Mobicious: One Part iTunes, One Part Google

Back in January, Michele MacKenzie of Ovum, addressed the key challenges wireless players are facing when growing the wireless content market:

“The market place for mobile content was dominated, in earlier years, by the closed portals of the mobile operators. Those days are over now. We estimate that in Europe 50-70% of content revenues are driven from outside the operator-branded portal. […]An on portal and off portal strategy are not mutually exclusive, they complement each other and are both needed. The walled garden is no longer viable: a single portal will not meet all of consumers’ growing demands. And operators benefit from off-portal content too: it drives revenues from data traffic, and we believe it will also help open the way for advertising revenues going forward.

Mobicious, who just launched this week, try to put the described above into practice; “Mobicious” (a name that came  about by squeezing “ambitious,” “delicious” and “mobile” together) hopes to be the best place for mobile phone users to discover mobile content and services.

How? Mobicious offers a diverse listings of mobile content like mobile services, ringtones, wallpapers, weather alerts and video games. By “diverse listings of mobile content” they mean both on-portal and off-portal mobile content.

Having the mobile consumer in mind, Mobicious wants to be the one place to find everything for your mobile phone, including paid-for and free content, on-deck and off-deck. When particular item costs money to download, Mobicious sends the user directly to the company’s own online store. By This, Mobicious actually addresses the mobile content discovery problem and tries to simply it. Things are simpler when all content is under one directory which includes support, forums, ratings, reviews, and help. Mobicious also copes with consumers fear from hidden phone bill charges when downloading content from off-portals - by deep linking into the content owners’ download pages in case the item has a price tag.

To put things to the test I searched Mobicious for “Madonna” (note that the service is currently available only to US users). As you can see at the screenshot below, I can download pictures and ringers of Madonna, some for free and some require a plan:

 

You can also try the Mobicious mobile web page by pointing your mobile browser to www.mobicious.com.

And last thing, on the business side,

"Mobicious’ business plan is twofold: selling ads on its Web site and taking a cut, about 10 percent to 15 percent, of purchases made that originated from its site. Since the company won’t charge upfront fees, and will make it easier for people to buy features, cell phone carriers are mostly welcoming the idea of sharing revenue, Chang said. “It’s a really easy sales pitch,” he said."

[via the Boston Hearald]

Comments

[Ricky Cadden]

I like this. I'm giving it a go right now, but even before I've seen the interface, the idea is awesome, and really seems to be a win-win solution for everyone, including the carriers/portal owners.

Things like this are what excites me about the mobile industry. This is a big step ahead, in my opinion.

[ladyphoenixx_1999]

The photos from flickr need to be removed, you all have been found out, you have the links according for the cell phone wall papper but there is a lot of folks here that does not want there work given away for free most on here trys to make money professionaly with their photos and you givng them away takes the profit away.. their link back needs to be printed on each photo that you are giving away, proper credit is due to each and everyone. Some peoples photos on here has a "All rights reserved" on their photos. which means you may have the proper links but some of them are not to be used in a commercial fashion, your company is in violation of the CC license based on the photos are being given away for cell phone wallpaper off and away from the internet, that was never part of the cc license agreement. you may respond to the discussion going on r ight now at... http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/43447/

[Xen]

Hi,

Thank you for your comment.

I read the thread at Flickr and saw that Mobicious has already pulled their links to Flickr from their site. Here is their reply.