What recent trends have you observed in mobile social networking in India?
There had been a lot of activity with regard to many of the popular social networking sites wanting to become available on mobile in Q1 of the last fiscal. We see India playing a very significant role in this space, not only because of the vast population, but also its growing demand on traditional social networking trends.

What exactly are the offerings of Peekamo?
Peekamo offers worldwide free SMS, mobile social networking, mobile-to-mobile, mobile-to-pc, pc-to-mobile, and pc-to-pc services. Our services differ from others in many ways; however, the most noticeable differences are our worldwide service, protection of phone number, and our spam free platform.

Al Sajoo CEO, Peekamo

Is mobile advertising becoming a source for operators to provide VAS and content to subscribers?
Mobile advertising seems to be a very cost efficient way of providing services that otherwise would have to incur huge costs. However, the trend in operator-based mobile advertising seems to follow many of today's web trends, in that they are mainly spam like marketing. We believe that by providing target and non-intrusive advertising to users the audience is much more captivated.

In terms of new offerings and innovative technologies, what are your plans?
Later in 2008 we will introduce many new ways of making our services easier and more accessible. However, our biggest offering will be our mobile software, which will save Indian users tremendous sums of money. The mobile site will enable our Indian users to use Peekamo from their phone. We are also planning to release our widget that will allow other social networks to avail Peekamo services within their offering or even fully integrate through our API.

Based on the huge success of the iPhone elsewhere in the world, we believe that 2009 will be the year of mobile Web in India, and as such the launch of the iPhone in India will play a signification role in our mobile strategy.

What kind of engagement do you have with operators? Are you planning to add content services as well?
We currently provide access to over 540 providers worldwide. And, we are aggressively approaching service providers to ensure complete global availability of our services. Our plans to add content services will also come to play later this year. Further, there are a few unique services that we are yet to release, which will create the buzz with our users and revolutionize content services.

Jatinder Singh
jatinders@cybermedia.co.in