Ever since Mark Zuckerberg surprised everyone, including his board of directors, by snapping up Instagram with a $1 billion offer, people have been wondering: Who's next?
Speculation has centered on a handful of apps that facilitate sharing of videos over social networks, including SocialCam, which has a reported 40 million users, and Viddy, which claims 28 million.
You could put Mobli into that camp as well. It's social, it's a photo- and video-sharing app, and, while its user base is a lot smaller than SocialCam's or Viddy's, it's growing fast, with 2 million of its 3 million users having signed up in the last two months.
Moshe Hogeg, Mobli's founder and CEO, has a different comparison in mind: Google. For him and Mobli, social is just a means to an end. The end is building a visual search engine -- one that can show its users "everything worth seeing in the world."
"We're trying to build a platform that eventually will give you eyes everywhere," he says. (I spoke with him at TechCrunch Disrupt in Manhattan last week.)
The idea for Mobli struck him in 2009, when he was attending a concert. Hogeg witnessed "a thousand hands up," holding camera phones pointed at the stage. At that moment, he got a text message from his sister saying, "I wish I was there." Hogeg envisioned a service that would allow her to be, vicariously, by viewing the images produced by the people who were, in real time.
"You already have eyes everywhere; it's just not connected yet," he says.
While Mobli resembles Instagram superficially, with tools for following your friends and adding visual effects to your photos, those features are somewhat beside the point -- there because users expect them to be, but superfluous to the real experience. "We're playing this game, the filter game, but this is not our essence," he says.
The essence involves the subject-based tagging of photos and videos, which allows them to be viewed by users outside one's own network but with an interest in the subject. Had Mobli existed in 2009, Hogeg's sister would have been able to search for the band's name and see a stream of videos and photos from those 1,000 smartphones. Face- and image-recognition software allow for easier tagging.
To satisfy as a visual search engine, however, Mobli first has to achieve much greater scale. Hogeg believes Mobli will hit the tipping point at about 15 million users, a milestone he hopes to reach within six to eight months. The company's not-so-secret weapon for attracting new users is its all-star cast of investors, a group that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Lance Armstrong.
"Maybe the best way today to attract users quickly is celebrities," says Hogeg. "For us, it made sense taking money from guys like them because they have added value. People are going in to follow Leo, but they're staying inside because they love the product."
It might seem strange for someone like DiCaprio, whose extreme dislike of being photographed without his permission is well-documented, to invest in a company that uses facial recognition software to give users eyes everywhere.
"Leo understands he can't fight it," says Hogeg. "It will happen, with him or without him. It's better with him."
Not only does Mobli allow its celebrity investors to profit from the era of universal surveillance; it also gives them a platform for their own creative endeavors. Maguire, says Hogeg, has been producing episodes of an interview show about personal breakthroughs and using Mobli to gauge interest. "It's like a pilot," he says. "If it gets a lot of feedback, he can do a TV show."
While Mobli hasn't yet rolled out any monetization, selling advertising on premium content, a la YouTube, is one avenue it anticipates exploring. Another is what Hogeg calls "the Twitter model," or promoted accounts for brands. Advertisers may also be able to sponsor tools like photo filters.
"We're not trying to go down the road of being a zero-revenue company that gets acquired," he says. "We're trying to build a company that will go public."
In fact, he says, four months ago, an entity he declines to name did offer to buy Mobli. Hogeg says it was "a very nice offer, but not enough to betray what we want to do." Had he been offered $1 billion, as Instagram was, things probably would have been different, he acknowledges.
Then again, if you think you're building the Google of visual search, what's a measly billion bucks?
