Ok – so we’re not exactly regular blog posters here on wordpress but that’s mainly because we’re posting daily into our own blog systems within Mostyle and associated communities.

One fantastic project that we’ve been involved in for nearly a year now has been with the No.1 Telco in the Philippines – SMART Communications.  SMART covers everything from mobile phone service to broadband and phone service so it only seems right that they have a cross-platform entertainment portal with they’re very own community/social network.  This new entertainment portal is named Sandbox and their social network is called My Groups.  The Mostyle Platform was chosen to power My Groups and with some refinements and customizations is proving to be a real hotspot for web users at the moment in the Philippines.

Check out the awesome TV Commercial that was produced as part of the national launch and see if you can spy elements of Mostyle there

New Enhancements Launched!

We’ve just launched a collection of new enhancements to the Mostyle Platform (and our partners).  The goal has been to improve the usability on the handset, add more help and support messages, make photo management easier and generally to increase the visibility of the dynamic elements of the community.  Here’s a big list of all the goodies:

User Interface
- The screen layout has been enhanced to place more focus on dynamic information
- “Back to Home” at the base of every page will return the user to their Home page
- The desktop experience now has the Profile Panel (top left) replaced with an Actions Panel to provide shortcuts to key functions
- On mobile the Factoids function has been moved to the Settings Panels

Advanced Happenings
- View media thumbnails from within the happenings
- Verbose happenings to cover a wide range of events (i.e. excerpts from photo, video and blog comments)

Notifications
- User notification of events that may require you to take action (i.e. new friend request, comment on your blog etc.)
- User notifications also trigger an email for each event (these can be turned on/off via settings)

Advanced Blogs
- Blogs can now be edited
- Blogs can have a photo attached
- Friend and all blogs can now be browsed

Groups
- Groups can now be created
- Each group can contain discussion topics and a photo album
- Group Creators can mass invite friends
- Group updates are shown in the happenings of members

Photo/Video Albums
- Photo/Video albums can now be created
- On-handset management of photos/videos into albums supported
- Photos can be reused across Albums, Avatars, Groups and Blogs
- Photo/Video Titles can now be edited
- Updated Photo Viewer to show the next and previous photos as thumbnails
- Bulk uploading of photos/videos can now be achieved through the email upload option

Here’s a few more screenshots running on handsets.

What’s coming next?

We love communities and we have a very solid growth strategy around whitelabel mobile communities and aggregated communities.  I’ll have to do another big blog posting about my views on “Communities vs. Social Networks” but with the proliferation with social networks we see the opportunity for a re-emergence of interest based communities on mobile to be very strong.

New Features! Ok – there’s been a HEAP of requests from both end users and partners as well, as well as internally so over the New Year Holidays we collated our favourites and had some external advise and put together a short list of features and enhancements that aim to improve user content management and finding like-minded people to communicate with (= fun++).  Some of the coming enhancements (which will be launched in the first week of february)are :

1) Groups – Create, manage and join groups from your mobile.  Groups contain a discussion board and photo album.

2) Photo Albums+ – One album is never enough (I’ve felt) so we’re introducing the ability to create and manage your own photo albums directly from the mobile.  Along with this functionality comes the ability to attach a photo to your blog post, group details and profile avatar.

3) Advanced Happenings – We’ve improved on happenings to be more informative and cover a wider range of events which will give you more visibility over happenings across your friends, groups and blogs.

4) Notifications – Want to be notified when someone has replied to one of your comments or shoutouts?  Notifictions will alert you to actions that require your attention and most importantly – keep you in the loop!

5) UI Enhancements – The Mobile UI is getting some slight changes to focus on bringing dynamic information to the forefront.  This ensures that every page brings you the latest information and community insight.

I’ll post some screenshots as we smooth things out towards the end of the week.

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

To celebrate our launch we’re holding a month-long competition to see who can create the most vibrant mosite that best represents their lifestyle and personal creativity. We’ll be giving away a limited edition red IPod Shuffle to the winner.

The Challenge: Users have one month to use Mostyle’s mobile site builder to create the grooviest mosite ever seen. We’re making it worth your while by giving away a Limited Edition IPod Shuffle 1GB to the winner, as well as inclusion on the Mostyle Inspiration Page. The second place runner up will also be included on the Mostyle Inspiration Page

Competition Guidelines:

1) The mosite must be constructed by using the Site Builder

2) Any panels may be used to construct the mosite

3) Any mostyler can enter

4) Only 1 mosite per user may be submitted

5) The winning mosite will be selected based on public ratings/votes within the 3 week competition period.

6) The mosite with the highest rating and most votes is the winner.

7) No adult or offensive content please!

The competition has been running for two weeks now, and with a flurry of entries, competition is hot! Entries Close on Monday 23 June, 2008 at midnight. For full details or to sign up please go to http://www.mostyle.mobi. If you would like to submit an entry to the competition email competitions@mostyle.mobi and mention the site’s URL, your name and your email address.

Good luck!

http://mostyle.mobi/competition

After a good 9-odd months of being in beta, trialling new features, collecting feedback and fine-tuning Mostyle we’ve said goodbye to the (often poo-pooed) “beta” phase. So now, we’re as LIVE as can be, no more holding back the tidal wave has come!

So what’s new? Most of the changes are on the Mobile Site

Publishing side of things, whereby our users seemed to be stumped by the complexity of the site editor and the limited number of templates. We realized that the “average joe” wanted more guidance in the template system so we decided to add more templates (5) which will give a much clearer picture of what kind of mobile site they can create from the outset.

The new templates are:

• Mobile Ad Landing Page: Incorporating a simple layout best for highlighting and eliciting service enquiries
• Mobile Brochure: A more detailed layout to promote a business, product or service
• Flickr: Utilizes the new flickr panel and lets you access a full flickr photostream (links off to Flickr’s mobile site as well)
• Blogger: Utilizes the new blogger panel to display a number of blog posts
• WordPress: Utilizes the new wordpress panel to display a number of blog posts

You’ll also notice that we’ve streamlined (if not overhauled) the site editor tool so that it’s quicker to load, more intuitive and has additional help information. We’ve also got a very cool new bulk file uploader which is great for uploading a heap of graphics and also a thumbnail cropper (very fun!). There have also been a lot of refinements in how sites are created, published and managed.

With Mostyle LIVE comes a whole lot of exciting events and promotionals (mainly around our lovely city of Melbourne) including our official Launch Party and a host of surprise appearances. We’ve got an exciting mobile site building competition starting shortly and also we’ll be on display @ CommunicAsia coming up in Singapore (17-20th June!).

We’re preparing for the official launch of Mostyle next week (yay!) and because we’re busy preparing for a fun filled few months ahead, we thought we’d give you the heads up on what you can look forward to!

Its now less than a week until we officially come out of beta mode!! This means launching our new look landing page, new features, and new panels. This includes panels that mobilize your content direct from sites like WordPress, Blogger and Flickr.

We’re also going to a GIG – the Get into Games event in Ballarat on May 16th – 17th. We’re going to be reaching out to students from all over Victoria and giving them some hands on experience with Mostyle.

This is a great event aimed at educating and entertaining students about cool new gadgets entering the market place, and how they can get into the gaming world, recreationally and professionally.

That’s all the exciting news that I can officially leak today, but stay tuned for more events, openings and possible club events that are sure to pop up all over the place very, very soon! Until then, we’re occupying ourselves with some heavy testing, and bug fixing so we can make sure your mostyle experience is as seamless as possible!

And before we sign out for this week, we’d like to wish Josh from the development team, a very Happy Birthday!

While the developer boys keep developing and exciting stories from the ICT expo flood the Mostyle office. I have been busy looking into issues surrounding online safety for users, especially minors.

Less than a month ago the Police Home Office Task force, consisting of representatives from industry, charity and law enforcements from around the world, collaborated to produce a document out lining a list of rules and regulations that social networking and online interactive sites should be aware of, and abide by.

This article is an invaluable source of information and guidance for companies that provide a platform for users to interact with other users. The article ‘Good practice for the providers of social networking and other user interactive services 2008’ is available on the police home office website http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/operational-policing/social-networking-guidance and is extremely informative.

The internet is an amazing platform for people to enrich their understanding of the world, expand their friendship bases, and increase efficiency in day to day functions. As a twenty year old, I have grown up with the internet as a part of my life, as will the next generation, and so on. I take for granted being able to Google search information, book holidays and catch up with friends, all from the comfort of my home.

However I do not take for granted my safety. I am constantly aware of online predators, the privacy and the security of the sites I visit. I credit this to the online education I had at school, and the horror stories I grew up with, regarding children who had not been protected when using the internet.

Today, information on safe internet use is not hard to find. I have attached a listing of websites to this article that provide parents and cares with an enjoyable, interactive means of educating youth on how to use the internet safely.

Further more, at Mostyle, we are taking this opportunity to stress the importance of educating users, of all ages, about the dangers they can face when interacting with other users online. Being a platform that encourages social interaction between users, sharing content and fostering an online community, we feel it is our duty to provide our users with safe, clear and accessible information about how to use Mostyle safely.

Mostyle is a site that is restricted to users aged thirteen and over. If a user is under the age of thirteen, they are asked not to sign up. In light of the aforementioned article, we are putting in place further measures to protect minors from accessing Mostyle. These should be up and running in the coming weeks. As well as putting in place age restrictions, we are putting up a list of guidelines to help users use Mostyle safely. This will be available with the terms and conditions, as well as else where on the website.

For more information on using social networking sites, and online interactive sites safely, Mostyle recommends the following sites for reference

http://www.crewjo.com/index.htm

http://www.cybersmartkids.com.au/

http://www.virtualglobaltaskforce.com/

http://www.chatdanger.com/

http://www.ahtcc.gov.au/

ICT Expo in Hong Kong… a note from Alex

“As a bit of a post-show report I’m happy to say that we had a great deal of attention and over the 4 days I was kept on my toes. Overall the response was above expectations and we expect to see a much greater presence of localised versions of mostyle dotted throughout Asia in the coming months. Much thanks goes to AIMIA (Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association) who supported us throughout the show.

A quick shout out goes to Crewjo (http://www.crewjo.com) a creative and innovative Western Australian Company who have developed a series of animations that aim to help kids address social issues such as dealing with bullying”.

What makes a good mosite?

Aside from mostyle’s social networking elements, mostyle prides itself on being an easy to use platform for creating and publishing your own mobile web site – a mosite.

So what can you make your mosite about?

The beauty of mostyle is you can make a mobile site about pretty much anything you like.

If you’re a large business or a small business you can use a mosite to advertise what you company offers to potential customers, detailing a photo flip through of the latest catalogue, or images of what you have on offer, or examples of work you have done in the past. If pictures don’t do your business justice, you can include articles and news feeds to keep your customer market in the know, where ever they are.

If you’re into art and design, you can use mostyle to exhibit your work, making it available to share with people from your mobile. This can be useful for folio work for students, instead of lugging around your folio, take a snap shot of your images and carry them around in your phone.

If your a mad blogger and love to share you thoughts with the world, you can blog away on mostyle or add in an RSS feed from your blog to your mosite, enabling you to take your blog with you where ever you go (coming soon applications for blogger.com and wordpress.com users).

If you’ve been on holidays and want to share your adventures with friends, make a mosite containing all your photos, and access them from your mobile, instead of lugging around print outs, or your camera (coming soon is a flickr photo sharing application).

When it comes to making a mosite, the only thing holding you back, is your imagination. So sign up or login and have a play around today! J

It’s a massive week here at Mostyle. Alex is away at the ICT Expo in Hong Kong working hard on getting the word out about Mostyle! While Alex is jet setting around the world, we are back home in Melbourne pushing out a whole lot of other changes that should make your Mostyle experience better than ever (or at least make it look prettier)!

New Headings!

You might notice the new page headings across all pages on the website. This new font was tailor made for Mostyle by our web designer friend. It fits in perfectly with our new landing page, which will be unveiled next month on the date of our official launch!

Moworld on Rotation!

So every time you browse through Moworld on the Mostyle mobile protal, you will see different sites. Providing you more sites to look at, without having to search through ones you have already seen. Remember if you keep coming back to a certain site, you can join the club for that site, making it easily accessible from your homepage every time you login.

About Mostyle

Ever wondered who’s behind the genius of Mostyle? Well now you can find out who we are, and what the Mostyle story is by clicking on the About Mostyle link. Situated on the footer on the website landing page, you can see who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going!

Male and Female Avatars!

For new members signing up to Mostyle, or older users who don’t have an avatar put up just yet, we have personalized the default avatar. So if you’re a girl you can have a pink avatar, and if you’re a boy you can have a blue one! If you don’t like the default avatar, why not upload a photo or an image that best represents you? Click onto ‘edit profile’ on your home page (on the website), and select and image from your desktop and upload it! There you have it!

Site Editor

Also you may notice on the Site Editor page a link on the top right of the page leading you a place to customize your site. We moved the customize link from the home page and moved it here, allowing you to edit and customise you site from the one place. If you are new to the customize link its purpose is allowing you to change your colour scheme, site details, such as the site description and tags (tags are descriptive words that describe your site, allowing your site to be searched by search engines like Google). You can also upload and banner and an icon for your site, so it’s a good one to use!

Mostyle Blog!

And last on our list of new features is a tool for you to use when you’re on the go – introducing the Mostyle Blog. The Mostyle Blog is an easy way for you to blog when you’re out and about, letting all your friends know what you’re doing. The most recent of your blog entries will appear on your profile for all to see! So start your blog today! The Mostyle Blog is accessible from you home page on mobile. Login to your mostyle account and you’ll find the ‘My Blog’ link in between ‘Change My Settings’ and ‘Factoids’.