News

"Fun" on mobile phones: new company for chat, MMS, community, launches.

Both Valis and Celltrex are seen as moderately successful pioneers of the "mobile community" software revolution - doing location-based, and chat services; and both are now looking to a merger, to exploit next generation phones.

In some parts of the world, you can ask your phone whether anybody of your age and interests is hanging around, bored, in a pub within 500 yards of you; and Valis software will find someone. That's what "community" means. Celltrex is more multi-media enabled; both companies sell services to mobile phone service providers.

Valis and Celltrex have merged to form a new company - Axis Mobile.

This merger "brings together the expertise of community services and messaging applications to create the leading company of applications for all-round communication, from location based chats to multimedia messaging to online community games." It will be announced at the 3GSM conference in Cannes, next month.

Axis Mobile's "philosophy" is all we have now: "that launching a Value Added Service should be no more difficult than ordering from a catalogue - simply choose and deploy."

The "community offering" is based on real experience and understanding of the way cellular communities work. It includes:

- Friends Locator - Know where your friends are

- Community Chat - with or without location

- A multi-platform multimedia dating service

- Community games

- MindBattle - a unique one-on-one betting zone

- A Complete Youth Channel (including all the above)

There are also messaging applications offer state of the art multi-media capabilities on any device today, including: Instant Messaging; advanced obile mail with SMS notification and attachment support; picture messaging with support for both MMS and legacy terminals; something called PiCollector - combining trading-card games with MMS and picture messaging for a killer application; and Family locator - "Know where your kids are!"