Synchronica, a developer of mobile email and synchronization solutions, today announced new functionality within Mobile Gateway 4.0 that pushes social networking and news updates to any mass market mobile phone.
A wide range of popular social networking sites, such as Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, LinkedIn and Plaxo are supported in addition to thousands of other leading news, financial, and sporting feeds.
Updates are automatically pushed to the user's mobile phone whenever new content is made available. The integration is based on Mobile Gateway's standard JCR-compliant plugin architecture which connects to any site that supports RSS feeds.
Global registrations amongst all social networking sites are expected to grow exponentially until 2012. In 2008 alone, Twitter recorded between 5000 and 10,000 new user registrations each day. The emerging popularity of social networking services present new revenue streams for network operators who license the Synchronica Mobile Gateway 4.0 push email and synchronization platform.
Mobile Gateway 4.0 enables network operators to enhance their data and mobile advertising revenues by providing subscribers with a simple method of receiving preferred social network and newsfeed updates whilst on the move. Updates are either pushed as emails into a separate mailbox on any phone supporting the OMA EMN (Push IMAP) industry standard or delivered as an SMS, MMS, or WAP Push.
The use of social networking services within emerging markets is exploding. Comscore reports that the greatest year-on-year growth of social networking subscriptions comes from the Middle East & Africa (66 %) and Latin America (33 %). Synchronica believes that in emerging markets where consumers are often reliant on internet cafes, the mobile phone is becoming the primary tool for accessing digital content.
Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, comments: "Consumers, even in emerging markets, are increasingly looking to connect to social networking sites from their phones. This is confirmed by recent research from Informa which reports that 55 to 60 million people globally already use their mobile phone for social networking. Synchronica Mobile Gateway 4.0 takes this a step further by pushing updates from popular social networking services in addition to thousands of news feeds to any basic mass market phone. We are connecting two mass market trends – email and social networking – and making them available anytime, anywhere, and on any handset."