Abphone is this month’s “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week” coming to you from mjelly.com here at Mobile Zeitgeist.
abphone – “snacking the web”
abphone is a mobile search engine that focuses on multimedia content that you might want on your phone including:
- images – photos from a range of photo sources including flickr and social networks such as friendster
- video – specially adapated mobile video from the likes of Daily Motion and Youtube
- games – provided from a range of free and premium mobile games publishers such as Glu, Gameloft Twistbox, Hovr and Greystripe
The service is operated by a French company and was launched in 2005. Abphone have a basic web-front end for the service but mainly operate through a mobile web front-end at m.abphone.com.
abphone has a great user-interface which is designed specifically for mobile – you can quickly access the content you are looking for. The service has become especially popular with users looking for images, for example to use as free screensavers or wallpapers for their phone.
abphone is getting big traffic
By offering a high quality, easy-to-use service which is easy for The service abphone offers has been delivering some pretty good traction:
– 400k unique monthly visitors
– 100+ million page views per month
– 500+ million searches since launch
- 15 sessions per active user per month
ab phone has achieved this success with almost no spending on marketing or advertising. The majority of their traffic comes from viral recommendations as well as through carriage deals with all major operators in France including Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom.
The business model is based on a mixture of advertising revenue and premium sales from the games content. To date, abphone has been completely bootstrapped with no external or VC investment. This puts them in a great position to sell to another mobile search or online search company – perhaps some-one like taptu might buy them…
With google increasingly focusing on offering a standard web search service to mobile users it’s really important that mobile-only search engines like abphone are developed to offer something more specific to mobile devices. With traffic growing all the time abphone is in a great position to benefit from the growth in mobile search and mobile internet.
You can find abphone on mjelly which is a directory of the top mobile sites other stuff including mobile softwares and free message tones
Author: James Coops has worked in the mobile internet industry since the dark days of ‘wap’ all the way through to the present day. In 2001 he developed one of the first mobile web sites to allow downloading of content over the mobile internet (previously this was done over SMS). He then spent 7 years working all over the world as a consultant for mobile operators, media companies, service providers and investors including the likes of O2, Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile, Discovery Networks, FIFA and Goldman Sachs. James has also written for Techcrunch UK, Mobile Industry Review and New Media Age Magazine and runs a directory of mobile sites and applications at http://mjelly.com (PC) and http://m.mjelly.com (mobile) and blogs at http://blog.mjelly.com. He loves Germany, especially the Weiss bier!
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