Wow – our last post was back in June 2008.  That’s certainly no way to keep a blog alive..  a LOT has been happening at Mostyle so it’s probably the right time to start sharing the love again (and hopefully keeping it regular).

Starting to see some media recognition.. at least here in Australia. Yay! See our Corporate Media page.

Mostyle's Desktop Experience

Learnings

1) Mobile Communities are HOT! – Being in quiet little Melbourne, Australia means that we miss out on some of the hubbub around mobility in the “hotspots” of Asia, but after our mid-year presence at the CommunicAsia tradeshow in Singapore we’ve seen a huge amount of interest in our branded mobile community service.  Expect to see a few more mobile communities “Powered by Mostyle” in Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines over the next few months.  It was great to see the interest from a wider breadth of customers beyond the usual youth market/entertainment partners and the opportunity for us to service a wider range of vertical markets is apparent.

2) Mobile Advertising is still young: We’ve dealt with all the usual suspects in this space and it seems that the mobile advertising industry still has a long way to go in terms of mature technology, ad-networks and attracting inventory.  Some of the technical issues are around bot handling, differentiation of web vs. mobile browser (and the blurring of them thanks to opera, apple and google), managing click fraud and delivering users to the correct experience once they click on an ad (i.e. it’s useless to push an iphone user to a mobile site using WML).  Our expectation is that this will improve dramatically in 2009 as the technology matures. We also are likely to see an increase in major brands using the mobile internet to increase market awareness and brand penetration. No doubt the right ad to your own mobile phone will generate valuable leads.

3) Shifting userbases: mostyle.mobi – our showcase community originally attracted a large audience from SE Asia including Indonesia and India during the pre-iphone days. In the post-iphone days we’re attracting users from Australia, UK and USA as our top 3 countries.  And interestingly they aren’t iphone users either.  The top3 handset manufacturers hitting us are Samsung, Nokia and then LG (with iphone/ipod taking 6th place).  While I don’t subscribe to the hype of the iphone being the god of handsets – it certainly made an incredible impact on the world by waking consumers up to the possibilities of a more fun browsing experience on mobile phones – the result of which is a general drop in mobile data charges and increase in mobile browsers. (sweet!)  Not to mention that 3G or no 3G – users are still hungry for more mobile internet experiences!

4) Web users vs. Mobile users: We introduced our desktop experience around October last year as a means to provide a seamless user experience whether you access the mobile community via web or mobile.  The motivation for this came about to cater for users that might be at home or at work that still want to communicate with their friends on mobile.  Now at least 50% of the traffic is via desktop.

5) User driven development: Feedback from users has been immensely valuable and through user feedback we’ve improved a plethora of things that just weren’t as smooth as they could have been.  This includes – streamlining the sign up process (no hurdle of having to check email verification), introducing direct file uploading (as an alternative to email/mms uploding), beefing up the blog and many more  – I can’t remember much of last year now .

-Alex