Funambol enters Middle East and Africa with Dubai office

The company's software keeps information on billions of mobile phones - including contacts, calendars, email, photos and files - in sync with the Internet cloud, popular email systems and PCs.

Its open source software can be freely used inside companies, while its commercial software is used by leading mobile operators, device makers, portals, service providers and software vendors worldwide.

Mobile cloud sync is becoming red hot. Apple helped popularize it with its MobileMe service that synced iPhones. Google, Nokia and Microsoft recently introduced similar services that sync mobile phone data with their systems.

Funambol provides a vendor-neutral open source mobile cloud sync and push email solution. It uses a state-of-the-art cloud portal (view its YouTube video) to sync billions of smartphones and feature phones with a wide range of email and webmail systems, and personal computers.

This makes it easy for users to access their personal and work contacts, calendars, email, pictures, files and more, anywhere, anytime.

Funambol can uniquely sync billions of mobile phones for two reasons: 1) The company co-invented and is a leading advocate of the SyncML standard that is built into more than one billion phones which provides sync capabilities.

Funambol's software is the leading open source version of SyncML; and 2) Funambol's 50,000 member developer community has downloaded its software three million times in 200 countries and uses it on the latest mobile phones.

If they run into problems, as they have the source code, they can fix them and contribute the changes for everyone to use. This 'world's largest mobile quality assurance team' enables Funambol to support the latest mobile handsets much more quickly and cost-effectively than any other approach.

Funambol is rapidly growing, even in today's economy, as its open source software is highly attractive to companies in the mobile industry. Funambol's commercial version enables large-scale deployments, with extra capabilities such as the portal and over-the-air setup of user handsets.

The availability of source code makes the solution easy to customize, brand and integrate. Open source costs much less than other solutions. These are all reasons why Funambol has recently been deployed at leading mobile providers with tens of millions of users around the globe.