 million monthly page views – which is pretty impressive since “almost all” of those page views are from mobile devices. They are also approaching 1 million registered users, and 6,000 new users sign up daily. MocoSpace raised a $3 million in a Series A financing in January 2007. Investors included General Catalyst, Pilot Group and Michael Deering. The company has 15 employees (half in Boston, half in Israel). If you are a startup targeting the mobile social networking space, we want to hear from you. → Read More
