Sunday, July 15, 2012

Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg And Mobile

English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Fac...
English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Facebook, at the press conference about the e-G8 forum during the 37th G8 summit in Deauville, France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fred Wilson: July 1: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is
Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

User experience is not the only big change/challenge for companies trying to navigate this transition. Monetization is different too.

Approaches like display advertising don't work as well on mobile as they do on the web. And they don't work that well on the web. ARPUs (avg revenue per user) on mobile are lower for display based revenue models on mobile across the board.

On the other hand, commerce works great on mobile if you have a well integrated (one click) purchase experience. The freemium model (whether it is virtual goods in games, in app upgrades, or something else) works very well on mobile.
Mark Zuckerberg: July 13: Zuckerberg Says Mobile Shift Is His Biggest Challenge
Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his hardest job right now is figuring out how to adapt the world’s largest social network to mobile devices.

Bringing Facebook’s features to handheld gadgets is difficult because the user experience is so different than on desktop computers......

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