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Proteus upgrades mobile publishing platform

Proteus, a provider of mobile marketing products and services, added new features to its mobile Web site publishing platform, Swift.

Swift enables consumers and companies to create a mobile Internet presence quickly and without extensive technical knowledge. The new tools were created to help users drive additional traffic to their Swift-powered mobile sites.

"It's all about increasing the viral component," said Guy Vidra, president of Proteus, Arlington, VA. "We want to enable people to be able to share what they've done with colleagues and consumers, so there is the SMS and email components to it so you can communicate from your Swift site.

"[Swift] also enables folks that have a Web presence to put a widget online that enables consumers to put in their mobile phone number and get a link to the swift site," he said.

Mr. Vidra said Proteus's market strategy this year is to gain exposure and critical mass.

"From an enterprise perspective we want to find a way to let enterprises reach consumers in the most personal and ubiquitous medium out there, he said. "And to do in the fashion that's fun for them to use and that can be used for marketing people who aren't necessarily in the technology arena."

Proteus develops products to help companies create marketing programs using SMS, mobile Internet sites and entertainment content storefronts.

Some of the company's clients are media brands such as Fox, HBO, Disney, NBC Universal and ABC, and corporations such as AT&T, MasterCard and Motorola.

"We feel that Swift has gone quite well for us," Mr. Vidra said. "There is a lot of interest but we want to drive visibility further, which is clearly a challenge -- you can build the best playground but if it's the middle of the forest no one will know about it."

Other new features of Swift include automatic image and photo re-sizing, the ability to assign a custom domain name and graphical reporting tools.

Additional features are new logo options that allow for text-based and hyperlinked logos and behind-the-scenes feed optimization for faster importing and display.

"Going forward, some main things you'll be seeing from us is how this tool can tie into social networks, publishing tools and ways to make it even easier for people to create a mobile site," Mr. Vidra said. "We're working very hard. We have an incredibly long futures list."