Mobile entertainment company ROK Entertainment Group has announced the “imminent” worldwide launch of GeeSpark, which it claims is the worlds first mobile viral messaging service. GeeSpark will enable users to chat, and share messages, images and
YouTube videos on their mobile phones and forward these to their
friends and groups, in a viral fashion.
According to analyst predictions, says ROK, the mobile social networking market is forecast to grow from 54 million users in 2008 to 730 million users over the next five years. According to a report published last week by Juniper Research, the fastest growth will come from the Far East and China. In addition, Juniper predicts it will be ad-funded mobile social networks that will drive the revenue growth of user-generated content from $1.1 billion (620 million) in 2007 to $7.4 billion in 2013.
GeeSpark has been developed by ROKs Finland-based mobile services development company, Geniem. GeeSpark is currently in invitation-only Beta mode and will be ad-funded. The service is free to join from Geespark.com and is free to use, so long as the user has a data plan in their mobile tariff.
In the past few years, there has been a phenomenon uptake in, and migration from, the use of email onto instant messaging and now onto multi-person broadcast messaging using PC-based social networking services, says Geniem Managing Director, Tuomas Kumpula. We believe the next evolution in the networking space will be through mobile phones.