Qpsa - Business Strategies And Suggestions
I wrote a post the other day commenting on how little I admire the Norwgian startup, Qpsa, which ripped off Twitter and translated it to Norwegian. However, I also wrote that this is a valid business strategy, especially if the company ripping off the service is catering to a large market. The best example is probably the Samwer brothers, who built an eBay clone for Germany and later a Facebook clone. Both services got a significant scale such that eBay soon had to buy the clone to establish a German presence.
I doubt that Twitter will sue or purchase Qpsa. Legal action is not probale, because protecting services throught patents seems to be very difficult in the web 2.0 world. The best protection is brand and scale. For being an acquisition target I doubt that the scale Qpsa can get in Norway is significant enough to attract Twitter’s attention. Another important thing is that “all” the interesting people are already on Twitter. So, the early adopters and grown-ups will stay on Twitter.
However, I think Qpsa can be a great success in Norway. What they should consider to do is to target a younger audience. Those, who are heavy users of SMS, MMS and MySpace, but are not interested in blogging. Good marketing and an OpenSocial app for MySpace would be brilliant. Same with good support for IM and cellphone updates.
Anyway, that would at least require that they change the birds…
