Yesterday at the Mobile Internet SIG of SD Forum featured a talk by a new mobile social site called Wichro. Its product is called ZKOUT. It is currently in private beta that became unexpectedly public when ZKOUT was selected as an Apple staff pick. They have had about 2000 users sign up a day. Not bad for a private beta. Just wait until it goes public.

What is interesting about ZKOUT is that it has been designed to run on the regular web and three mobile platforms, low-res mobile Internet, high-res mobile Internet and a mobile site customized for the iPhone. They decided not to create an iPhone app but to use the mobile web instead.

You can completely create your account on the mobile web without having to create a account on the regular web. With Facebook, you create your Facebook profile on the web and then link your account to a cell phone and network. ZKOUT seems to get around this by completely separating the different layers of the site, such as email, mobile Internet, SMS, MMS, etc. from each other. As a result, they can run on up to 10k phones. They are able to run on 10K phones because they have access to an online list of cell phones and cell phone features that let them tailor the mobile web site to each phone. One such site with this type of info is Phone Index.

The speaker from Wichro was not clear on how they plan to make money. Mobile ads were mentioned as was subscriptions. I could not tell if Wichro was trying to keep their revenue model secret or if they are still working it out. My guess is that they are still sorting it out.

Tags: mobile Internet, SD Forum, ZKOUT

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 12:09 am and is filed under Business Lessons, Web Site Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.