Next Generation Digital Services Featured Articles

WeChat: Prime Example of Why Fourth Wave Digital Services are Valuable

By Michelle Amodio
TMCnet Contributor

Traditional mobile services have a bleak future; with voice and messaging services seeing a decline in revenue, operators are smart to find new waves of revenue streams as we enter the fourth wave of digital services.

Perhaps a prime example of offering a fully-integrated digital lifestyle solutions being of value comes from WeChat, a 600-million user platform that allows users to send text, voice, and photos to friends and family. Aside from standard services, users can also hail a taxi, order food delivery, buy movie tickets, play casual games, check in for a flight, and send money to friends. What normally would require several apps is now available in a one-stop solution.

More impressive than the service itself is the numbers generated from WeChat. Aside from its vast user base, the valuation of the company itself clocks in around $83.6 billion, and that is part and parcel to not only the subscriber base, but what it has to offer.

"WeChat's success is a little bit of a game-changer in the take on messaging as a platform," said Adley Bowden, senior director of analysis at Pitchbook Inc, according to Bloomberg (News - Alert) Business.

The success of WeChat, numbers aside, is largely due to how it addresses the changing needs for its user. It far surpasses what social media can do; WeChat has focused on building a mobile lifestyle — its goal is to address every aspect of its users’ lives, including ones that are not of the social variety.

This is what we’re seeing with the fourth wave of digital services; an all-inclusive “apps within one app” solution. For service providers, this means being able to ride the wave towards financial success. There are endless possibilities for the kinds of applications that providers can build on top of the existing framework. New kinds of services layered on existing ones can help their family and friends stay better connected, whether it’s for healthcare reasons, social, or other.

The key is finding opportunities within this industry, and investing early and fast.

"There's not many categories of technologies that are going to consume a mass number of people, and messaging appears to be one of these now," said Brian Blau, social-media analyst at Gartner (News - Alert) Inc. , according to Bloomberg Business. "That's probably one of the most attractive parts for these investors, which is driving those valuations."

The communications landscape has offered an ocean of opportunity, and so this wave offers strong and powerful solutions to change the landscape for the better.