The firm's technology enables users to update and manage site content from mobiles, writes John Collins
MOBILE SOFTWARE firm NewBay used this week's CTIA wireless industry get-together in San Francisco to announce it had signed a significant deal with US Cellular and to release what it claims is the world's first "aggregated" mobile social networking solution.
The contract win with US Cellular, the fourth-largest mobile network in the US, is the latest for NewBay, which also supplies T-Mobile. US Cellular will use NewBay's LifeCache technology to provide a multimedia album service where users can upload and manage content including photos from their mobile phones.
NewBay chief executive Paddy Holahan declines to place a value on the contract but says it is a "big deal", not just in terms of its monetary value, but because it is with a new customer which the firm can potentially sell other products to.
NewBay also used the CTIA Wireless IT Entertainment 2008 get-together to launch its LifeCache Social Networking v2.0 product, which allows users to access their accounts on multiple services including Facebook, Bebo, YouTube and MySpace from their mobile. Features include the ability to update status in real time, view friends' profiles, browse, download and comment on online media, and send private messages.
The company describes it as bringing together "internet-style consumer innovation with carrier-grade stability".
Holahan says that NewBay's offering was "miles ahead of the pack" compared to similar mobile social networking products on show at CTIA. NewBay has been offering mobile community products such as blogging platforms since its foundation in 2002.
"We did it very early on with lots of first generation stuff and we learnt an awful lot from that," says Holahan. "There's a lot of investment gone into this."
Holahan admits that mobile operators are struggling with how to make popular internet services available on mobiles, without simply becoming "dump pipes" that carry traffic to the web.
"The social networks need activity but the operators don't want to hand the relationship with their subscribers exclusively to the social networks," says Holahan.
One of the major advantages of the mobile platform is that users can be automatically logged into a range of services, using their mobile phone number as a strong form of authentication.
"If you are sitting in the pub, you can update your status across all your networks with a single command," says Holahan. "This provides a single view of your world."
The new software can be accessed through WAP technology, but a richer experience is offered through a client on the handset. Holahan says NewBay will work with operators to pre-load its software because relatively few consumers ever download mobile applications. Orange UK is pre-loading NewBay's software on Nokia N95 phones, and as a result Holahan says it is seeing 50-100 times more usage of its services.
