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Synchronica CEO Carsten Brinkschulte Offers His Opinions on What Will Be
Hot in 2007

    RESTON, Va., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- The year 2007 will be when both
mobile email and 'back-up and restore' for mobile devices come of age for
the mass market. We will see mobile email taking off in the consumer space,
due to the advent of industry standards, lower cost devices and falling
service plan costs. And we will also see consumers paying service providers
an additional monthly fee to insure their mobile phone's address book
against loss or theft.
    Mobile email for the masses
    Until now, mobile email has been mainly limited to the approximately
six million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide who can afford to buy an
expensive device and are willing to accept a costly data plan. But there
have been strong signs over the course of the last year that the age of
mobile email for the masses is almost upon us. The combination of industry
standard adoption, lower cost devices and affordable service plans is set
to make mobile email for the mass market a reality in 2007.
    One or both of the two complementary mobile data synchronization
industry standards -- Push IMAP and SyncML -- have been adopted by all the
major device manufacturers and middleware vendors in 2006, which sets the
scene for standards-based push email between heterogeneous mobile devices.
There have also been some innovative, low cost devices launched in the last
six months, such as IXI Mobile's OGO, which has been designed from the
ground up for mobile messaging.
    With such a wealth of mass market devices that support mobile email now
available, the time is right for mobile email pricing plans to fall, to
attract more customers. And as customer numbers increase, we will see
mobile email start to replace text messages, becoming the next generation
SMS. Interestingly, SMS messages are relatively expensive when compared on
a 'per character' basis to alternative forms of messaging such as mobile
email, so data tariffs per character for mobile email should not prove
prohibitive to even the most cost-conscious of mobile phones users.
    'Back-up and restore' for the masses
    We also expect to see a surge in demand from consumers for a 'back-up
and restore' facility for their mobile devices in 2007. Already back in
2004 the research group Zelos found that 15 percent of mobile subscribers
expressed a strong need for a mechanism to back up contact data. This is
because consumers -- and particularly the MySpace generation -- depend
increasingly on their mobile devices as the primary repository for vital
information such as phones numbers and addresses.
    In this scenario, if a person's phone is lost or stolen, all his or her
friends' and family's contact details disappear with it. For this
fast-growing section of society, it is the information on the phone, rather
than the phone itself, which is of value to them.
    We will therefore see an increase in demand for a low-cost facility
from service providers -- a kind of insurance policy for your contact
information - - which will allow consumers to back-up and restore their
contacts information over-the-air. As well as providing a safety net for
consumers who lose their phones, a back-up and restore service also makes
upgrading to a new phone easier. Customers simply use the back-up and
restore facility to transfer their contact information and saved SMS
messages over-the-air to their new phone.
    Conclusion
    In summary, 2007 will see the mass market benefiting from recent
advances in data synchronisation and messaging. Mobile email will start to
replace some of the billions of SMS messages that get sent every month by
consumers and more service providers will begin to offer their subscribers
a robust over- the-air back-up and restore facility for their contacts
information.
    For more information please visit http://www.synchronica.com

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