(For MMW’s complete coverage of Under The Radar: Mobility, click here.)
So this post isn’t really about marketing. Well, I guess you have to be the ultimate marketer to use your mobile phone to troll fellow singles. (More on that in a moment.)
But I had to share two of the funniest–and oddly compelling–presentations at Under The Radar.
First, there was Smule, which has released several iPhone apps based on music. These guys may be a little cerebral, but their stuff has been selling like hotcakes. The newest, released earlier this week, is “Ocarina”–which turns your iPhone into a flute! Really! Pictured above is Ge Wang, Smule CTO and a professor at Stanford University’s Center For Computer Research In Music and Acoustics, showing how the phone is played almost like an actual wind instrument. Now if only they could create a similar app for the BlackBerry Storm!
Then there was Skout, a mobile dating site that focuses on meeting someone in the same venue or close area as yourself. I gotta hand it to these guys–they found the market glutted with mobile social networks, and found a niche. Thing is, NPR did a story a few months ago about young singles in Saudi Arabia using Bluetooth to remotely troll for romantic interests. (Mobile phone technology–which can be used on the sly, without being obvious–is crucial for young adult socializing, due to social limits that country’s culture places on co-ed interaction.) So there kind of is already a proven mobile dating system. Moreover, I think this might be more niche than these guys think–I mean, who really wants to meet some weirdo trying to contact them via their mobile phone?
The Under The Radar crowd loved these guys–of course, since they’re pre-dispositioned to admire tech of all kinds. What do you readers think?
