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NewBay UGC Gateway Chosen By Orange UK to Accelerate Mobile Social Networking

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 April 2007, 06:00 CDT

NewBay Software, the leading provider of mobile multimedia and social networking solutions, today announced that Orange UK has licensed its UGC Gateway to enable easy integration with third party mobile blogging, album and social networking sites. Orange UK is already using NewBay PIXOTA handset imaging client to drive one click uploads to the Orange Photography album. With NewBay UGC Gateway, Orange UK customers will be able to instantly upload photos and video direct from their mobile to multiple online sites of their choice. Initially, Orange UK will provide direct upload of images and video to Photography, Pikeo by Orange and Bebo, with other leading social networking brands to follow.

Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Development and Innovation at Orange, said: "Online social networking has become a huge trend in the UK and we want to give our customers choice so they can instantly upload their camera phone photos and videos to their favourite online sites. NewBay UGC Gateway made this easy for us to do. We didn't have to worry about integrating with multiple sites. We simply specified the sites we wanted to offer to our subscribers and NewBay did what was required at the back end to make it happen."

NewBay UGC Gateway uniquely handles all the complexity for mobile operators to connect to multiple third party sites including posting media, viewing WAP pages and sending text alerts to users' devices. To date, for mobile operators to support multiple blogging and social networking sites they need to integrate with each individual site which takes time and resources. With NewBay UGC Gateway, operators only need to make one connection and then simply decide which sites they would like available to their subscribers. UGC Gateway removes the challenges and costs by managing the integration with third party sites and seamlessly routing the multimedia content to the requested blog/album service(s).

The UGC Gateway gives mobile operators the choice to selectively integrate sites such as Pikeo by Orange and Bebo into their network under their policies, improving customer experience and in turn increasing revenues. It gives the operator flexibility and complete control over its relationship with third party sites by channeling traffic through a central, operator-controlled platform where policy is applied. The operator is able to tactically promote, demote, drop or apply promotional pricing to particular sites.

"Our mobile multimedia solutions are uniquely designed to make it as easy as possible for mobile users to post and share user generated content such as high resolution photos and video to blogging and social networking sites. We developed the UGC Gateway to enable mobile operators to offer subscribers the ability to post to multiple sites of their choice. This will increase traffic and revenue for the operator but it will also make real mobile social networking possible today for the user," said Dr Nagappan Arunachalam, CMO of NewBay Software.

NewBay UGC Gateway is available now to mobile operators worldwide as a software license product or an ASP.

About NewBay Software

NewBay Software develops mobile multimedia products and services to deliver Mobile 2.0. Solutions include FoneBlog, mobile blogging and multimedia album solution; PIXOTA, mobile imaging handset client; UStarTV, to monetize user generated mobile videos; and FonePIM, carrier grade mobile synchronization.

NewBay sells to mobile operators worldwide enabling them to increase messaging, data and content revenue, strengthen customer loyalty and build mobile communities and social networks based on user generated content. Customers include T-Mobile USA, O2, Alltel Wireless, Orange, Vodafone, Swisscom, Bell Mobility, Maxis and SETAR NV. NewBay Software is based in Dublin, Ireland, London, UK and Bellevue, USA. NewBay was founded in 2002 and is privately held. Investors include Benchmark Capital.

For more information visit www.newbay.com.

Source: Business Wire

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