Nurtured in Australia, with a pan-Asia fan base in excess of 50 million, a cool new social networking service called mig33, is making an audacious bit to outdo Facebook on its own turf. With canny partnerships in Japan ( GREE), China (TenCent) and the US ( Openfeint), they hope to offer developers a massive 825 million strong market for their apps and services like chat, virtual gifts and games.
On Monday, Chris Chandler, mig33’s Singapore-based Vice President of Business Development, evangelised the opportunity at a gathering of Bangalore’s best and brightest application developers, inviting them to target the huge Indian diaspora worldwide with games and apps that would have a special appeal for them. In India alone mig33 had quickly built up a 7 million strong user base ( accounting for the major chunk in S Asia which had 9.6 registrants at last count).
Interestingly the fastest growth came from Nepal – and on a pan-Asia scale, Indonesia accounted for the biggest chunk of mig33 users, Chandler said. Since its July 2011 launch here, leading Indian developers like Nazara and Anantarupa Studios had come on board. To tap the market of youn Asian users who might be challenged by the need to have a credit card or Paypal account, mig33 had put in place a 5000 strong network of merchants who sold ‘credits’.
There is no registration fee for prospective developers to join the mig33 platform and the revenue sharing is approximately 70-30 in favour of the developer, Chandler clarified.
http://developer.mig33.com  www.mig33.com  Aug 22 2011