Funambol, Laszlo integrate mobile messaging, Web service

By Mickey Alam Khan

May 13, 2008

The medium is the message

Mobile messaging software provider Funambol is integrating the commercial version of its offering with Laszlo Systems’ Web messaging application.

The partnership merges Laszlo Webtop, a unified Web-based communications suite that includes email, contacts and calendar, with Funambol’s push email and PIM sync software that is claimed to work on 1.5 billion mobile phone handsets.

“What we see is that service providers are looking for a new mobile email solution, possibly ad-based, at the same time looking at Web 2.0 solutions for email and contacts and calendar,” said Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, Redwood City, CA.

“It makes perfect sense for the two companies who are leaders in mobile messaging and rich Internet applications to join forces, in particular, because we’re all based on open source,” he said.

The combined offering will let service providers use an ad-based model for online and mobile users and also upgrade their email systems to compete with Web and mobile mail clients such as Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail.

A clean interface

Funambol’s open-source mobile messaging software has been downloaded more than 2 million times by 50,000 developers and project participants worldwide.

The commercial version of Funambol is used by customers such as CA, EarthLink and 1&1.

Laszlo, San Mateo, CA, is a specialist in rich Internet applications. It is also the creator of OpenLaszlo, an open source rich Internet application development platform used by thousands of developers worldwide.

The alliance between Funambol and Laszlo aims to leverage a growing trend: consumers moving from desktop to mobile devices expecting the same rich Internet experience on their mobile phones.

With that trend comes the operative word: free.

“In consumer messaging we see a big trend towards free mobile email powered by advertising,” Mr. Capobianco said.

“And we believe that on a mobile phone you are using the mobile messaging client more than any application you have there, because the phone is a communication device – you talk or you message,” he said.

“So, in my opinion, the mobile messaging client on a phone is the equivalent of the browser on a PC. And therefore the driver for advertising on mobile is going to be the mobile messaging client, not the browser.

“So the Google of mobile will not come from the browser world – it’ll come from the messaging world.”