Colibria today announced the launch of its new service, the App Center. This is an operator-end service, designed to deliver mobile application services through already existing messaging infrastructure. The range of applications revealed by Colibria so far is quite small – mostly limited to social networking services and easily updatable apps like weather and news services. The interesting part is that these services, once installed, simply sit in the users contact list. So pretty much any phone can access them, without needing anything near smartphone capabilities.
The “featured” applications discussed by Colibria include Twitter, Google Talk, Facebook and flickr. It can also access IM services like Windows Live Messenger. The service has push capabilities, so that social networks will automatically be updated in the contact list.
From the release:
Keith Gibson, CEO at Colibria said “Operators are beginning to see the importance of broadening the mobile community experience, and the new App Center will go a long way to improving this as well as operator revenues. With a single integration point to access multiple social networks, internet IM services and content, the App Center is already showing from early indications across Colibria’s customer base that traffic can double when applications are introduced. Customer expectations are shifting, and operators need to be able to respond quickly to these expectations with innovative new services such as those available through the Colibria App Center.”
What we think?
I’m a long-standing fan of bringing smartphone-like features to low-end phones… and this is one of the lowest-common-denominator services I’ve EVER seen. It uses the basic messaging infrastructure of the operator to run these apps, and I can’t think of a single mobile device that can’t make use of that. The idea of the services being inserted into the contact list has it’s good and bad points. Honestly, when was the last time you really looked at your contacts list? Cleaning one of them up takes a couple of days at best – it would be incredibly easy for an app to be simply lost in there.
