John Delaney, Principal Analyst at Ovum comments on:
Orange brings Bebo to mobile phones
The Financial Times reported yesterday that Orange plans to offer its customers access to the Bebo Internet social networking site on their mobiles. Orange's Bebo Mobile service will allow users to update their profiles, add photos, add new friends, view other people's profiles and receive notifications about updates to their profiles. It will also let customers send SMS messages to friends on Bebo. Customers will be offered a Bebo Bundle, including unlimited access to the Bebo site and text messages. Pricing is not yet known. Orange is hoping to launch the service by this summer. The service will begin initially in the UK but will be rolled out later to other countries where Orange has a presence.
'Personalisation and messaging are the only mobile data services so far which have unequivocally succeeded in the mass market. So we believe that services which let mobile users express their personalities, communicate and share content in a richer and more integrated environment could be huge.'
'Mobile operators are grasping the potential offered by mobile social networking, to boost mobile data usage, and to introduce the mass market to the Internet on mobile phones.'
'Apart from data charging models, there are other ways in which current conditions make it hard to implement mobile social networking services in a way that would satisfy the mass market. But we don't think that mobile operators and social networking providers should wait until conditions improve. First movers like Orange and Vodafone can gain significant advantages.'
