Ozmota: another mobile social networking effort
Written on January 29, 2008 – 11:16 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We often hear about mobile social networking companies launching. A few examples are Zingku (Bought by Google), Loopt, Berlin based Aki Aki, Helio, Moco Space, Denmark based Zyb, Bluepulse and Frengo but I’m sure there are countless others. You can imagine that I was skeptical when I heard about the soon to launch Ozmota. They are based in Barcelona, Spain with R&D in Australia and a focus on Europe and Asia.
Ozmota’s slogan ‘Anything in life gets better when you share it’ surely doesn’t count for money, girlfriends and underwear. The main difference between Ozmota and their competitors is that they have a clear B2B model and will focus on Telco’s such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon instead of the end user. The site clearly reflects this with ManagementSpeak such as “Ozmota’s carrier grade platform, SMACC™ (editors note: not to be confused with ’smack’; slang for heroin) integrates social network services, ad and search capability, published and user generated content all seamlessly linked into our geo spatial database”. I’m sure Telcos love it.
Now it is easy to make fun of a website of a company that hasn’t even launched officially but in all honesty I do think they have stumbled on a huge opportunity. Their competitors are all spending their energy in attracting end-users which means they don’t have to make all those difficult deals with Telcos. Ozmoto is taking a top down approach. The founders of Ozmota, Matthew Kapp and Simon Button, appear to have good connections to the telecom industry and see to understand that all the Telcos are scratching their head right now looking for a way to monetize their users by offering them more social services. They can simply wait for Facebook or some of the companies listed here to steal all their members or come up with their own social service. This will be what Ozmota will be able to deliver.
Ozmota is currently looking for funding and will be at 3GSM in Barcelona which will take place 11 till 14 February 2008.
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