Operators Sprint and O2 are both offering branded community services from Jumbuck. Jumbuck, which calls itself the world’s largest provider of community messaging services for mobile, is a pioneer in this area, having introduced mobile WAP chat in 2000. Today, it is offering its services to 80 operators worldwide, a number that keeps growing.

Olivia Hilton, CEO of Jumbuck, says that one of the reasons for her company’s success is that it was quick to connect operators to its platform, which its customers link to via their WAP portals, giving them access to millions of users from around the world.

“Most start-ups have to start from a user base of zero, whereas we had the advantage of establishing a large volume of users from day one,” Hilton says.

Jumbuck reported 15 million unique users in the last Australian financial year across its combined services, and Hilton says her company’s services on 02 and T-Mobile accounted for 15 percent of the total WAP traffic transmitted across all operators in the UK in January 2007. “Our services are very ‘sticky’ and that means our user session times can be as long as 30 to 45 minutes, driving great revenue for carriers,” she says.

Among the most popular services that Jumbuck offers are Fast Flirting, a speed-dating service, and Power Chat, a service that provides chat with rich media such as photos and videos. A Spanish-language version, called Chat del Mundo, is also available, along with Chat do Mundo for the Portuguese-speaking markets.

Chat del Mundo was recently rolled out in the US, where 15 percent of the population speaks Spanish.

“When we launched the service with Sprint in December, user figures rose by 20 percent in the first few months,” Hilton says, adding that the service continues to grow at an encouraging pace.

While some operators team up with Jumbuck to offer their own community services, others partner with popular online community sites.

Bjarne Ottherdahl, head of marketing at Lunarstorm, one of Sweden’s most popular online community sites with more than one million members, understands why operators are keen to team up with such communities. He says that not only does his community generate lots of data traffic – it currently tops 1GB every month – but it also offers a huge base of loyal users.

“A big chunk of our users have been members for more than five years and operators could benefit from this loyalty by offering the service,” he says.

As early as 2004, Lunarstorm launched its WAP mobile portal (wap.lunarstorm.se) and although the service, which is open to all mobile users, is not as popular as its online counterpart, Otterdahl says it meets an important demand. “People want to visit Lunarstorm all the time, not only when they are sitting in front of their computer at home or at school,” he says. “When people are out and about they can still update their blogs and write to their friends.”

So far, the mobile service has 15 page views per visit and one million logins per month, compared to the online service’s 50 page views per visit and 25-30 million logins per month. But Otterdahl believes the mobile numbers will grow.

“Once handsets allow users to do the same things as they can do online, and provide a good broadband connection, I think the mobile service will be as important as the web service,” he says. “A community is very much built on being an easy and instant way to message friends, and the mobile service meets that need much better than the web.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen