With the ever-expanding mobile entertainment space in full view, wireless carriers are working feverishly to bring their customers enhanced access to the social networking sites of their choosing. There’s money to be made on all sides, and not just with the household-name variety like MySpace.
The question carriers get stuck on is which social networking site to partner with. Should they throw all their weight and investment into one social networking site or diversify their lineup with multiple partnerships? While some carriers have inked short-term exclusive deals with the more popular Web sites, almost all carriers, regardless of their market, are looking to partner with as many social networking sites as possible.
Enter Intercasting Corp. The San Diego-based company has developed a Java application that it says enables dozens of social networking sites on one application. Its Anthem platform is designed to free carriers from having to install individual applications from each Web site while putting the smaller social networking sites on an equal playing field. Of course, the application won’t skirt the agreements that are required between a carrier and each social networking site it wants on board.
“We’re thinking about presenting mobile social networking apps with a low learning curve and giving them an online experience,” Intercasting CEO Shawn Conahan said. “We wanted to build a platform that would enable the category.”
Each of the social networking sites provide similar features: blogs, comments, pictures, messaging and networking. While Intercasting users can quickly scroll between different social networking sites with a single click, the feature sets between each is rather universal. “It’s essentially a container app,” Conahan said. “Our relationship with the social networking sites is technical in nature.”
Virgin to launch in April
Intercasting has been developing the application for more than a year and has inked deals with Sprint Nextel Corp. and Virgin Mobile USA L.L.C. with more coming soon, Conahan said. Sticking to Intercasting’s business model of overlapping inclusion, carriers have not asked for exclusive deals. “The carriers learned with SMS that all ships rise with the tide,” he said.
“Carriers are in the business of facilitating communication” and want a tool to provide a gamut of social networking sites to their customers, Conahan said. “We’re basically handing them a turn-key mobile strategy.”
Virgin Mobile USA, which closed its deal with Intercasting last month, is sticking to its previously scheduled April launch into the social networking sites scene. “Our whole goal is to give our customers as much of a diverse selection of social networking sites as possible,” said Jayne Wallace, director of public relations at Virgin Mobile USA. “It seems that Intercasting is the only vendor with the multi-site application.” OZ Communications Inc., a Canadian company with a considerable portfolio of wireless carrier and manufacturer clients throughout the world, has announced a similar application that it plans to release later this year.
Wallace said Facebook is the only social networking site that Virgin Mobile USA uses today, but it may bring others into the platform before it launches. The MVNO is trying to focus on what it calls “tier-two social networking sites” such as BlackPlanet and Xanga.
