Mobile social networking company and Maxis Developer Programme member company, IGM Mobile, has established a very strong presence in this region within months of its launching and IGM Mobile company director, James Peh attributes a lot of its good performance to the MDP Programme.
“We benefited from the excellent marketing recommendations that the MDP was able to give us through their consultancy services.” Also, the MDP offers a good channel into the Malaysian mobile business. “Through MDP, we managed to speak to Maxis and secured a six month exclusive tie up for our friendship service.”
The friendship service is known as Frenclub! and it works as a kind of mobile ‘Friendster’ according to James. People sign up via a simple SMS registration process and after the application bulds up a profile of the member, it looks for peope of similar interests and introduces them via SMS. Frenclub! Members can then choose to text each other and build friendships.
The service has been a hit. It is now available from all Malaysian telcos and is interoperator enabled. The Frenclub! service is a relatively low priced as there is no registration or monthly fee. Members only pay for sending text messages while received text messages are free. Users also have options like the ability to blacklist unwanted contacts.
“We started the service on 21st March 2006 and in just nine months we have built a user base of over 150,000. Our customers like the interactive menu user interface. There are no codes or complicated steps to remember. Since the success of friendship services is heavily dependent on the number of potential contacts available, this has meant that Frenclub! members have the opportunity to find the right friends.
The Frenclub! service launched here was based on learnings from similar applications in China, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong. There was, of course, heavy re-design, customization, and modifications.
“We took the bae application and built a version suitable for this region. The Malaysian oepration is also responsible for launching these services in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. So we made it multi-lingual and it’s become totally different from the version in East Asia,” says James. IGM Mobile had assistance and support from MDP throughout the development phase.
James says that IGM Mobile has big plans to expand and also grow the product. “Frenclub! isn’t just a SMS based service. There are choices for MMS, voice and 3G services on the Frenclub! mobile portal.” For 2007, James will be busy rolling out these enhancements as well as launching the Frenclub! service in Indonesia and Philippines which he considers to have huge potential.
Further developmental work is ongoing and IGM Mobile has plans to develop Frenclub! like services that can help communities or group network with each other.
“We are always on the lookout for ways to enhance our products and MDP has proven helpful in this regard. We attend their activities to get exposure to new technologies and advances in communications,” says James. He recently attended an MDP organized event that introduced the possibilities of building application using Flash.
We hope to continue to work closely with MDP as we roll out our new services.
(Source: Mobile World, February 2007)
