Mobile Web technologies provider Miyowa launched a social networking application for mobile devices.

The new service, InTouch 5, offers a mobile address book with social presence, mobile instant messaging, mail, user-generated content, file-sharing and location services. Carriers can now deliver an aggregated Web 2.0 application and control the amount of services and applications they choose to roll-out to their subscribers.

"This service is basically extending your life from the PC to mobile," said Sergio De Acha, senior vice president of sales and business development at Miyowa. "Our customers are the operators. This is something we deploy.

"The operator can decide which social network to roll out to their subscribers, like Photobucket or YouTube," he said. "We engage in focus groups, so we really sit down on a monthly basis to see how these users are interacting with social networkers and then we integrate them to mobile, so we highlight the implementation."

Miyowa's InTouch 5 service enables operators to offer a comprehensive social networking platform without entering into restrictive relationships with social networks and IM providers, the company claims.

The service implements Miyowa's communications protocol which extends the instant messaging and presence service standard to deliver the same type of functionality found on computers to mobile phones. These things include avatars, file-sharing and social networking to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java and BREW-based mobile devices.

The service can be accessed in mobile devices with the service already embedded when the phone ships from wireless carrier to provider or users can download it through a carrier mobile browser WAP site.

"It is difficult to talk to an operator without mentioning mobile, so we started listening to these focus groups and we realized users wanted to branch out to mobile, as to they wanted the same things from their PCs on their mobile devices," Mr. De Acha said. "Their mobile phones are equipped with cameras, so they want to share."

"From the operators' perspective, they want to share a unified, seamless experience," he said. "It would be the best way to describe how a subscriber doesn't want to jump from one application to another to post pictures and such, and the user experience is simple, and it allows the operator to decide how they want to roll it out."

Miyowa claims that this protocol increases mobile application responsiveness and reaction, which results in a 30 percent increase in bandwith reduction on the carrier network, and nearly doubled handset battery life.

Since 2003, Miyowa created MoveMessenger, the first handset independent universal end-to-end
client messaging technology that is compliant with all major existing standards and systems and provides mobile operators the opportunity to deliver Mobile Web 2.0 instant messaging-related content and services to their clients.

"The challenge is to basically simplify the communication and sharing process," Mr. De Acha said. "Right now I would volunteer that it's difficult to use a mobile phone, and this simplifies that. It makes for a very sophisticated user."