Brief

Mobile social networking

Nick Desai

JuiceCaster is a unified mobile and Web social media application that allows users to send content like pictures clicked on a mobile to friends or family on their mobiles and even to social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Orkut in just four to five minutes.

The application allows anyone with a camera-enabled mobile phone to create and consume rich media content from their wireless devices and the Web, and then automatically share it with their friends and family. Juice Wireless is in active discussions with the leading Indian operators regarding strategic on-deck launch plans for the Indian market.

“JuiceCaster is a full social network right on your phone, perfect for Indians who have a well deserved reputation for being very tech-savvy and enthusiastic users of mobile technology,” said Nick Desai, CEO of JuiceCaster. “Around 15 million people have a camera in their mobile and hence India is strategically important for JuiceCaster. It’s a naturally social market and we’re making the sharing of pictures and videos among friends and family as easy as sending a text message.”

It offers cross-platform content access, making it perfect for distributing and sharing mainstream and user-generated content, which, for example, would benefit emerging professional publishers and Bollywood celebrities. The service does not require a dedicated connection, but the faster the connection, the faster the service.

With JuiceCaster’s groups feature, users can share pictures and videos from their phones with several people. Users create groups on JuiceCaster.com and import contacts from a variety of top sites and desktop contact management systems such as MS Outlook.

Presently the content is available in English but by the end of the third quarter Juice Wireless will make the content available in Hindi and in future will consider other languages. The company has a proactive content filtering team that works 24/7.

“In the US, for a similar service, we have a subscription model that charges $3 per month but in India we have not yet decided upon the model but would be looking at different models like pay when you use,” said Desai. The company will generate content-based advertisements that will be displayed when a user accesses the search engine.

Juice has a strategic partnership with Mavin Infotech in Hyderabad for content monitoring and development, as well as an additional application development center in Delhi.