E3: Motricity launches cross carrier community platform

LOS ANGELES—Motricity has enhanced its Fuel 5 community platform to support multiple carriers simultaneously, allowing content providers and willing carriers to launch interest-based content communities extending beyond the limited sphere of a single carrier’s own subscriber base.

The Fuel upgrades also include Motricity’s first micropayment service, a driver of incremental revenues from applications or games a customer has already purchased. Motricity is positioning both capabilities as methods for content providers and even carriers to extend their brands off portal. Customers subscribing to one carrier’s service can access another carrier or 3rd party portal and not only browse content but also buy games and applications.

Motricity also announced today it is using the new Fuel capabilities to expand Sprint’s Game Lobby, a one-stop portal housing all of Sprint’s games and associated. The Game Lobby itself was designed by Motricity and powered by Exit Games’ Neutron connected gaming software, and since its inception has garnered more than 1.3 million Vision and Power Vision customers. Now Sprint has hired wireless social networking developer AirG to build to add a social community component, allowing Game Lobby users to communicate directly and indirectly with their peers through chat features, blogs and customer reviews. Called the Game Lobby Lounge, the application will be offered initially as a free download through the Game Lobby site.

Sprint, which had a big presence at E3 showing off its mobile gaming progress, reported that participation in Game Lobby has been rapidly picking up in the last year as its gaming catalog has increased to 200 titles from 30 publishers. Users rating individual games have quadrupled to 170,000, and 36 million game scores have been posted to the leader board high scores pages.