Intercasting has released a big upgrade to its ANTHEM platform, making smartphone-style services available on feature phones. The platform, which enables on-line social networks to go mobile, will now support more mobile services on-server. These services include email, instant messaging and other social applications. ANTHEM is “cloud” hosted and includes unified messaging, device integration and an application portal, enabling a “smart phone” experience for the billion-plus feature phones on the market today.
Since the entire platform is hosted server-side, new apps can run on mobile devices either via a preloaded “player” or integrated directly into the device UI. Future apps and features can then be plugged in with no client upgrade required. For consumers, the new user interface can be personalized for any kind of social communication. New features include one-click access to phone contacts, popular social sites, IM and email, enabling interaction across the user’s entire personal network from one central place.
From the release:
“Our latest ANTHEM release raises the bar for social application deployment in the mobile space,” said Shawn Conahan, Founder and CEO, Intercasting Corporation. “Our carrier and OEM customers now have a cost-effective and low-touch solution to dynamically plug in and integrate the most in-demand consumer applications driving mobile usage today.”
“We know that today’s mobile user is more connected than ever before, said Kevin Thau, Director of Mobile Business Development at Twitter. “With instant access to their social community at their fingertips, consumers are used to being constantly updated about where their friends are and what they’re doing. Intercasting understands our philosophy and with this new product has created a user-interface that will have more people Twittering than ever before.”
What we think?
Intercasting has been powering MoSo’s for quite some time now, and it seems to be doing a great job of it so far. I really like the idea of further integrating (there’s that word again – integration, interoperability and convergence seem to turn up in every second release these days) email, IM and even other social networks into your mobile social network of choice. And since some of the biggies (Twitter and Bebo, for starters) are already heavily involved with Intercasting, there might a lot more cross-network socialising coming our way then was previously available.
