Speaking at the recent mobile advertising launch at Vodaworld, Vodacom\u2019s Rick Joubert said that the company is planning to extend its services into the social networking realm with its own mobile platform.<\/p>\n
Joubert said that people should envisage a combination of MySpace, Facebook and MXit with location based services thrown into the mix.<\/p>\n
This platform will allow members to interact and share information in a variety of ways – including blogging, messaging and video uploads & downloads \u2013 with the added advantage of making the service location specific.<\/p>\n
A system like this has clear advantages like sharing information about traffic and weather \u2013 which\u00a0are both time and location specific \u2013\u00a0using a mobile phone.<\/p>\n
Vodacom is developing this social networking service themselves from the ground up and it will be a free standing, proprietary system.<\/p>\n
This new platform is likely to be funded by mobile advertising. The fact that Vodacom will know the user\u2019s location and personal details allows for very targeted, relevant advertising.<\/p>\n
Vodacom is aggressively targeting the mobile media market, and has recently launched their On-The-Line mobile advertising services. The company expects mobile media adspend in South Africa to reach R1.5 billion by 2011, and this new channel will allow it to expand its current operations in this space.<\/p>\n
The new mobile social networking service will initially be launched in South Africa, but Vodacom pointed out that they are \u2018thinking big\u2019 which indicates that an international launch later on may be in the pipeline.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vodacom is planning a mobile social network service, simply called The Grid, merging MySpace, Facebook and MXit with added location based advantages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cellular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}