The companion volume

The profiles of 30 mobile social networking services were sent to the editor tonight. These will become the companion volume to the Mobile Social Networking strategic report.

I'm really excited about these because I believe they capture the state of the art in the segment as of December 31, 2007. Each profile has a description of the service, a table with about 15-20 features (yes, no, some explanations where and when available), a mention of the size of the community in terms of registered users, the geographic coverage, the business model(s), the lessons learned and then...an analysis of the services Future Prospects. The analyses were pretty varied though there are some that share the same technology challenges or business challenges/recommendations. Makes sense since the services are in similar positions (direct competitors).

A lot of those who I spoke with when I was doing the background research for the main report said (when I asked them what they most needed or wanted to read) that they would highly value a resource that compiled information about the available services in an easy to scan, yet detailed fashion. I hope this is going to meet that need. It involved a lot of work on my part.

Now that all the parts of both the main "book" (I estimate it will be approximately 300 pages in length with about 100 figures, 57 of them just in the forecast chapter) and the companion volume (approximately 100 pages) are in the hands of the publisher, I'm beginning to work on the next phase of the marketing (the first phase was just having this page: www.informatm.com/msn ).