Jupidi launches mobile flirting site

· New German mobile flirting startup Jupidi has announced a successful fundraising (days after its launch).

· Portal jupidi.de the company offers single teenagers a new flirting service per SMS.

o The service targets users between the ages of 12 and 19 (calls its offering a ‘social enabling service’)

o Users can anonymously contact their crush by sending an SMS to figure out whether he or she feels the same.

o If so, they can continue one-to-one communication - still anonymously - guided by Jupidi’s matching and flirting program.

Jupidi’s matching process

· The user needs to indicate his or her own name, the name of the person they wish to contact, his or her mobile number and a hint about where they know each other from.

· SMS is then sent to Jupidi via the code number 60777.

· User pays 99 cents for the first SMS contact and 49 cents for each further one. Recipients pay their normal SMS fees only.

Company has now received an investment from German venture capitalist Neuhaus Partners (Amount undisclosed).

(via Tornado Insider)

Social network world popularity index

Some interesting observations before we get started

• Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
• Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
• LinkedIn is most popular in India.
• Twitter is most popular in Japan.
• LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.
• Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States.
• MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
• MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.

(via Pingdom)

Mixi.jp still Rules....MySpace and Facebook follow on...Orkut most engaging amongst users

comScore released a new report (report on PC based Social Networking and exclusive of mobile ones) today with stats on the Japanese Web social networking market.

In terms of growth Facebook saw the largest growth percentage at 213%(but then isn't that normal whenever any new viral sites launch but impressive nevertheless).

On the other hand the Japanese leader Mixi.jp clocks over 12M montly uniques vis-à-vis FB which is a little over 500k users.Mobile based networking though omitted in this report is a crucial point as Japan is one of the leading countries in terms of mobile based web access.

One of the startling points is the fact that "Orkut is the most engaging of social networking sites" with stats

• Average Usage days per visitor : 11.5
• Average minutes per visitor : 454
• Average pages per visitor : 1,557

(via comScore)