Italys D2C pioneer Buongiorno has extraordinarily ambitious plans to create new mobile communities and blur them with those on the web and even TV.
How do you feel about the current climate for content?
I think it’s very exciting. The industry has come through a tough time, but now with iPhone, Google and the handset companies all moving into mobile with their own value added services, there’s momentum again. And I’m confident that Buongiorno is well-placed to bring our products to one billion people by 2012.
Why are you so confident?
What’s different about us, perhaps, compared with other D2C companies is that we have a diversified approach. Having bought companies like Freever, Inventa, Flytxt and iTouch we operate across mobile marketing and CRM, community services, participation TV and more. It means that we can offer B2B partners a wide variety of products and many different ways to get them in front of consumers.
Which community services are you working on?
We have already launched Bing, which is a sort of Facebook mobile product. It gives users fast and cheap mobile IM thanks to super low data consumption. It was launched in June 2007 and is free. We’ve had 600,000 downloads, 80 per cent of them registered through viral distribution. And we also launched Share, which blurs the boundary between desktop and handset. Its users can sync their mobile contacts book to the desktop, upload or sideload media between platforms and use tools to edit and share files.
How can you monetise them?
It’s a question of building up the brand and the user base and then building in enhancements that some users will pay for. That’s clearly a D2C play for Buongiorno. But what about your B2B partners?
Are you building community-oriented offerings especially for them?
I think this could be the most exciting area. Look at participation TV. I see it going upside down. At the moment, it’s just a few votes added on to a TV programme. But our vision is of TV programmes based around communities that have a life of their own when the TV is turned off. We want TV shows to serve community concepts we’ve developed first – not the other way round. And we’re already developing them in Benelux and the UK.
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