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ShoZu Delivers Friends' Newest Flickr Photos Directly to Handsets; First Step in Expanded Two-Way Mobile Social Media Service

Posted on: Thursday, 8 November 2007, 12:00 CST

ShoZu Inc. today opened a new era in mobile social media with the addition of media delivery features enabling consumers to have friends' latest Flickr photos as well as the top YouTube videos sent directly to their handsets. The upgrade turns ShoZu into the first two-way mobile social media service, allowing users to keep in touch with their Flickr social life and newest YouTube entertainment on the go by signing up for automatic content feeds to the phone.

Other social media delivery options will be added to ShoZu in the near future, allowing users to access new site postings without the time and trouble of opening a mobile browser. These offerings extend ShoZu's one-click image upload capabilities, which enable users to publish photos and video clips from the handset to dozens of Web 2.0 destinations with a single click.

"Social media has been moving from the Web to your pocket, but until now the only practical way to interact with your preferred social network, personal blog or photo or video sharing site from the handset has been to send photos and video clips captured on the phone to the site of your choice," said ShoZu CEO Mark Bole. "Now we can push content from those sites down to the phone so that users can stay in touch wherever they are. This bridges the gap between users' mobile and online worlds, and it substantially extends our leadership in the mobile social media space."

For users of Flickr, the second most popular photo sharing site in the U.S., anyone with a ShoZu-equipped phone can now request that new Flickr photos posted by friends be sent to their phone as they are published. Users can receive a collective feed of the latest photos from all of their friends as well as individual feeds from specific friends.

Each feed is delivered in the background with no download downtime or other interruption to phone activities using ShoZu's patented technology, and is announced with a popup message on the phone idle screen.

Flickr users with the ShoZu application on their phone can also both receive and respond to friends' comments on their own Flickr photos directly from the handset, set the application to automatically add geotags for images captured with a GPS-enabled phone, and have those GPS-tagged photos automatically appear on their Flickr map.

Also new is the ability for ShoZu users to receive YouTube's "Featured,""Mobile" and "Most Views" videos as feeds delivered automatically to the phone. ShoZu will deliver a thumbnail and description of up to 10 clips with each feed, enabling users to click on the videos that interest them to begin streaming from the YouTube site.

For users without unlimited mobile data plans, the new Flickr and YouTube content feed options include cost controls making it possible to set weekly limits on data delivery by megabyte. A 1 MB limit will typically accommodate 100 photos or video thumbnails, fitting easily into the typical 4 MB or 8 MB monthly data package. The ShoZu application itself is free of charge, available either as a download from www.shozu.com or preinstalled on a variety of handsets.

These latest enhancements add to the ability of ShoZu's Share-It service to extend today's burgeoning social media movement from the Web to the mobile world where users spend the majority of their time. ShoZu's proprietary data replication technology makes two-way content exchange between the mobile and the Web as easy as sending or receiving a text message.

ShoZu users can send photos, videos and text from the handset to their favorite social media sites with a single click, eliminating the complex navigation and limitations of other methods. Other capabilities unique to ShoZu include the ability to send video clips up to 10 minutes in length, transmit high-res photos at full resolution to yield print-quality images, add descriptions and tags to individual images from the phone before or after uploading, and exchange two-way commenting and messages between the mobile and the Web.

The Share-It service is currently available on 278 handset models. A list of compatible phones is available at www.shozu.com

About ShoZu

ShoZu is the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from the handset. The company's patented technology provides fast, easy, one-click uploads of photos and video clips from the mobile to the Web, full-resolution photo and video delivery without compression, an emerging suite of services that push content to the phone, the ability to work in the background even if a connection is dropped, and other unique features that simplify and enhance the user experience, plus a mobile advertising service that provides non-intrusive and behaviorally targeted ad delivery. The company was founded in 2000 and has formed partnerships with some of the leading players in the mobile ecosystem, including Motorola and Samsung. For more information, visit www.ShoZu.com/AboutUs.

Source: Business Wire

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