LAS VEGAS - (Business Wire) Frengo, the leading provider of social mobile services to more than 10 million users, today announced the availability of its OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit. Leveraging experience from its very popular mobile toolkit for Facebook, Frengo has created its OpenSocial-compliant mobile platform to allow developers for other social networks to easily extend their web-based applications to mobile. Consistent with the diverse and international user base of OpenSocial networks, the Frengo platform supports all major U.S. carriers and the majority of popular global mobile carriers, with the ability to reach more than one billion cell phones worldwide.
Mobile phones are a central component of social networking, keeping members of online communities connected, informed and entertained on the go. Teens and young adults have shown strong demand for mobile networks in order to stay in touch with their entire social circle — anywhere, anytime. Vikrant Gandhi, Strategic Industry Analyst in Mobile Communications for Frost & Sullivan, an analyst firm based in Palo Alto, California, commented, “Cell phones are fast becoming an inseparable extension of teens and young adults today; using text to reach each other on their phones is an important form of social communication. Frengo’s strategy of mobilizing existing, popular social networks is the next logical step in this fast growing market.”
“Our services on Facebook attract millions of users and we are excited to support OpenSocial networks and the thousands of developers building applications across that platform,” said Mahi de Silva, Frengo CEO. “We learned very quickly that social networking has no geographic boundaries and are especially excited about social networks extending the reach of fun, social experiences to places where the Internet is more likely to be accessed on a mobile phone than a PC. Mobility brings a level of intimacy and convenience, making it easy for people to stay connected in ways not possible on a PC.”
“Integrating with Frengo was a breeze and we really appreciate their experience and expertise in mobile. With Frengo we can extend our social experiences to people on mobile phones around the world,” said Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, one of the leading developers of social applications and an early customer of the Frengo Mobile Toolkit. “Horoscopes,” a popular web and mobile application on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and hi5, was built by RockYou and powered by the Frengo Mobile Toolkit.
“As we launch third-party applications to hi5 members, we’re pleased to include ones that are already mobile enabled,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of hi5 Networks, Inc., the leading social network in over 20 nations, a founding adopter of OpenSocial, and the 8th most-trafficked website in the world. “We think it’s great that Frengo’s OpenSocial mobile toolkit is helping to bring mobile applications to our 80 million registered members.”
Available today, the Frengo OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit includes SMS alerts and notifications and mobile web services, including WAP site hosting, handset recognition and transcoding, which make it easy for developers to quickly extend their applications to mobile. This model promotes an intuitive user experience. For example, a consumer receives the following text message: “Your friend Eric just sent you a message. Click here to see more…” When the recipient clicks on the message containing a URL, he is sent to a WAP site where the message can be seen and responded to easily.
“Frengo is the ideal partner for us to bring humor and fun out of the Intertubes and into the hand-helds of people who like to laugh,” said Ben Huh, Chief Cheezburger of ICHC. “These Frengo guys are fun, very talented and are invaluable digital Sherpas for mobility challenged sites like ours.” To activate the a new subscription to start receiving funny LOLcat pictures and captions, users simply need to text the keyword “LOL” to 44566, available today.
Frengo also provides rich photo/image handling from the mobile handset which is important as handsets become a more viable photographic tool and means of sharing pictures on social networks. Frengo also provides traffic monetization, advertising brokering and premium billing services, as developers look to monetize their social applications and services.
Frengo powers the mobile services for popular applications from top social networking developers including Slide, RockYou, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Serious Business and Frozen Bear, providing integrated web and mobile services to over 10 million people through a variety of channels.
About Frengo
Frengo is the global leader in creating and powering social media and entertainment services on top of popular social networks and across mobile devices. Frengo builds upon the “social graph” of on-line users to promote social sharing, people discovery and friendship. Frengo strives to provide the best user experience for keeping people connected, informed and entertained, regardless of location – in front of a PC on a mobile phone. Frengo provides tools to let anyone create and share user generated content within a friend circle or across a large audience via SMS text messaging and the wireless web. For more information, visit www.frengo.com.
Spark PR for Frengo
Candace Locklear, 510-292-8216
candace@sparkpr.com
