Oz to bring social networking to cell phones

Oz to bring social networking to cell phones

By Reuters Privately held Oz Communications, a maker of wireless messaging technologies, will announce on Wednesday a new product allowing people to access social network sites over their cell phones.

Oz will offer a technology that lets cell phone companies and handset makers load a connection to social networking sites onto phones in a bid to capitalize on the growth of community Web sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Google's YouTube.

The company already provides technology that lets people access e-mail and instant messaging services from MSN, AOL and Yahoo over their mobile phones, with such customers as Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA.

Oz will offer the product in the first half of 2007 and is in talks with leading wireless carriers, phone makers and social networking sites for the service, said Chief Executive Skuli Mogensen.

"Clearly the user experience will not be the same as on a desktop (computer)," Mogensen said in an interview. "But the mobile phone has other attributes that are so appealing we think it will fly."

The growing use of cell phones embedded with digital cameras will encourage its use as a device to share photos and video on the spot, he said.

Oz expects to record revenue from the new technology in 2007 and believes social networking revenue could eventually contribute equally to its business with the more established e-mail and instant messaging services, Mogensen said.

The company has already loaded such e-mail or messaging services onto 70 million devices in North America.

A social networking service would appear to users as an icon on a cell phone menu. Selecting the icon would bring the customer to a list of the most popular networking sites among hundreds of nascent Internet communities.

"If a new community arrives and becomes a major hit, our solution allows mobile operators to introduce that new community," Mogensen said.

Oz recently closed a $34 million round of financing. The company is based in Montreal and employs about 230 people.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Bluepulse 2.0 Does Not Disappoint

Natali Del Conte

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Mobile phone application company bluepulse released version 2.0 today to rave reviews on our sister site, MobileCrunch.

Blogger Oliver Starr could not say enough about the new platform. “I’ve seen quite a number of mobile applications in the last twelve months and many have been very comprehensive but I do not believe that I’ve seen a single platform that had as many different functions as bluepulse 2.0; especially not one with the diversity of widgets or the ability to run on so many phones,” he writes.

Bluepulse 2.0 is a full-fledged multimedia platform that allows users to socially network, create detailed user profiles, chat, text, and link to Flickr, Gmail, Digg, and more. In fact, the Digg widget allows readers to read news, log in, Digg stories, participate in comment forums, and blog and email stories.

Starr writes that this mobile application is groundbreaking for two reasons: because it works on virtually any phone, and because of a combination of the user profiles and the broadcast messaging capability which will allow for “highly targeted broadcast mobile advertising.”