Day one at Mobile Internet, Berlin

I've heard loads of interesting and challenging stuff today at Mobile Internet in Berlin (see 'speaking at' links, left). I've met some interesting people too.

I was twittering live throughout, as I will be on April 1 and 2. That means those that follow www.twitter.com/davidcushman get to ask questions, too.
Was great to hear from Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO at GoFresh/Itsmy.com from the stage and to have a conversation with him in a round table. I'm a big fan of itsmy's focus on community first and mobile first. They have an incumbent- rocking model. As Antonio points out a new media leads to new leaders; before cars there was no BMW. Before the internet, there was no google... before mobile there was no itsmy!
I also like the itsmy ad model. Users don't get a share of the revenues they create. BUT they do get to choose if their ugc carries adverts - and if it does, what sort of adverts. The users are allowed the power to treat the ads as content (the content as ads).
Interesting itsmy stats: The first pic of the recent UK earthquake was uploaded to itsmy within 30seconds (only content created on a mobile can be uploaded to mobile). Each user looks at 60pages per visit. 42% had never used a social network before using the mobile-only itsmy!

Cyworld's Christian-Peter Heimbach revealed the South Korean MoSocialNetwork is retreating to asia after a failed european experiment. Christian himself will crop up working in Brighton soon. Brighton types - give me a shout so you can welcome him in, he's a nice chap.

The Cyworld back-track was clarified after Jonathan Macdonald (following via twitter) asked Christian, via me, what the plans for a launch in the UK were. Answer, er none just yet. It's back to rebuild the aging tech with a view to returning someday soon.

Yahoo's Alex Romero had some nice things to say about my presentation (I was on before him, and before lunch!) and talked about new products such as oneconnect, among other things. It allows you to bring together all your social networks merging all your contacts. To which www.twitter.com/stoweboyd asked if yahoo thought this was something we actually want.

I caught up with Alex later and he explained the idea is more about a user gathering their routes to networks in one place - not sharing your digital identities and each identity's connnections. Need to investigate this a little more before drawing a conclusion, I feel.

Alex was fascinated by my eeepc. A few more sales coming Asus' way. Wonder when I'll get my commission...

I was also interested in Tim Hyland's youtube stats eg: every minute of every day 10 hours of video is uploaded to youtube. youtube uses more bandwidth today than the entire internet did in 2000.

Spent some time chatting to Luke Brynley-Jones of Trutap. Aim to catch up with him some more over the next few days. Luke revealed one user had sent 1200 messages in a day. Who knew thumbs could do that? And two Finlands a month are going on to contract in India each month at the moment. Now that's a growing market!

Finally (and apologies to those I haven't mentioned here, I may have reported previously via www.twitter.com/davidcushman) Martin Duval of orange gave us an interesting insight into the orange start-up programme which has orange working with vcs to develop and help new businesses take shape. He's creating a value web in the best traditions.

More from conference tomorrow, Follow it live at twitter.com/davidcushman and look out for opportunities to ask questions.

Starts again at 8am UK time.

Cyworld: 21M uu a month, 16M page impressions a day, $100M a year.

Alan Moore has just posted this on communities dominate brands

Apart from anything else, I hope the headline on this suggests we all could learn a little here.

Visit this link and there's a 100-page plus report on best practices learned from Cyworld to download free.

The interview Alan conducts reveals, for example, that the US version I link to on this site (one's to watch) and have sampled is a much watered down version of the full-on Korean one. So that explains that then!

The numbers alone are staggering. A third of the population of South Korea has an account. And most of them appear to visit almost every day.

Take a look at Alan's full post.

Here's a few highlights from an interview with Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star

"Among the most interesting aspects are Cyworld's business model relying on micro-customization, which concerns not only avatars but the whole page with music and many other functions. Also, the mobile aspects of Cyworld can certainly inspire companies who wish to step into this next 3-billion dollars industry'."

"The key point in Cyworld is its 'real-name policy'. Basically you need to use your real name associated with your official ID number to register. This has become more or less a standard among South Korean Internet services... Real name policy does not damage free speech, it brings responsibility, courtesy and a lot of benefits for users themselves in terms of trust in the information they can find."

"It is useful to note here that most Cyworld users write for their 'offline friends' and not for strangers. They can set privacy levels to their hompy, setting accessibily by content category to themselves only, friends or everybody. The role of the 'il-chon' friendship link is critical here. Visiting friends' pages and friends-of-friends' can help deepen relationships by understanding people better.

"Among the most important issues has been this privacy aspect: many information are at risk on (western) blogs: appearance, name, address, contact info, pictures, relationships, age, etc. Some problems have appeared in services like MySpace."

"what do users value in the service?
This is a critical question to ask yourself as a SNS operator, as it will largely condition service development, marketing and eventually revenues! In Cyworld we found the following drivers:
a). Not being left behind
b). Their creations
c). Their relationships
d). Their image"