Social Networking

With the rapid growth of sites and services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the relevance of social networking for the mobile sector has been cemented as a driver for web adoption.

Our client, a leading Independent Software Vendor (ISV), was looking to develop an innovative mobile social networking solution to increase the adoption of Multi Media Messaging (MMS) based services. The challenge lay in not just developing a compelling application but in developing a solution that could help operators monetize data services using mobile advertising, while enabling mobile users to connect to their social circuit for sharing experiences.

Monetizing Experience through a Social Networking Solution

To address these challenges, the client was seeking to develop a social networking solution that would support multiple social networking sites, allowing end users to connect to their friends. Simultaneously, the solution would have to enable operators to monetize data services. After evaluating many Experience Engineering solution providers, the client selected Aricent to provide the complete solution - from conceptualization through to the design phase and on to delivery of the final solution.

Along with a core group of user experience engineers, a strong team of experts well versed with WAP, MM7, MM1, Java and Web Services worked dedicatedly to develop a compelling solution. The Aricent team managed the entire project, instituting processes where needed, from project execution to test reporting.

Leveraging years of proven expertise on Linux, Tomcat Apache and the MMSC (customer platform), Aricent’s experts provided a comprehensive line of services to deliver a unique mobile social networking solution. Some of the salient features of the solution developed by Aricent are:

• Value Added Services (VAS) for publishing user generated multimedia content from a mobile handset (via MMS) to a Social Networking site
• Portable across any MMS enabled handset; does not need a separate client
• Intuitive WAP interface for end-user subscription along with web-based subscriber management
• Highly scalable, and optimized based on target hardware
• Supports multiple Social Networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and more
• Allows operators to communicate their brand attributes through a customized UI

Results

The client successfully developed a compelling social networking solution that increased the adoption of data services for the operator and reduced subscriber churn. The solution increased the data traffic significantly; it was estimated that VAS ARPU would grow by 20% by deploying the social networking solution. The solution also allowed the operator to become more than a data pipe provider by providing a platform to rollout services that were easy to monetize. This social networking application also helped the device manufacturers/operators to up-sell feature rich handsets, in alignment with the operator’s end user acquisition strategy.