mig33 has been in the news recently for raising gobs of money from high profile investors. Our first contact with mig33 came about, when it was selected as one of Asia’s Top 10 apps, a contest run by e27 and SingTel. The sheer number of votes for mig33 during the polling period, caused us to worry about our server crashing. This definitely piqued our curiosity and we went to their upscale office in Clarke Quay to find out what exactly mig33 does.
mig33 can be broadly defined as a mobile social networking application. But if your idea of mobile social networking is Facebook for iPhone or Twidroyd application, it’s time to look at a whole different realm of social networking that doesn’t involve real life identities, check-ins or only photo sharing (read: Instagram).
Much like Tencent’s QQ, mig33 is primarily a mobile application that encompasses hordes of social networking features such as chat, chat rooms, blogs, forums, groups, profiles, leader boards and provides range of services that include social games, dating services, classifieds, content portals and the list goes on.
mig33 launched in late 2005 in Australia as a mobile messaging and voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) product. It then evolved into a mobile social network application with social games and virtual content. In an interview with GigaOM early this year, Steven Goh, mig33′s chief executive, attributes the success of mig33 product due to pivoting the product to focus on virtual goods business and social games.
Unlike other feature phone mobile applications, mig33 doesn’t make any money through operators or advertising. It has a virtual economy where users buy and trade mig33 credits to play games, exchange virtual goods, make calls and use messaging services. This has spurred the merchant model in which merchants can purchase mig33 credits in bulk and sell it to the rest of the user base, making some money out if it.
mig33 has also recently launched a game developer program, to boost its social game offerings and provide game developers access to 40 million registered users on its platform.
Based in Singapore, mig33 has raised a total of $34 million in funding from various well known VC firms and is three to four months away from being profitable, according to Goh.
mig33 moved to Singapore in Oct 2009 and since then, its registered active user base has grown to 60% and the revenue multiplied 7 times. It has 40 million users and is growing at an impressive rate of 30,000 – 40,000 users per day in addition to delivering a billion messages per day.
This application primarily runs in J2ME and is now available on Android. When I asked Goh, if he is even considering an iPhone application, Goh responds, “Not an interesting platform for us. iPhone hardly has any penetration in the emerging markets.”
According to Goh, 99% of their user base are from the emerging markets and their largest market is Indonesia with 20 million registered users. mig33 was also the top free application in Airtel App Central, an application store by India’s largest telco, Bharti Airtel. It has several million users in India which contributes to about 30% of their user base. It also has a large African user base consisting mainly of Indians.
mig33 was based in Australia when it started, moved to California after receiving venture funding and then moved again to Asia to get closer to its customers. Having spent enough time in both North America and Asia, Goh had some interesting insights into how the mobile market in these two continents differ greatly. We’ll be covering that and other interesting features of mig33 in the part two of this article.
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