Cellfish throws hat in social networking arena

Cellfish Media L.L.C. is the latest company to join the social networking stampede with a new community site designed to bridge the gap between mobile phones and PCs.
The company launched an ad-supported portal, Cellfish.com, designed to allow users to upload and share photos and videos from their phones. The effort builds on the company’s traditional paid content offerings, and offers a variety of free and premium images, video clips and ringtones.
Cellfish.com also features a content locker where users can store their downloads in case they lose their handsets or upgrade phones. Content lockers have gained popularity as a premium offering from carriers and application distributors, but are quickly gaining favor as a free feature in an effort to lure heavy consumers of mobile content.
“We believe there will be more access to the Web from the phone than the PC in the next few years,” said CEO Fabrice Sergent. “The site will feature both user-generated content, licensed content from the big names, and also our own original content.”
The New York-based firm, which is partly owned by the French media giant Lagardere SCA, has gained traction in the United States and a few European markets, operating sites such as BlingTones, Barrio Mobile and Wicked Betty. Cellfish raised $50 million late last year and completed the round with an additional $10 million in April.
Sergent said he is targeting users in their late teens and early 20s in the hopes of buildling a high-profile brand name for wireless content and social networking.
“The real brands that exist in consumers’ minds (in mobile) are just the carriers’ brands,” Sergent opined. “They’re very strong, based on the strength of advertising power, but they’re not very cool. They’re identified as networks, as enabling transmission, but not really capturing imagination like a media brand would do.”
Cellfish’s announcement follows a similar move from Mixxer, which has rebranded as 3Guppies. The Seattle-based startup earlier this week unveiled a widget that can be placed on MySpace profiles to send photos and videos to wireless phones.
3Guppies is hoping to build on its existing audience of 750,000 unique visitors a month with the PC-to-mobile distribution service, and, like Cellfish, offers a content locker for wireless users. The company plans to monetize the service by delivering ads along with the content early next year.
The two announcements underscore the critical role marketing dollars will need to play to drive the mobile social networking space.
“We’re all looking for that breakout” in wireless user-generated content, said 3Guppies CEO John Dearborn. “We’re trying to allow the kids to extend the media of their social networking out to a device.”