Oz signs Bell Canada, developing multimedia IM

Instant Messaging application developer Oz said today the company has landed another North American customer, Bell Mobility in Canada, and is pursuing multimedia support for its core IM platform by linking directly into carrier’s MMS infrastructure.

The deal with Bell Mobility will add Oz’s messaging client to the carrier’s downloadable applications and allow customers to access their MSN Messenger accounts. In the U.S., Oz has landed every Tier I carrier deal for instant messaging except for Verizon Wireless, which uses Comverse’s solution. The Bell Mobility deal is also Oz’s second CDMA-carrier win after Sprint, helping the technology firm dispel the notion its platform is targeted at GSM networks.

In an interview last week, Oz CEO Skuli Mogensen said that Oz is currently developing a MMS support for its IM solution by tapping into the MMS applications used by its carrier customers and multimedia capabilities on PC desktops. Though the process would be like sending an ordinary IM to a user, a multimedia message would be routed to a carrier’s MMSC, where it would be formatted and transcoded before being directed to Oz’s media gateway, which would ship that message over the Internet either to an email account or directly to another user’s phone, Mogensen said.

Oz has already launched its initial multimedia application, announcing in March that it would support AIM’s picture messaging function. While that application would essentially send a photo as an attachment to an IM message, Oz’s new application will embed multimedia directly into the MMS capabilities of the network and handsets, creating a much more seamless experience, Mogensen said.

Oz is still testing the solution, but it expects it will be available soon as an upgrade to all of its carrier customers.