Monday, August 11, 2008

Press Release: Mobile Push Facebook - BlueWhaleMail

LONDON, August 11 /PRNewswire/

- Facebook Wall Posting and Messaging With News and Status Updates Straight to Your Mobile

Blue Whale Systems Ltd makes Facebook on a mobile phone as easy as Text Messaging with today's release of enhanced Facebook features for BlueWhaleMail, their free mobile push social networking application. BlueWhaleMail notifies you of your friends' Facebook status updates, wall posts and news items, and allows you to send them a message, poke them or write on their wall in response. Notifications are displayed as soon as they are received without requiring users to manually browse to the Facebook website. The service also supports email and is initially available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones.

"The complexity of setting up mobile applications on many phones is a great obstacle for most people so we've worked hard to make BlueWhaleMail child's play to setup" said Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion. "In a revolutionary approach to deploying mobile applications we've also launched a Facebook Web application to help with setup" continued Michael. BlueWhaleMail can be interactively test-driven and pre-configured for download at http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/ - people will only need their Facebook username and password. Alternatively browse to bluewhale.net on your mobile.

"We're trying to make social networking as much a part of mobile life as Text Messaging." said Richard Seward, founder and CEO. "With its unique combination of email and Facebook our service is the simplest choice for those wishing to stay on top of their social life while they're away from their computer". The service is free and funded by a small, unobtrusive banner ad in the display of incoming items.


(prnewswire en fr de es)

Screenshot of BlueWhaleMail Facebook application


The BlueWhaleMail application for Facebook makes it easy for Facebook users to get BlueWhaleMail on their phone.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Press release: Blue Whale Systems selects Smaato Mobile Advertising Platform for its E-mail & Facebook Service to Mass Market Mobile Phones

London / San Mateo, July 7, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Blue Whale Systems Ltd today announced a new strategic partnership. Blue Whale Systems introduces the free ad-supported BlueWhaleMail application that offers a mobile push e-mail and push Facebook service.

With its BlueWhaleMail application, Blue Whale Systems offers a service to make simple and effective e-mail and Facebook access available to the 2.7 billion people using mass market mobile phones. Many of these phones have either an unusable or hard to configure built in e-mail service; BlueWhaleMail allows users to keep the phone they like and still get a great service for mobile e-mail and Facebook. In connecting BlueWhaleMail to the SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform, Smaato enables Blue Whale Systems’ business model by allowing them to offer their service to users for free; financing this by ad-enabling the application.

“The partnership with Smaato is a great step forward for us. In ad-enabling our application and offering it free of charge to our users we can enhance our reach and build a greater community”, said Richard Seward, Founder & CEO of Blue Whale Systems. “We believe that banner adverts at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer provide an unobtrusive way to support the service”.

“We are excited to partner with Blue Whale Systems and their innovative mobile e-mail solution”, comments Ragnar Kruse, Co-Founder & CEO of Smaato Inc. “Access to e-mail on mobile phones is getting more and more mission critical for businesses or a vital part of our connected lives in the mobile age. Together with Blue Whale Systems we enhance our reach in Europe for our ad sales network partners.”

Blue Whale Systems, after careful review, selected the SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform that is available with free APIs and a software development kit from www.smaato.com for mobile developers. Smaato is partnering with leading ad sales networks international such as Ad Infuse, Third Screen Media (Advertising.com) and Screentonic (Microsoft). SOMA supports all major mobile platforms such as Symbian, Windows Mobile, J2ME and the iPhone platform and saves mobile developers time and money to enter new business models with ad-enabled content and services.


About Smaato Inc.
Smaato Inc. (www.smaato.com) is a leading mobile advertising technology company that provides the open mobile advertising platform called SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) for developers, publishers, ad sales networks and operators. The SOMA platform enables the delivery of targeted display advertising to mobile phones within applications and on mobile sites. SOMA’s unique feature is the SOMA client, which is a mobile ad server on the handset that optimizes the process of ad-enabling applications for mobile software developers. SOMA can be easily integrated with 3rd party ad sales networks, ad inventory owners (developers, publishers, operators) and ad technology providers.
Smaato is an active member of the Mobile Marketing Association, the dot.mobi Advisory Group and the German Digital Media Association BVDW. Smaato received a Top 100 Private Company award by AlwaysOn Media (US) in January of 2007. Smaato Inc. is based in San Mateo, California. The privately held company was founded in 2005 by an experienced International management team. The European office is in Hamburg, Germany.

A free white paper on Open Mobile Advertising is available for download at www.smaato.com

Smaato® is a registered trademark of Smaato Inc. - SOMA™ is a trademark of Smaato Inc. The names of actual companies and products mentioned in this release may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Press release: Finally, push email for the rest of us - BlueWhaleMail

LONDON, June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Email plus Facebook wall posting and messaging with news and status updates delivered straight to your mobile

Launched today, a new, free service for mobile phones starts bringing easy email access to the 2.7 billion people with ordinary mobile phones. Michael Maguire, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion, founded Blue Whale Systems Ltd: its BlueWhaleMail application offers a free mobile push email and push Facebook service. On launch, the service will initially be available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson feature phones.

"My team and I think there are some great dedicated mobile email devices out there - but we're biased, because half of us helped build one of them," said Michael Maguire. "Unfortunately the rest of the world's 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we've gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

BlueWhaleMail doesn't just allow you to securely send and receive email messages from services such as Yahoo! and Google Mail*, it also notifies you of your friends' status updates and news items on Facebook, and allows you to send them a message or write on their wall in response. Messages and notifications are displayed as soon as they are received without requiring users to manually connect to their inbox.

"We're trying to make social networking -- messaging, news feeds and status updates -- as much a part of mobile life as Text Messaging. People who are unwilling to pay for or use a dedicated mobile email device still deserve a great mobile email service and that's exactly what BlueWhaleMail offers," said Richard Seward, founder and CEO of Blue Whale Systems Ltd. "Our service is the simplest choice for those wishing to stay on top of their social life while they're away from their computer".

"The complexity of setting up mobile applications on many phones is a great obstacle for most people so we've worked hard to make BlueWhaleMail child's play to setup" continued Michael Maguire. BlueWhaleMail can be interactively test-driven and pre-configured for download at www.bluewhalemail.com - most people will only need to know their email address and password. Alternatively browse to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile.

"We wanted to deliver a great service without charging users" continued Richard Seward. "We didn't want trial periods or subscription fees, but we didn't want spam messages either. We believe that banner adverts at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer provide an unobtrusive way to support the service".

* BlueWhaleMail users cannot directly access Hotmail, as Microsoft does not yet freely support the required industry standards of either IMAP4 or POP3.


(prnewswire)

BlueWhaleMail screenshot slideshow



BlueWhaleMail screenshots (picasaweb)

BlueWhaleMail tutorial


BlueWhaleMail Tutorial (youtube)