Developing Telecoms | Social networking app targets emerging markets by running on 80% of handset models

9 February 2012

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Social networking app targets emerging markets by running on 80% of handset models

Monday, 23 August 2010 14:12 | James Barton

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The prohibitive costs of high-end smartphones, high-speed internet and additional memory have long stymied the development of mobile social networking in the developing world. A new service named MyXenzo aims to remedy this issue, claiming to offer a consistent user interface on 80% of handsets with even the most basic Internet access.

Developed in India with Chennai-based software team Softsmith, the new service is hosted as a web application on cloud computing. By downloading a small amount of data to the phone’s applications list, an icon is installed which opens the application’s URL in the phone’s browser. The service runs on many popular older handset models which are prevalent in developing countries.

The application enables users to create separate profiles for home, work, leisure and relationships, using proprietary matching algorithms to seek out the specific people and services that are nearby and of interest to them. Once they’ve accepted an invitation, users can chat one-to-one with connections. However, they retain full control over their privacy, deciding which invitations to accept or block and staying safe in the knowledge that private information cannot be compromised as no data is published in public lists.

According to Managing Director Rhea Sheedy, “We know that this is the sort of service that people want – particularly in developing countries where they are more likely to have access to a mobile phone than a broadband PC…Although we’re only launching the commercial version of the service today we already have over 200,000 users”.

MyXenzo has been built to work on the majority of popular phones and smartphones with Internet access. For a list of compatible phones go to http://www.getjar.com/mobile/31965/myxenzo/?s=phones
More info:

http://www.myxenzo.com

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