Funambol.com - New Mobile 2.0 Messaging Announced

Many of you will already be familiar with Funambol, an open source project that provides push email, contacts and calendar functionality to more than 1.5 million mobile phones. Funambol’s community program, called Code Sniper, has been busy funding developers of mobile social networking solutions for the last year and has already introduced some great new mobile features. Funambol recently announced a number of new exciting projects for developers to start working on. Some of the more noteworthy developments include the ability to enhance your phone’s address book by getting your contacts’ photos from your favorite social network and appending them to your address book and the ability to sync events between your favorite social network and your phone’s calendar. Also, invite your contacts to your favorite social network straight from your phone.

“Get icons/photos of your friends on your mobile phone. Many cell phone address books allow you to associate a picture or icon with the names in it. Sync Events. On your favorite social network(s), you have people who you like to hang with. Wouldn't it be great to be able to easily sync events from your favorite social network to the calendar on your mobile? And send events from your mobile phone to the social network?”

Social networks and mobile applications are arguably the two fastest growing sectors of the mobile 2.0 community. Funambol’s funding of innovative projects that will extend social networking to the mobile phone at no cost could result in mass adoption of their software platform. Much will depend on the quality of the eventual solutions proposed but if Funambol’s past projects are any indication, look for this to become a real success.

How long will we have to wait for these projects to become a reality? Many other big players are busily developing similar applications and the first ones out of the gate will have a big advantage.