Synchronica plc, the international provider of next-generation
mobile messaging services, today announced Mobile Gateway 5, a complete
mobile messaging suite that enables operators to offer push email and
synchronization, instant messaging (IM), social networking services
(SNS), and web feeds to consumers and business users regardless of the
handset they use.
Mobile Gateway 5 enables operators to provide a broad range of
mobile messaging services from a single platform aimed at increasing
data usage and subscriber loyalty. Mobile Gateway enables users to
connect to existing internet communities, such as Facebook, Gmail,
Google Talk, and web feeds, driving traffic and user uptake, but also
enables operators to create their own email and instant messaging
communities, creating the stickiness that reduces churn.
Based entirely on open industry standards, Mobile Gateway 5 is a
clientless solution which works on virtually any handset in use today,
ensuring fast take-up in a large addressable market.
New key features introduced with Mobile Gateway 5 include:
Mobile instant messaging – Mobile Gateway 5 enables users to connect
to their existing IM services, such as Windows Live Messenger, ICQ,
AIM, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat. To encourage subscriber loyalty,
operators can also offer their users a carrier-hosted IM community to
chat, send pictures, and see others’ status. Mobile Gateway 5 enables
aggregation of up to five IM accounts and leverages the built-in IMPS
client of most mobile phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and other
manufacturers and provides a downloadable IMPS client for J2ME-enabled
handsets. The Mobile Gateway IM community can also be accessed from a
PC or smartphone, using any XMPP client like Apple’s iChat.
Mobile SNS – Mobile Gateway provides clientless push SNS for a wide
range of popular social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter,
and LinkedIn, to the built-in email clients of smartphones and mass
market feature phones. Mobile Gateway even extends social networking to
entry-level phones by sending feeds and status updates as MMS or SMS.
By simply replying to messages, users can comment on, and ‘like’
friends’ photographs, post status updates, and wall posts and instantly
upload and share photographs taken from the mobile phone’s camera.
Web feeds – Mobile Gateway 5 allows users to subscribe to live web
feeds from a list of operator-defined news feeds (e.g. ESPN, BBC, Al
Jazeera), as well as from any RSS-enabled site of personal or business
interest. Updates are pushed automatically as emails into a separate
mailbox on any phone supporting the IMAP and OMA EMN or ActiveSync
industry standards. On entry-level phones, Mobile Gateway sends web
feeds as an SMS or MMS including text and pictures.
The email-to-SMS, email-to-MMS, and push-to-WAP gateways of Mobile
Gateway 5 connect literally any phone to email, IM, and SNS – ideal for
emerging markets where PC-based access remains limited and entry-level
devices continue to dominate. The carrier-grade solution delivers
mobile email, IM, web feeds, and SNS through established technologies,
such as SMS and MMS for basic handsets, as well as via the industry
standard IMPS, IMAP, and ActiveSync for mid- to high-end handsets.
According to a recent report from Frost & Sullivan on the mobile
IM market in Africa and Latin America, the total market for mobile
instant messaging solutions is estimated to grow to almost 500 million
users by 2015 from almost zero in 2008. This represents a compound
annual growth rate of 54 percent over the next five to six years in
these regions alone.
Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, comments: "With Mobile
Gateway 5, we are providing a one-stop solution for next-generation
mobile messaging. While our competitors are busy replicating the social
network sites with proprietary clients for a rather limited number of
high-end devices, we are using a clientless, industry standards-based
approach to connect users to email, IM, SNS, and web feeds – offering a
true mass market solution with the largest possible addressable market
and service uptake. Mobile Gateway 5 provides operators in particular
in emerging markets with a solution that can significantly increase
revenues from data traffic and can help to combat the number one
problem – churn."
A recent report by Informa estimates the mobile social networking
market will undergo substantial growth over the next three years. At
the end of 2008, there were approximately 92.5 million mobile social
networking users globally, with conservative estimates putting this
number at 641.6 million by 2013.
Mobile Gateway provides push email and PIM synchronization for
consumer mail services such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail / Windows
Live, as well as for business servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, Sun
Java Communications Suite, and Lotus Domino. Unlike other solutions,
Mobile Gateway does not require users to install additional software on
the handset or behind the firewall.
The combination of this zero footprint architecture with an
additional over-the-air provisioning module for service activation
increases adoption rates and improves the overall user experience.
Mobile Gateway 5 uses open industry standards, such as Push IMAP and
SyncML, to integrate with the native email and synchronization clients
built into more than 1.5 billion devices from major handset
manufacturers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, and
others.
For mobile IM, Mobile Gateway 5 supports the standards IMPS and XMPP
and connects to the IM client built into handsets from Nokia, Sony
Ericsson, and other leading device manufacturers.
