Tuesday feature: Wadja got in store for us?

Wadja is billed as a “marriage between mobile messaging and social networking” by its founder and Managing Director Alex Christoforou. Impressive talk as one would expect but with more 3 million customers using the service, we thought it only right to look at the marital foundations in more detail.

Why should the mass market care?
Unlike many other social networks, Wadja does not rely on users bringing a social group to the service. Many social networking sites rivals are only truly useful for a user if their peers have signed up to the service, as the services are often contained within the network.

Wadja’s key strength is the openness of its service which brings provides a messaging platform to be used by each member of the Wadja tribe, as they are referred to, wishes. This is summarised by Christoforou (left) who states that “the network’s strength is its service, not the people”.

What services are brought to the table?
On a basic level, Wadja enables email on mobile (using an “@wadja.com” address), and multi-screen web-browsing, aimed at overcoming the issues of single-window browsing on mobile. This is billed as a major reason for the somewhat sluggish adoption of mobile internet as it prevents users replicating a PC internet experience on a mobile device.

The service allows the pooling of multimedia on the internet, from sites like YouTube and Flickr, and will add contacts from a range of email servers including Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and many more. The PC client affords the same functionality as Wadja mobile which effectively provides an internet-based communications hub accessible from a terminal (PC or mobile) using the principles of enterprise cloud computing.

Christoforou discloses that the biggest driver of new users is the free monthly SMS service. That’s right, upon sign-up each users is allocated 100 monthly messages to be sent to any mobile phone in any network, any country. The service is monetised by MessageAds, a system which places 40 characters of advertising linked to the content and theme of each SMS.

For those who prefer, a premium, ad-free service messages are available to buy in bulk on a pay-as-you-go basis. This service has proved popular with individuals and companies looking to buy bulk messages that are below the smallest amount offered by bulk messaging firms.

Although the bulk message service may not be of interest to many mass market users, it highlights the sound business model which Wadja operates. Indeed, Christoforou is keen to stress that, unlike other companies that are counting the cost of not monetising their services sooner, Wadja’s finances are healthy and the revenue model dependable – the company, and its system is in rude health and unlikely to affect its users.

What is the competition?
As Wadja offers a vast range of services to its user-base it is difficult to define its competition. On one hand, email services for mobile, such as Google’s Gmail application, rival it purely by bringing email to mobile. Mobile instant messenger (IM) and VoIP companies (like Truphone, fring, Trutap) are more obvious rivals as they too offer a mash-up of internet communications, although neither mobile IM nor VoIP are yet to enjoy anything close to success of mobile email. The likes of MySpace and Bebo offer similar social networking and mobile options, albeit with a focus on the PC-experience and considerable marketing budgets – they also lack an email service.

Our verdict
Wadja is definitely worth testing out, particularly for those looking for free messages, email on mobile/PC and a taste of the potential of mobile social networks.

For the service to truly live up to its “marriage between mobile messaging and social networking” we would like to see a continuation of integration with mainstream social networks … we suspect there are more developments in the pipeline.