Mig 33 - Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week from the mjelly directory
This is James from mjelly touching down here at Mobile Industry Review for another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week”. So far we’ve looked a two mobile web services – the mobile community Peperonity and the mobile search service Tatpu. This week we are moving to APPLICATIONS with a look at Mig 33.
What is it?
Mig33 is like a mobile hybrid of the messaging platform Meebo and the VoIP service Skype, provided as a downloadable Java application for your phone. The service lets you sign into the various IM services (AIM, MSN, Gtalk, ICQ etc) from your phone. You can also chat and message in a range of internal chat rooms and use social networking features and photo sharing. Mig33 also enables users to make VoIP calls and send cheap SMS using an internal prepaid credit system. The company was founded in December 2005 in Australia is now based in the US.
Why is it interesting?
Mig33 have raised a massive amount of funding for a mobile startup – $23.5m over two rounds from some big hitters including Accel. When you think about it this is a massive vote of confidence in the future of downloadable mobile applications – an investment of this size suggests they are gunning for a huge exit of hundreds of millions of dollars – all from a mobile java app!
The service already has massive traction with over 9m members generating 2m sessions, 45 million messages and 1m pictures shared per day. Again, the sort of usage mig33 is generating suggests that there really is a big potential market out there for mobile software and apps if you have the right proposition.
Currently most of the mig33 user base is in Asia and developing markets like South Africa and the funding appears to be designed to grow the user-base in the US and Europe and create a service with global scale. If mig33 can successfully execute it on this plan it will be great news for the mobile apps industry and mobile 2.0 in general.
See you next week 🙂
You can download mig33 from mjelly, which is a directory of mobile software and other stuff
