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)

Gaming is BIG Business and gets BIGGER

Entertainment Software Association has released a new report about video game usage in the U.S.

The report discusses a variety of items including purchase intent, demographic data, online gaming activity, and which games are most popular.

Some of the highlights from the report include:

• The average game player is 35 years old
• 40% of game players are women, 60% are men
• 26% of gamers are over 50
• Halo 3 is the most popular video game over the past year; World of Warcraft is the most popular computer game
• 47% of online gaming is in one of these categories: Puzzle/Board/Game Show/Trivia/Card
• 41% of Americans have purchased or plan to purchase one or more games in 2008.

(via ESA)

3D Printing a website away with Shapeways

Shapeways

• A spinoff of Dutch electronics giant Philips Electronics, has figured out a way for artists and ordinary consumers to print 3-D models of their creations for a mere $50 to $150.
• The tool allows budding artists, product designers and amateurs to use their own familiar tools to create 3-D models of their designs.
  
• Then they can order 3-D physical models of the designs.
  
• The company will deliver the molded plastic models in 10 days or less.
• It accepts formats such as STL, Collada and X3D.
  
• The designs can be “white, strong and flexible,” “cream robust,” “white detail” and “transparent detail.”

Questions :

• How do they work/judge the pricing ?
• How do I master using software which is associated with STL, Collada, X3D (Where do i get the software for this)?

I love this idea and think its very very cool but I still have to verify the designing aspect cause that could be a bottleneck to otherwise this extremely VIRAL concept (Can anyone send me an invite :D)

Check out the awesome video here

Mobile content sales in Japan cross $100Bn and counting

Martyn Williams has an interesting look at the Japanese mobile content market.

His notes for the calendar year 2007:

• More than $100 billion was spent on mobile content (the total was actually $107.5 billion)

• Sales includes items such as ring tones, Web site subscriptions and e-commerce purchases.

• E-commerce made up about 65% of the total amount spent (transactions include: movie and event ticket sales, travel reservations, air and rail ticket sales, stock trading and online auctions).

• The biggest percentage gain came from "high-fidelity music" which increased 42% thanks to more mobile devices handling better quality sound.
  

• Mobile gaming jumped 13% as well.

• E-book market expanded 220 %

(via Yahoo! News)
(Image Credits here and here)

Mixturtle: Deezer or Better ?

MixTurtle

• A new music search engine that will source for music from other networks so that you can stream them for free
• All you have to do is type in the artist you want and a long list of music you can stream will appear.
• To play back music, you click the artist/track label. Click again to pause. A slim submenu emerges directly below the chosen song, which displays the buffer bar, the number of sources discovered to hold said track, and an option to browse other sources.
• You can even create your own playlists, save them and listen to them at a later date.

Gone are the days when you had to tediously look for music online or stream music from MySpace–the Mixturtle makes it so easy!