A global social networking platform, Australia-based MOKO.mobi enables people to, as the company says, “Chat and Share anywhere!” People around the world use MOKO.mobi to meet new people, chat in real-time, upload photos and video plus share links and music. MOKO.mobi is available on 20 mobile operator portals around the world and can be accessed via mobiles and PCs.
MOKO.mobi is designed for consumers between the ages of 16 and 35, who are users of chat sites. With the goal of ensuring an excellent mobile Web experience for all of its users - which leads to longer user session times and increased profits for the company and its operator partners — the search for the best technology is of paramount importance.
Paul Grueber, MOKO.mobi's SVP of Business Development and Marketing, said, "MOKO.mobi is one of the few services that is accessed on mobile phones on all continents and in different languages. In less developed markets, devices tend to have fewer capabilities. We have to make sure our product works on those less advanced devices as well as on state-of-the-art iPhone and Android devices."
To help create a uniformly pleasurable mobile experience — no matter what mobile phone a consumer uses — MOKO.mobi turned to dotMobi's award-winning DeviceAtlas® mobile device detection database.
According to Paul Grueber, "The MOKO.mobi site is fully dynamic. The site recognizes the phone when it 'asks' for content. We don't just have a set of images with static widths. Instead, we use DeviceAtlas along with our own database to serve the optimal experience for the device that a mobile surfer is using."
"Thanks to DeviceAtlas and its deep set of device characteristics, we're able to offer additional site functionality based on a phone's capabilities. For example, with iPhones and Android devices, our site will serve enhanced service since we know exactly what each phone is capable of handling," Grueber added.
"We're very impressed with the quality of information DeviceAtlas provides," said Grueber, "as well as the strong, quick support we receive from dotMobi."
Thanks to its unique market niche and its ability to meet the needs of its users, MOKO.mobi has more than four million active users.
The service generates hundreds of thousands of premium MMS a month plus an average user-time-per-session of 23 minutes on mobile. That means strong revenue for MOKO.mobi and its set of global carrier partners, including AT&T, Verizon, Telefónica (Spain), Telstra, 3 (Australia) and Orange (UK).
Further, Grueber said, use of the .mobi domain has been a bonus in drawing people to the service.
"People typing 'MOKO.mobi' into their mobile browsers accounts for 65% of all our site visits. And given that the .mobi domain is the best mobile naming convention for ensuring a site is found by search engines, it’s no surprise that an additional 30% of our visits come to us via search engines."
Paddy Power is Ireland's biggest, most successful bookmaker with retail, online, telebetting and mobile betting services. The company also markets its services in the UK, and is listed on the Irish and London Stock Exchanges.
Founded in 1988, Paddy Power takes an unconventional approach to betting and gaming, believing them to be firmly rooted in the leisure and entertainment space. As such, their mission is to make “risk-based entertainment” accessible and fun. They offer customers an unparalleled betting and gaming experience, which is great fun, good value and is supported by friendly customer service.
To continue making its services available to customers on an “anytime, anywhere” basis, Paddy Power upgraded their mobile offering and, in July 2008, launched a Web site specifically designed for use with mobile phones – http://paddypower.mobi.
Given the critical and fast paced nature of “risk-based entertainment” and the variety of mobile handsets available in Ireland, the UK and other jurisdictions where mobile betting is legal, it was imperative that Paddy Power be able to provide a Web site that delivers the best possible user experience to the widest variety of mobile phones.
So that Paddy Power Mobile could deliver a compelling mobile service for its customers, they turned to dotMobi and its DeviceAtlas™ product. DeviceAtlas is the world's most comprehensive database of mobile device information, offering multi-sourced data for maximum reliability and depth of information.
To incorporate the wealth of device data that DeviceAtlas offers into the http://paddypower.mobi Web site, the Paddy Power development team created a local application that uses the DeviceAtlas API to handle mobile phone profiling in real time. The site then displays a WML or XHTML version, with cascading style sheets and content according to the device type as profiled by DeviceAtlas.
According to Ciarán McGeehan, Mobile Services Manager for Paddy Power Mobile, “The range of detailed mobile device data available, combined with the support of dotMobi's industry partners and investors, prompted us to select DeviceAtlas as our preferred solution.”
When building their mobile Web site, the Paddy Power development team also made extensive use of dotMobi’s free mobiReady.com service to test the site for W3C mobile compliance.
Since launching http://paddypower.mobi, Paddy Power Mobile has seen a significant increase in traffic from mobile devices, particularly from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and iPhone handsets. More than 300 different types of mobile devices now regularly connect to http://paddypower.mobi to use the Paddy Power mobile Web site.