Built the largest social network you've probably never heard of.

Antony's role
Innovator, business model creator, corporate fundraiser, product manager, business developer

The Challenge
Enables mobile operators to enter the emerging social networking market.

The Solution
Develop a zero-rated mobile social networking platform for emerging markets in the era of feature phones when few could afford a mobile data plan.

Results
LifeStore was developed by a small team in Slovenia working for Ericsson and launched by mobile operators in several emerging markets at the same time as Facebook became a global phenomenon. It enabled a zero-rated gateway to Facebook as well as several other legacy social networks, allowing consumers to be connected 24/7 and not just when they were on WiFi. While some markets refused to zero-rate data traffic and failed to gain traction, American Mobil went all in across Latin America and by the time Facebook removed the syndication APIs, LifeStore, under the :Plugger brand, was second only to Facebook in number of users in Mexico and lived as a significant social network in its own right. With daily traffic on par with Wikipedia and more traffic than Yahoo, :Plugger served up to 40 million mobile ads a day via Ericsson Ad Orchestrator. The service was eventually shut down by the American Movil group, and users on Telcel and Claro were offered access to Facebook Zero instead.

Lessons learned
Service innovation is usually the preserve of well-funded start-ups. Mobile operators will always struggle to launch innovative services to consumers, but in the rare case where they have a majority market share of the target audience they are targeting and a willingness to go all in, they can succeed. Also, don't misunderstand the power of big companies to crush your business.