Interview: Snaptu Turns Any Mobile Phone Into A Smartphone

Snaptu is a mobile application that everyone who owns a mobile phone absolutely needs to know about, particularly the 4 billion users out there without a Smartphone. What this free app does is bring masses of apps available to iPhones to your regular cell phone, even a $20 dingy old thing you got in Thailand, as long its Java enabled and has internet. The company was founded 3 years ago and has acquired an astonishing 14 million users so far. It works on 2,500 different phone models and contains access to many web hotspots with the most recognizable being Facebook, Twitter, Picassa and Flickr. At this stage in their popularity, mobile operators actually seek out Snaptu for rights to install it in their phones because it offers major appeal for consumers who aren’t already in the smartphone scene.

The technical details of why and how the app is so easy to use are a bit daunting but the core idea is that Snaptu is a cloud based application. This gives virtually any phone the power of a server and automatically circumvents device fragmentation. This prevents operators and device manufacturers from having to develop and maintain multiple versions of mobile apps for their phones and prevents users from having to download each app individually and constantly upgrade them. Another perk is that you can add as many apps as you want without downloading.

I had a chance to get a quite detailed presentation from Snaptu’s VP Business Development, Lior Tal, and I have to say that I didn’t know I could do so many neat things on my old-school Nokia.

Social Times) What is the value proposition of Snaptu?

Snaptu) For the user, it’s the availability of the best internet content regardless of device and the lack of hassle. For carriers and mobile device manufacturers, it’s the easiest way to get the top social networking and lifestyle apps to their entire device portfolio without having to worry about fragmentation and with the fastest time to market. Snaptu apps are always updated, as they run in the cloud and don’t actually reside on the phone itself. Case in point is India’s largest mobile operator Airtel that offered Snaptu through their app store and received a half million downloads in less than 6 months.

ST) Which phone models use Snaptu most?

S) Nokia series 40 and pretty much any other Nokia device (available on OVI), Sony Ericsson, Blackberries (available on App World), as well 2500 various phones from all manufacturers.

ST) Android and other Smartphone operating systems are becoming increasingly popular – is this a problem facing Snaptu’s popularity?

Snaptu constantly moves ahead with the evolution of the mobile Internet market. At the moment, 95% of the devices out there are not I-phones or Android. We already see Android based devices developing quite a fragmentation, and as Android popularity increases, we will be there as well.

ST) What is your main demographic?

S) The countries with most usage are Indonesia, India, U.S., U.K., South Africa, Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, China, Russia, Philippines and Venezuela. 37% of our users are female and 65% are male. The most popular age group is 18-24 and then 25-34.

ST) On any non-smartphone phone, can I do everything on Facebook and Twitter that I can from a computer?

S) Well, almost everything. We are constantly improving the applications and adding more features based on user feedback. For instance, we recently added the ability to get Facebook notifications and soon we will come out with some quite exciting new features.

ST) How is Snaptu different than its competitors?

S) Some technologies that tried to resolve the fragmentation problem used to exist but pretty much died out along the way such as ‘Widget Engines’. Our real challenge is reaching mobile users who don’t know they can use internet on their phone or think it is complicated. Snaptu is so easy to use that if people knew about it, they would certainly use it.

ST) Can you describe Snaptu’s business model?

S) At the moment our revenue source is mobile advertising through integration to leading ad networks. Our servers can serve ads into any Snaptu app instantaneously without requiring the content owner to interact with the ad networks. These networks include Google’s AdMob, inMobi, Yoc and many others. Down the road there are many more exciting products which will be introduced into the Snaptu platform, allowing content partners to monetize their mobile apps, much like the actual iPhone app store.

ST) Are you undergoing marketing efforts to acquire more users, what are they?

S) Snaptu’s viral growth is amazing; our users are doing incredible work sharing Snaptu with their friends and we’re on any major app store. We already have 4.5 million users of facebook on Snaptu, and over 850,000 followers on Twitter though this should grow and we need to reach more masses of mobile phone users.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.