MWC: Seven extends power of push email to apps

Despite the emphasis on feature-rich mobile applications, there is still a large market that just wants a better push email experience. It’s a market that Seven has tapped to grow its user base by 70% in 2009, synchronizing more than seven million mobile devices. With a year of profitability under its belt, the messaging provider is ready to extend its push capabilities into the growing world of mobile apps.

The company introduced Ping, a set of packaged services to push-enable messaging, social networking and other mobile apps, at Mobile World Congress today. According to Isabelle Dumont, Seven’s senior director of marketing, the service works on a range of devices from super-phones to mass-market devices by storing data it pulls from the cloud. Seven is also opening up Ping’s APIs to its partners and app developers to create new apps. They imagine the use cases, and Seven handles the cross-platform integration.

“We believe that messaging apps like email, IM, SMS are really core to devices now, so users should get that out of the box rather than have to download something,” Dumont said. “They are looking to operators to make that happen for them. We are also working a lot more closely with device manufacturers so they can do that even earlier in the process and provide an even greater degree of integration across experience applications.”

As an example, Dumont said that contacts on the phone should be accessible for SMS, instant messaging or email in one place. Seven is working with handset makers to integrate this functionality, but she said that social networking is the app that really triggers the manufacturers to accelerate their push initiatives to solve these issues.

Since it was formed in 2001, Seven has competed with handset makers like Research In Motion, Nokia and eventually Apple’s iPhone’s push services. For the rest of the market not served by these companies, however, the mobile email experience was degraded and incomplete, often only including manual updates or neglecting features like the calendar, Dumont said. There was a real demand for mobile email, especially as the phone has become a primary access point, and Seven saw a large untapped market for a better, cheaper push alternative.

Currently, Seven’s push email is in use in 70 countries and 14 languages. It’s available on more than 550 devices running six operating systems from wireless operators including Sprint, AT&T, MetroPCS and US Cellular. Dumont touted the benefits of wireless data synchronization for these partners, including battery life conservation, reduced cost of service delivery, improved user experiences and the ability to optimize data traffic on the network. Constantly polling multiple data sources from the handset quickly runs down the phone’s battery and worsens the data load for operators the more apps a customer uses, a problem that has made push an attractive alternative – and a competitive market.

“What we see in the market is this big battle of the ecosystem between iPhone, RIM, Droid, Samsung with its introduced Symbian phones,” Dumont said. “You will see Seven starting to push at that level and really help the ecosystem be richer, stronger and more differentiated and really help the device manufacturers compete with RIM and iPhone with their own devices in the ecosystem.”