Page 24 - Sphere No.26 (Mar 2010)

22
wants to consume all this useless information?’, but with some information it is like with ice cream. It is
not nutritious, but people still eat it.”
Whatever the new direction, it seems that Asian mobile users will play an increasingly important part
in the future of social networking. IDC’s 2009 regional survey of social network users aged 15 to 35 found
that mobiles have the potential to overtake PCs as the social networking device of choice. In countries
such as China, India, Korea, and Thailand, over 50 per cent of the users interviewed have now made
accessing social network sites via their mobiles a weekly habit.
That mobile social networking trend is also being aggressively cultivated in other markets
by leading telecom network operators. Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings,
which operates the 3 brand cellular networks in the city and Macau, prides itself for being a local
trailblazer in terms of introducing social networking site access via its mobile phone service.
“In 2006, we became the first operator to deliver both Windows Live and Yahoo messaging
services on a range of handsets,” says Raymond Ho, Head of Content Management at 3 Hong Kong.
“The following year, we again led the market in offering Skype as a mobile service.”
As the city’s largest 3G network service provider, 3 Hong Kong helped expand mobile social network
usage in Asia with the launch of the world’s most advanced mobile phone dedicated to social-networking
applications – the INQ1, which was dubbed the “Facebook phone” by the media. “The most popular social-
networking applications in Hong Kong are Windows Live messaging and Facebook,” says Mr Ho.
London-based INQ Mobile, a Hutchison subsidiary, designs low-cost cellular handsets that are
focused on providing a one-click, “always on” interface to various online social networking, e-mail and
messaging functions. Along with Facebook and Skype, the INQ1’s other built-in, easy-to-use Internet
applications include auction site eBay and search engines Google and Yahoo.
Last October, 3 Hong Kong ramped up its mobile social networking strategy with the introduction
of the INQ Mini 3G – a compact handset dubbed as the “Twitter phone” by the press. Users can send
their tweets – text-based posts that each measure up to 140 characters – and re-tweet via the Internet
rather than blog through their service provider’s short-messaging service. Frank Meehan, the founder
and Chief Executive of INQ Mobile, says his company has worked closely with Twitter to
develop a programme for its mobile phone that is always connected to the online service.
INQ Mobile, which has already sold more than a million handsets worldwide since
launching in 2008, offers advanced social media specifications on its products without
the hefty price tag, which helps mobile network operators drive data usage to the mass
market. “We pioneered social networking on handsets,” says Mr Meehan, explaining that
the key to building the INQ brand is to stick to what it does best and steadily improve on
this, which is similar to the path taken by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion of Canada.
According to Facebook,
there are more than
65 million active users
worldwide currently
accessing the site
through their mobile devices
Sphere