Uncool Mobility

Visto launches white label social networking app for operators

Visto is announcing a new version at CTIA which includes email, social networking, SMS, IM and photo sharing.

" Featuring an innovative "living address book," VISTO Mobile 6 offers end users expanded push mobile email and mobile social networking capabilities. This living address book combines favorite contacts from multiple sources, including social networks, into a seamless user interface. VISTO Mobile 6 utilizes VISTO's patented push and synchronization technology to keep users constantly up to date in real time on their messaging and social networking activities.

In addition, VISTO Mobile 6 provides end users the ability to filter updates from their list of contacts; meaning each user has the control to see only the updates they truly care about. This eliminates the clutter of unnecessary updates and requests."

Visto will target both small business, SOHO, and consumers with this offer. For operators Visto will emphasize the ability to federate many solutions through one client application and control data costs through Visto's NOC and data compression capabilities. There are no announced operator customers yet.

Visto's product positioning:
"VISTO Easy Setup(TM): End-to-end self provisioning with pre-installed clients, enabling mobile email users to set up their service from their device in a matter of seconds

VISTO worklife.freedom(TM): -- access email from the most popular portal email providers and social networking sites including Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket

VISTO ConstantSync(TM): instantly pushes data right to the phone so the end user is always up-to-date - alerts, emails, status messages - everything is always current. -- get notification of new pictures, posts, and other important events from social networking and photo sharing sites from your favorite contacts pushed to your phone -- share photos from your phone to multiple photo sharing sites. Support for multiple services: send and receive messages from work and personal email and social networking accounts, each with its own inbox, with full attachment handling"

Email sync vendor Synchronica wins MEA distribution deal

Continued evidence that emerging markets in particular want a lower-cost option than RIM's BIS architecture: Synchronica announced they won a deal for ASP distribution with Emericon.

"Emircom, one of the top five UAE-headquartered IT / telecoms systems integrators, has offices across the MEA region in UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Pakistan and is one of the fastest growing systems integrators in the region. Emircom will offer a hosted mobile email and synchronization service to businesses and prosumers in these countries through its Managed Services arm, M/s Telelogic. "

Messaging startup Altexia going under

News out of the UK that Altexia is looking for financing to stay afloat. With several white label providers competing on price it's increasingly difficult to ramp consumers and create a revenue model based on subscription fees.

Funambol secures funding, lands AOL - Open source messaging showing traction

Mobile email startup Funambol announced $US 12.5Mn B round funding and AOL as a customer. Open source is becoming increasingly attractive to operators and enterprises when coupled with adequate support and professional services.

Funambol develops SyncML/OpenSync ad-funded push email and PIM sync solutions. They partner with other startups to provide advertising on their platform. Their business model has changed several times and they are now positioning themselves as a market enabler "help(ing) companies in the mobile ecosystem deliver new wireless services and monetize mass market users". They deliver a free solution to enterprise, a for-fee server solution to carriers both of which are licensed.

They claim the syncing engine has been downloaded more than 2 million times by 50,000 developers. Article with CEO interview here.

"Funambol was recently selected by AOL to help with synchronization for AOL's online and mobile mail services using Funambol's open source software and its scalable synchronization platform. Funambol recently signed a Web services company, two top device manufacturers and a large U.S. carrier," said Carl Stjernfeldt, general partner of Castile Ventures.

Wikipedia has a fairly detailed solution description. The solution is based around registration with a network server via a site where users can configure their account. If synchronization is required with Outlook then an application must be downloaded for PCs and for some other devices, for example, Windows Mobile devices.

Startup vendor Synchronica wins distro deal

Email gateway vendor Synchronica announced a worldwide licensing agreement with a Chinese electronics and handset manufacturer, rumored to be TCL, for Synchronica's Mobile Gateway. (Cross posted at my enterprise mobility blog).

The push email and PIM synchronization software will provide Synchronica a revenue share of 20 percent of all revenues earned by the manufacturer for the service, with a minimum of $1.00 per handset per year.

TCL - known for producing Alcatel handsets - expects to ship about 16 million devices in 2008. The Synchronica client will also be downloadable to existing smartphones and should theoretically have a larger addressable market than the new devices.

This marks the success of emerging competitors who target markets where mobile subscribers are unlikely to have PC access and include backup/restore functionality with lightweight, standards-based messaging clients.

Synchronica is also showing that mobile application startup vendors are moving beyond operators as a channel as device manufacturers are forced to respond to RIM, Apple, and to a lesser extent Nokia and WM devices in bundling value-added services to handsets.

Messaging Startups: Berggi

Berggi is back in the news today with a press release about current success with their new ad-supported email service.

I wrote about Berggi earlier in the year because of disputes about uptake. They are a VC funded startup founded in 2003; their HQ is in Silicon Valley (also Madrid, Beijing) .

What: Berggi  has a direct to consumer offer targeting "young, IM-intensive consumers".

Target audience: Consumers in US, China. Berggi has built a strategy around localizing its service in multiple languages, and marketing it by advertising on websites

Uptake: Claims 2M downloads with “20% of users active online” i.e. 400,000 users.

Solution description: 

IM supports  MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Gtalk, ICQ and AIM networks

IMAP,POP, POPS accounts -- Yahoo mail, gmail, hotmail, AOL mail, etc.

Breaking news, sports updates sent to device

Free Berggi text messages to other Berggi users.

Works on every cell phone, in every country.

Basic service is free

Messaging startups: Emoze overview

of What: Emoze is a subsidiary of Emblaze Limited, created in 2006. Emblaze was founded in 1994 in Israel as GEO International Computer Based Training Ltd. The first Emblaze multimedia- over-IP products were launched in 1996. The company changed its name to Emblaze in 1998. The Emoze free mobile e-mail service was announced in April 2006. They plan on launching an enterprise version as well.

Target Market: Emoze’s target market is individuals and small enterprises. It intends on expanding the product’s capabilities to target enterprises and mobile operators.

Solution Description of the Emoze solution from their website:

Emoze has a client footprint on the handset and a connector running on a PC or corporate network. Emoze is compatible with a large number of mobile devices and is native on Nokia Nseries.

The Emoze mobile e-mail solution will be available in several different packages:

- free direct to consumer version

•

•- planned version for enterprises

•

"The Emoze push server does not store any copies of in-transit e-mail and uses strong encryption (AES-128) with keys in both the sending and receiving devices. This security aspect should be considered a major advantage and Emoze is confident enough to tackle RIM head-on over security issues in its marketing. Emoze is compatible with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes Domino servers and POP3 or MAPI services, including popular online e-mail services, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. Emoze can also synchronise Outlook folders, including the calendar, contacts, drafts, notes and tasks, where such support is available on the mobile device.

It also supports end-to-end encryption from behind the firewall for PC and corporate e-mail. "

Why it matters: The interesting aspects of Emoze to me are:

- Sign that basic push email is a commodity offer that end customers will not pay for.

- Uses a Web 2.0 revenue strategy of free basic offer with hope to migrate customers to premium for-fee services (E.g. syncing contacts and calendar, viewing attachments).

- planned version for carrier-grade implementations.

Messaging Startups: Altexia Overview

What:  Altexia is a small privately held French startup created in April 2001; it claims its main site is located in Bordeaux.

Customers and target audience:  Orange is, or at least was, the main (only?) customer. I can't find any reference to Altexia in the Orange materials any more, it may have been dropped as a vendor (as of April 08). It targets mass consumers with its offer, which in my opinion is as close as you can get to saying you don't target your offer.

Solution Description:  The Altexia web site describes their solution (called MagicMobile) as "scalable architecture based on the J2EE environment" and makes it look as if they rely upon WAP for everything other than PPC, WM Smartphone, and Palm.  MagicMobile platform includes modules which synchronize  emails, calendar and tasks; view and  real-time update emails, calendar, personal/corporate directory and tasks; Voice access from any phone to listen to emails, calendar and tasks; or SMS/MMS Notification for new emails and tasks (real-time) or for the number of emails received (using a predefined notification schedule).

Why it matters: Shows that  Operators are still interested in white label/in-house IM and email as an alternative to RIM. It's also evidence that a small, lightweight messaging client (e.g. J2Me) is still demanded by operators in an attempt to extend messaging beyond SMS to low-end devices.

Reviewing mobile messaging startups 1H 08

To kick off this blog I thought I'd go through a representative set of mobile messaging startups. There are so many it's impossible to keep track so I picked a set that would span the revenue & business models, functionality types, and architectures.

The resulting list:

Altexia

Axis

Berggi

Cortado

Emoze

Funambol

Flurry

Momail

Oz

Renzoo

Synchronica