How Social Networking Migrates To Mobile

Andrew Perlman, General Manager, Senior VP Content & Community, Vringo

Date: Wednesday, March 12

Time: 2:00 - 2:15 PM

Location: Grand Hall

What happens when social networking hits the (very) small screen? A mobile phone or PDA display may be a bit cramped for Facebook, but as it rides in everyone's pocket and is used to communicate, it's a brilliant medium/canvas/billboard for sharing or selling music. Note, too, that the most devoted social networkers (those born after 1980) have grown up expecting authoring rights on anything with pixels. All this is why the personalization and user-generated content now available to mobile lags way behind the Web's. Ringtones attach phone owner to phone, not to community, and are pretty thin gruel by today's rich media standards. Sending music videos or pictures are a rung up the ladder, but unbidden, potentially intrusive.

So what is the business model for Mobile 2.0? What media in that small a frame will promote self expression, community, entertain and advertise -- without annoying? Andrew Perlman, GM and SVP Content & Community of Vringo, a company pioneering video ringtone sharing, will tackle this question. He will describe the forms that personalization and social networking might profitably take on mobiles, and how they might complement user-generated content on the Web instead of miniaturizing it.