January 27, 2008

MocoSpace Raises $4 Million B Round

Erick Schonfeld

13 comments »

mocospace-logo.pngMobile social networking startup MocoSpace raised a $4 million B round from existing investors General Catalyst, Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and former eBay exec Michael Dearing. The previous A round was $3 million in January 2007.

MocoSpace is a mobile-only social network with two million members and serving one billion pageviews a month (from mobile phones). When we last wrote about MocoSpace in August, it had half as many members and pageviews. Strangely, MocoSpace does not connect its members to their friends on online social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. This silo mentality seems a throwback to the days when mobile apps didn’t need to talk to the Web. I guess the kids who use MocoSpace always have their cell phones with them anyway. CEO Justin Siegel explains why he is ignoring the big social networks:


At this point we’re not joining, but it’s not a “political” stance. Our CTO doesn’t believe it’s relevant to us at this point. We’ve talked about letting people import their profiles, but we’ve been able to grow at a nice clip without doing that.

Competitors in the increasingly crowded mobile social networking space include Aka Aki, Loopt, Mig33, Pelago, Twipster, Zannel, etc.

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Comments

Its actually refreshing to see a company that doesn’t jump on the MyFace bandwagon. Since they are doing something different, perhaps they will succeed whereas all the social network hugging ‘mee too’ will inevitably fail.

 

I think its all about stepping outside of the box.

If you consider that Asian phone users primarily use their phones for web access, this makes sense. Since I got my iPhone, I end up using that a large part of the time, and my box mostly for programming/work duties.

Focusing on mobile phones only is a smart idea.

 
 

Doesn’t “moco” mean snot/booger in Spanish?

This industry seriously has the most ridiculously low naming standards.

 

If what James said is true, I can’t believe a site named itself booger. Que loco.

 

michael dearing, not deering. he is one cool guy!!

 
 

I believe Moco is short for Mobile Community - the translation is just a coincidence.

 

Interesting product, however considering that Mig33 has over 10million users I hardly see this as a serious competitor just yet.

 
Álber (Spanish guy) - January 28th, 2008 at 1:47 pm PST

Yep: They called it Booger-Space.

Yo lo flipo.

 

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