I managed to grab a video interview with Travis Katz, international head of MySpace at Mobile World Congress today. In it he talks about MySpace’s announcement of its integration with the new Palm Pre and the new Nokia flagship phones. MySpace will now have integrated apps for all the major phones, including the existing Blackberry and iPhone apps, and it’s the only social network on the Android platform right now.
Katz said mobile traffic to MySpace is exploding at the moment, up to 20m users now, from only 4m a year a go. They are seeing 50% growth in the US, 80% in Europe and 60% in Asia. It’s no surprise then that they view the future of the company as being more and more mobile-based. They’ve had “several Million” downloads of the MySpace iphone app.
I asked him about full streaming of music but while he said they already have streaming video from their WAP site, “music is an obvious extension and we’re talking to carriers about that.”
We also talked about the spilt between native apps and the web, and their desire to bring more advanced services to users of non-smartphones – to which end they re-launched their WAP site this week.
Location based services are an “exciting” opportnity, but user privacy needs to be protected.” Ultimately they see great social aspects to location, but marrying advertising with location is a “hugely powerful opportunity for us”. MySpace is “Focusing a lot of energy on it.”
And what happens after the Google advertising deal ends? Guess what, they “can’t talk about what happens afterwards.”