October 20 , 2009

Eliminate expensive data plans, phones
iseemedia challenges BlackBerry apps

iseemedia Inc., a provider of rich content adaptation and delivery solutions for mobile applications today announced the availability of iseemail, a new Blackberry-like service that eliminates the need for expensive data plans or high-end phones to receive emails and rich attachments on the go.

The solution will be specifically attractive to wireless service providers and OEMs who support almost two billion mobile phone subscribers in emerging markets where the penetration of smartphones is virtually non-existent. The Company also announced that a soon-to-be-disclosed carrier is now implementing the iseemedia service in India.

"RIM has done an incredible execution with mobile email, but it has only scratched the surface of the potential market with its popular Blackberry," said Anthony DeCristofaro, President and CEO at iseemedia. "We anticipate the greatest growth in mobile messaging over the next five years will be in developing countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America where the mobile handset is rapidly becoming the dominant communications surpassing the PC."

Informa predicts there will be 4.81 billion mobile phone subscribers by 2012, with the majority of the next billion subscribers coming from emerging markets. Portio Research further states that nine of the top ten highest growth markets over this period have one key defining factor in common - they are all low income per-capita markets. Therefore handsets sold into these emerging markets will continue to be mainly lower-priced devices.

It is clear from the likes of RIM, Apple, Nokia, HTC and other handset manufacturers that push email is a killer application. According to Visiongain Intelligence, mobile consumer email revenue has the potential to generate $4.43 billion by 2011. In 2008 210 billion emails were sent globally each day representing over 1.45 billion email accounts. It is expected that there will be over 615 million mobile email accounts by 2011, the majority of them belonging to the mass market.

Mobile operators in emerging markets are growing rapidly by offering mobile email and other Internet-based applications on low-cost handsets. Operators see mobile email as a key differentiator with pre-paid subscribers, and more importantly as a way of increasing their Average Revenue Per User.

"The ideal email service for these operators is one that doesn't require a client to be installed on the handset and provides substantial bandwidth savings when using attachments of any size," commented DeCristofaro. "To have mass market appeal one needs to minimize the user interaction to get the email service running while optimizing precious bandwidth requirements."

The iseemail solution allows any mobile phone to send and receive email and rich attachments like a PDA or smartphone. It provides seamless access to most consumer and enterprise email accounts with support for virtually any content on any device. Utilizing iseemedia's content adaptation and transcoding technology, it offers fast, secure and bandwidth optimized access to all popular email attachments with on-demand pan and zoom capability for an unmatched mobile email user experience.

The iseemail is completely clientless and is designed to leverage operators existing infrastructure. Unlike other solutions, it provides unique multi-modal approach that allows users to access emails using multiple interfaces such as SMS, WAP/XHTML and embedded Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) client. It supports virtually all email systems through standard POP3, IMAP4 and EAS protocols thus allowing access to enterprise and consumer email from Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and others.

iseemail is cost effective, feature rich and fully functional on nearly 100% of available devices. It is fully functional even on low-end mobile devices with only a basic SMS interface. As such, the iseemail solution offers operators and business partners ample opportunities for generating additional revenue - even from customers not subscribing to data plans.