Dublin firm to launch mobile backup service


14 Dec 2006

Irish mobile data sychronisation company SIMchronise is gearing up to launch its mobile phone backup service across Europe in the first quarter of next year to enable business users who lose their phones to fully back up and restore contacts, calendar and other data.

“With growing rates of lost, stolen, damaged and upgraded handsets, the ability to restore valuable personal and business contacts and other data to a new phone with ease has become critical for every mobile user,” said Philippe Joly, SIMchronise CEO.

“We saw an opportunity to offer an integrated solution that provides customers with full backup and restore services of mobile contacts, calendar, tasks and other data. Our main challenge was finding a robust data synchronisation engine that also offers high device compatibility.”

To make this happen the company has struck a deal with push email and personal information management (PIM) software firm Funambol, which in 2001, when it was known as Sync4j, led the open source implementation of SyncML, the de facto industry standard for mobile data synchronisation.

“A major obstacle to mass adoption of wireless services is that carriers struggle to support the large variety of devices used by their subscribers,” said Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO.

He said that Funambol’s SynchML service Phone Sniper will drastically improve the breadth and depth of device compatibility, giving service providers the confidence to aggressively deploy new mobile services that increase revenue and reduce churn.

“We are very pleased to work with SIMchronise to deliver this next generation of mobile services for the masses.”

SIMchronise is launching mobile contact backup services initially in the UK, Germany and Ireland, which are built using synchronisation (SyncML) and over-the-air (OTA) technology. The services are completely wireless and require no additional devices, software programs, cables, Bluetooth or infrared.

They allow users to back up all the contacts on their mobile phone to a private secure online area. The user can retrieve saved contacts anytime, from virtually anywhere in the world, eliminating the headache of losing valuable personal and business contacts whenever the user’s mobile phone is lost, stolen, damaged or upgraded.

By John Kennedy