next2friendsblog.com

Next2Friends is offering its mobile tools and special brand of social networking as a White Label solution to companies.  For those of you who don’t know, “White Labeling” is just offering your products to other companies to use and rebrand.  So under a White Label deal a company such as Coca-Cola could introduce all or part of our technology, such as Next2Friends Live, into their own consumer sites.  But instead of “Next2Friends Live” they could call it whatever they liked, “Coke Live” for example.  They could also retool the look to include their own graphics and logos, but the heart of it would be built upon the Next2Friends Live code.

Monetizing social networks and mobile tools is a difficult task.  There are scores of innovative products out there that just don’t have a clear path to making any money.  This is particularly true for applications such as Live Mobile Broadcasting.  Sure, nearly everyone who sees it wants to do it, but few are willing to pay for it, and it hasn’t reached a point where a large enough swath of people even realize the possibilities it holds.

Available Solutions

• Real-Time Mobile Video Broadcasting (Live):

Broadcast quality video from the world’s most popular mobile handsets to the web in
real-time.

• Real Time Mobile Social Suite:

Stay connected with your friends and community when on the move. Upload
photographs, ask questions, user tagging to build a closer connection with members
and a full dashboard to keep you informed of your friends latest activities.

• On-Line Communalities and Corporate Portals:

Real- time mobile to web interaction within a community driven and secure
environment including;

• Member Profiles for self promotion, connecting with others posting videos and photos, upload and play MP3s, blogging and wall posting capabilities.

• Chat (IM) with members online with our online chat tool. Create closer relationships with your friends and customers.

• Send text, audio or video emails to your members and community. Stay connected.

• Create opinion polls to find out what people think about your latest campaigns and products. Poll all Next2Friends members or only your online community and obtain real-time video back.

• Find people ready to engage with you in the real world based on specific demographics and profile information.
• Communities pages with advance search capabilities on members and content.
• Viral widgets and content distribution.

If you have an idea for a way your company could incorperate our real time mobile tools or special brand of social networking please drop us an email.

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

There is no doubt that technology can greatly influence society and thereby politics.  Consider how greatly the printing press came to effected Europe’s Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, or the American Revolution and Civil War. Then fast forward to the effect of the telegraph or the first televised presidential debates. With the use of the internet and particularly Social Media  we are seeing yet another sea change in the way people gather information and are influenced by technology.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project conducted research in June that outline this shift.  In 2008, nearly half of Americans (46%) used the internet, email or a text messaging to get news about the presidential campaign, share their views, or mobilize others. Further, the most common online activities were watching online videos, social networking and making campaign donations.  In many cases use of these technologies have doubled or tripled since just 2004.

• 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos - nearly triple the level of the 2004 race.
• 10% say they have used social-networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social-networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.
• 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% who did during the entire 2004 campaign.

Jeremiah Owyang did some quick election day social networking number crunching as well.  He found that in nearly all instances Barack Obama has far outpaced John McCain in the use of Social Media.  Barack Obama has 380% more Facebook and Myspace friends, almost a 1000% more Youtube views and 240 times the number of Twitter followers.  Will this mean that he will be the next President of the United States?  Not necessarily, but you can be sure that future elections will have a growing Social Media component. Good luck to both candidates and regardless of who wins, it will be interesting to see how our new leader deals with the difficult times ahead.

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

A handful of announcements this week regarding the Android OS add momentum to the uptake of Google’s nascent mobile platform.  First, ASUS, the well known computer hardware manufacturer, has announced it’s intention to create Android based handsets for release by mid year 2009.  Looks like they will be testing the models in the Taiwanese market first then bringing them to the west.

Asustek’s 3.5G P552w PDA phonePhoto: CJ Liu, Digitimes, October 2008

Second, Motorola has announced that it will be using the Android platform for nearly ALL  of it’s mid-level phones.  This was an even greater pledge than was first thought a few weeks ago. Motorola also announced that they will be cutting the number of operating systems that they build for from six to three.

Android is very much in it’s infancy.  It is only availble on one handset, the G1 by HTC, but there is very serious work being done to ensure its spread.  Google has begun talking to some of the leading universities in the US about building curriculum around Android.  Universities like Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.  And companies such as Motorola are using Android in products other than mobile phones such as set top boxes for TV.

Add to all this that just this week WalMart and T-Mobile announced they will be offering the HTC G1 at all WalMart stores for $148.88.  Putting an Android phone into one of the nation’s most heavily trafficked chains is definitely a good idea.  It will be interesting to watch the sales numbers.

The future could be bright for this open source platform.  As many others have predicted, we may be set to watch a showdown between an “open” model (Android) and a “closed” model (Apple OS).  This could very well be the Apple verses PC struggle of the new millennium.

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

We have been very hard at work lately.  Some of you may know that a few weeks ago we announced the world’s first free Live Mobile Broadcasting solution for the BlackBerry OS as we brought Next2Friends Live to the BlackBerry Curve and the Pearl.  Well now we’re adding to that list one of the most talked about phones by RIM in a while, the BlackBerry Bold.

The Bold is a fantastic new phone that features all the goodies you’d expect, Wifi, 3G connectivity, a 2MP camera, and the ability to connect to almost any network worldwide, to name a few.  Add to that having a display about which CNET writer Bonnie Cha says, “I was absolutely blown away. I can pretty much say I’ve never seen a better-looking display on a smartphone.”

Next2Friends Live turns a mobile phone into a live video broadcasting tool.  Live video broadcasting from mobile has been notably absent for BlackBerry devices, owing largly to the difficulty in working with the BlackBerry OS.  Next2Friends set about correcting this early this past summer.  There just were too many ways that live mobile broadcasting could be useful to the primarily business set who use BlackBerrys, from tradeshows to conferences to beaming images back home while traveling.

Singing up for an account is free and Next2Friends Live is just one of the mobile offerings from Next2Friends.  Our Social Suite is comprised of SnapUp, truly two click photo capture and upload to the internet, Ask, real time opinion polling, and Tag, real world profile matching.  Besides providing a comprehensive set of real time media tools, the Social Suite delivers much of the functionality of the website to mobile so members can look at and comment on photos, read emails and follow their friends’ latest activity from anywhere.

Here is a demonstration of how to get Next2Friends Live up and running on a BlackBerry Pearl, Curve or Bold.  Happy Streaming!

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

We’ve been hard at work lately developing all sorts of new features and improvements.  The biggest of which was our development of Next2Friends Live for RIM’s BlackBerry Curve and Pearl.  But something slipped by virtually unnoticed lately (except by our members) and that is the launch of the Next2Friends Live embeddable widget.

Essentially it is a widget that displays your live videos.  You can embed it into anywhere that will let you use HTML code, like Myspace or a personal website.  It’s quite simple to use, just copy the embed code from the landing page of your (or anyone’s) Next2Friends Profile, paste it and away you go:

Already members are jumping on this new tool.  Have a look at how new member and active blogger dotlizard has utilized the widget on her website.  It’s also great for musicians, lifecasters, and anyone with something to promote.  It’s pretty clear that fans of virtually anything appreciate the intimacy of live broadcasts from artists and personalities.  But that is not to count out how families and friends are using it to offer a window into their life’s little happenings for one another.  All great stuff, we’re quite pleased with the response so far and ask that you stay tuned for even more features in the coming weeks!

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

Next2Friends has developed the world’s first live video streaming for BlackBerry devices!  It was a long and difficult process but we stayed committed to bringing live mobile streaming to this segment of the smartphone market and are elated and humbled by the response so far.

Next2Friends Live now works on the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl, some of the hottest selling smartphones today.  Here is a demonstration:

To start streaming from your Pearl or Curve all you have to do is head over to Next2Friends, complete the 60 second free signup and install the application!  Happy streaming and join us in welcoming the potentially millions of new live mobile broadcasters!

Next2Friends - It’s NOW!

There has been quite a bit of noise lately around the efforts of mobile networks to supplant traditional methods of internet connectivity.  This is being accomplished through the use of the mobile carrier’s 3G networks or mobile broadband services as they are also called.  Indeed, the numbers are impressive.  In just one year adoption of mobile broadband has gone from 11 million users to 50 million users.  We have watched this trend very closely at Next2Friends as several of our services greatly benefit from better mobile networks.  But what is particularly interesting as of late is not just the move of mobile carriers to being internet providers but the evolution of the hardware that will facilitate that move.

Much has been made of Dell’s new Inspiron Mini 9.  You can see a whole list of features here.  But the interesting part is the fact that there appears to be a space for a 3G card.  And this is just the latest in a long line of computers fitted with 3G connectivity.  Computers by Fujitsu Siemens and Lenovo come to mind.  And partnerships between mobile networks and computer manufacturers seem to be happening all over the place.  Add to that the fact that Europe has seen double digit growth in USB 3G dongles.

And peripherals to this sea change have also begun to surface.  This is T-Mobile’s 3G Broadband Sharing Station.  It allows multiple users to access a 3G data connection.

So is the future of the internet wireless broadband?  There are some interesting doubters.  Principle among them is Dean Bubley, author of the Disruptive Analysis blog.  He argues several points but in general thinks that the trajectory of embedded 3G cards in computers will not follow the same route as WiFi.

Either way, there is little doubt that the way we all connect to the internet will only grow in the future.