Synchronica, an international provider of mobile email and synchronization solutions, will announce Mobile Backup 1.2 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, with major feature enhancements to drive up consumer adoption rates and revenue and drive down support costs.
Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones as the sole repository for social and business information. For many, the loss of a handset itself is much less traumatic than the loss of the precious contact information, a social network, that it held. For operators, this means a loss of revenue because users will initiate far fewer phone calls and send far fewer text messages during the several months it takes to restore that social network to a new phone. By using Mobile Backup from Synchronica, operators and service providers can prevent loss of ARPU and add value to their services by offering insurance for their subscribers' personal information. If the customer loses or upgrades a phone, the service painlessly restores all of the data to the new device-remotely, over-the-air.
Mobile Backup 1.2 also now features two new intuitive methods that allow consumers to sign up easily and directly from their phone: moves that encourage consumer adoption whilst reducing the support costs traditionally associated with new service roll-outs. Mobile Backup 1.2 features the ability to register for the service through the use of a straightforward WAP interface or alternatively through a simple SMS signup procedure. A built-in client provisioning module automatically configures the phone.
"With Mobile Backup 1.2 we have made it as simple as possible for large numbers of consumers to sign up for the service directly from their mobile phone, without ever having to touch a call centre or a website," comments Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica. "No additional software needs to be installed on the phone, a fact that will strongly encourage use by consumers. We expect Mobile Backup 1.2 to boost service adoption rates while also cutting support costs, which is a particularly attractive proposition for those operators in emerging markets where subscriber numbers are growing by 25% per year."
Aberdeen Group predicts that another 1 billion people will be added to global mobile networks by 2011. The analyst group believes that the majority of these new subscribers will come from emerging markets such as India, Africa, and the Middle East, where PC-based internet access is relatively low and mass-market feature phones predominate. Therefore, Synchronica has now made its mobile backup and restore solution accessible to consumers via WAP or SMS, without requiring access to a PC or speaking to a call centre. Based on the dominant OMA DS (SyncML) standard, Mobile Backup 1.2 is able to work with the built-in SyncML clients found in more than 1.5 billion phones in use today, including many models from major vendors such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, and Samsung.