Microsoft to Acquire Mobicomp: Watch for These Cool Mobile Features
Microsoft announced this morning that it plans to acquire Portugese mobile application company Mobicomp, makers of some very cool mobile tools that we're excited to get our hands on. Microsoft watchdogs Liveside saw the news first and have a good description of the Mobicomp offerings, which we'll discuss below.
One thing's for sure, though - the iPhone is not the only mobile game in town. We continue to see things that Windows Mobile phones can do that iPhones cannot and we expect that to continue after the launch of the iPhone app store. Check out what Mobicomp offers, presumably a feature set that will be included in all Windows Mobile phones in the future.
The Features
- Automatic backup and recovery
- Social web integration
MobiComp's MobileKeeper™ Backup & Restore is an 'over the air' mobile backup and restore service that can store any kind of content held on a mobile device, including contacts, calendars, text messages, photos, videos, music, bookmarks,
ring tones and applications to business files like Microsoft Word and Excel. Backup to the web happens automatically and the web interface also allows for management of the contents of the mobile device. This reminds us of SugarSync, among other things.
The MobileKeeper™ Sharing & Communities features include both read and write capabilities for blogging and participation in various social networking sites. Here at RWW we're big fans of Facebook Mobile, Netvibes Mobile and FriendFeed to Go - and we believe that mobile social networking in general is going to be very big.
- News ticker
The company's Active mTicker™ is an RSS-based news ticker that delivers a wide variety of content types while the phone is in idle mode. Sounds like a great idea, if a battery suck. We love the Adobe AIR desktop news ticker Snackr and we like the idea of a high quality, customizable mobile news ticker. Right now the news ticker doesn't appear to be personalizable - it's almost like an ad platform for customers. We would love to see users able to access this functionality directly.
In other words, this is an exciting acquisition for Microsoft to make. We hope that Mobicomp's features can be integrated quickly.
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As a portuguese I have mixed feelings about this...
Mobicomp was one of the new breed of portuguese companies : R&D based, innovative, young staff, global focus.
Their potencial of growth was enormous. Revenues were expected to grow 100% this year (2007 - 3 million euros; 2008 - 6 million euros.
This was reinforced by their focus on emerging markets, mainly Asia, Middle East and Africa, specially through the deals with the leading carriers on these geographies.
So it is sad to see them being bought.
At least the integration in Microsoft validates their strategy and and their expected growth.
Accordying to the press release of the deal and the portuguese press, Microsoft considers this deal so important that they will install a new R&D center centered around mobile technologies in the offices/headquartes of Mobicomp in Braga, a city in northern Portugal.
This is significant because they say this will be one of the bigger centers outside of USA, in par with the China and France centers, also related with mobile technologies.
For semi/automatic backup and recovery zyb.com is a good place.
Sr. Proença,
Nos precisamos do trabalho aqui em Minho, e se precisamos de trabalhar para Bill Gates, e' melhor de emigrar-se!