South African Naspers and Chinese Tencent owned ibibo.com, a social networking site focused to India has made a tie up with Indian mobile operator MTS India to offer social networking for MTS MBlaze customers.
Currently MTS MBlaze website showing MTS Action Zone including Gaming Zone and Music Zone which are made specially for MTS customers as a promotion of ibibo. But browsing ibibo from MTS MBlaze is not currently free as Yahoo India, Wikipedia, MakeMyTrip, IndiaTimes Shopping and CricInfo are.
Apart from this development ibibo has launched a new feature called ‘MyVoice’ which enables users to post voice status updates directly from their phones irrespective of GPRS enabled or not. This service is very simple – first register your mobile phone with this service, and to record and upload the voice status SMS ‘RECORD BEEP’ to 58247 or 5676746. Or you can just click one link on web. SMS will cost Rs3/SMS from most of the operators.
After that they will receive an incoming call from ibibo asking to record their message like voice mail. The audio of recorded message will be uploaded as a new ‘beep’ on ibibo immediately with a status of “I have recorded a new voice beep on ibibo. To listen, sms PLAYBEEP <code given by ibibo> to 5676746 or go to link given by ibibo”. As per my personal experience this service is cool enough to attract new users to ibibo, as Indian social networking sites like Zapak, Bigadda, IndyaRocks are not as par with Facebook or Orkut here.
Ibibo also launched Group SMS over the past couple of months. It allows users to create and subscribe to groups, enabling one-to-many and many-to-many SMS. Ibibo hosts some most popular online social gaming like "The Great Indian Parking Wars" and "Teen Patti".
