Nareos Announces Addition of User Generated Content and Social Networking to its Peerbox Mobile P2P Platform
Nareos, the company behind Peerbox Mobile has just announced the launch of a number of new services across their platform.
Among the new services that they will now support the user generated component and social networking elements are the most exciting. From what I can see Peerbox Mobile is making it easier than ever to upload and share your own files including video, audio and images.
I reviewed Peerbox Mobile last summer and gave it very high marks for a number of its attributes, not the least of which was (at that time) a nearly unbelievable selection of free music from artists as diversified as Cocteau Twins to John Lee Hooker.
Sadly the RIAA and Nareos’ desire to be compliant with anti-piracy laws have really killed the number of popular artists available for download. In fact, even checking out their ringtone selection reveals that most of the popular ring tones (for which they are charging $1.99) aren’t even done by the original artists and in fact have the words “sound alike” in parentheses to indicate this fact.
While I’m sure that it will be fun to have an easier way to upload and view mobile video and to share other content with friends, I suspect that this move is - at least in part - motivated by the need to create more interesting things for users to do than browse stacks of artists the majority of which appear to be independent artists that I and probably many others as well have never heard of before.
To my knowledge the company has not released any subscriber numbers and I don’t believe they’ve made any carrier deals or come embedded direct from any handset manufacturer. As with many applications that require the consumer download them to the handset this may be resulting in less traction than they anticipated and thus this thrust into the currently in vogue social networking scene to try and bump up those subscribers.
Granted, this is pure supposition on my part and I’d welcome a comment from Nareos management refuting my assertion; however what is clear to me is that the current model that has resulted in a large catalog of what I would characterize as largely second rate music at iTunes prices isn’t going to be a recipe for success.
My suggestion; either compete on price or upgrade quality to meet the current industry standard. It would also help to get a carrier or embedded deal to drive user growth. Not that I’m telling the company anything that it doesn’t already know, but maybe this outsider’s view will be helpful in getting PeerBox Mobile back onto a path like the one that I thought I saw when I originally reviewed their application.
The other comment I have relates to the actual application itself. One thing that I had trouble seeing in testing the updated application was how the social networking features work. The website really ought to provide some additional information about how to use that functionality if Nareos really wants to maximize what value the social networking component provides.
Things like personal profiles would probably be useful. The other option to consider would be to partner with a company that already has a large user base but lacks the P2P functionality of Peerbox. Again, just a thought.
Originally from MobileCrunch by on Jan 23, 2007, 1:11PM
Originally by Oliver from MobileCrunch on January 23, 2007, 6:41pm
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