August 1, 2007
Parsing the global (social) network
What are the kids doing in Mumbai, Marseille and Mexico City? Some fascinating new data from comScore suggests that social networking has so far been a distinctly regional game. The big question of the next two-three years is whether this regional tendency will become entrenched, or whether a small handful of global powers will win out.
The audiences of MySpace and Facebook are still heavily biased towards North America. Friendster, on the other hand, blew its early lead in the US but is still the clear favourite in Asia, while Google’s Orkut is dominant in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Bebo, thanks to its UK origins, is skewed towards Europe.
Less noted because of its broader geographic reach has been Hi5, a San Francisco-based network started by two Indian engineers in 2003. Of course, having a broad audience spread across a lot of places is not necessarily a path to success. Most social groups are by nature local, so critical mass in any given market seems essential.
According to Ramu Yalamanchi, co-founder of Hi5, there is an interesting cross-border dimension to some parts of the social networking business. Some of his company’s biggest markets are Spanish speaking, and benefit from connections between family and friends trying to stay in touch around the world.
Yet the real fight is about to take place at the national level. A place among the top three in any given market is essential, says Yalamachi. He raised $20m of venture capital last week and plans invest that in further tailoring the service and building a sales force in targetted countries.
On that measure, MySpace’s massive early audience lead looks daunting. Even with less than 10 per cent of its audience in Asia it can almost rival the reach there of Orkut, for which Asia has been a clear success story.
the “New Office”, to win, needs mobile video-conference between mobile phones-pc-pda-etc. , lets hope Palm and others get it right and fast, i don’t speak good chinese yet ! , the http://www.fcc.gov/ auctions in the 700-Mhz band spectrum must deliver the goods to the USA economy, the kids need to start inventing new apps in those bands,and with music too ! , its sales,multi-conferences and presentations,legal dealing and negociations, it’s the works and with mobile video-conference on IP, that and streaming video is open-source, how could the Patent Office give anyone a patent after every University in the USA and Europe was using it since the 90’s ? who runs the Patent Office ? , the “New Office” is mobile, simple, easy apps, fast and pushes inventions of batteries, solar power cells, hydrogen little fuelcells, motion chargers,etc., a launch pad.
Posted by: blogger | August 7th, 2007 at 6:20 pm | Report this comment