ZenZui becomes Zumobi
ZenZui becomes Zumobi and announces beta program. The newly re-branded company will open access to beta offering on December 14th.
ZenZui shared details of its highly anticipated Beta roll-out plans with reporters and analysts attending the Mobile Internet World Conference in Boston. The company also announced its new name – Zumobi – that better reflects the company’s award-winning Zooming User Interface and mobile platform business. Zumobi will be available to the general public in Beta form beginning on December 14, 2007. Program details and product downloads will be made available on the company’s website: www.Zumobi.com.
“Since we unveiled the company at CTIA this spring, we’ve made tremendous progress in refining our product and service. Our new name is a reflection of our capabilities and is the result of what we’ve learned through more than three years of research and development as well as our Alpha trials earlier this year. The Beta version of the product that we’re now launching will offer consumers an exciting new set of mobile features and functionality that helps them stay on top of the things that are important to them personally and have fun doing it,” said Eric Hertz, CEO of Zumobi. “Our team has been hard at work, and the Beta product offers great opportunity now for each of the participants in the Zumobi ecosystem, including consumers, developers, content partners, advertisers, mobile operators and distributors.”
Zumobi takes accessing, retrieving, and sharing Web-based content beyond traditional mobile browsers. Through an intuitive, lush, high-framerate user interface, Zumobi allows people to easily bounce in and out of snack-sized bits information they need throughout the day, and the targeted entertainment they enjoy, while offering advertisers a better way to connect with consumers through their mobile phones. For mobile Web developers, Zumobi delivers an open, device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones. Zumobi makes it simple and profitable to build and deliver mobile applications – through a single standard for development and deployment and an attractive revenue sharing model.
“Improving and simplifying the user experience is vital to the future of mobile applications,” said Jason Ankeny, editor of FierceMobileContent. “As one of the winners of FierceMobileContent’s Top App Award for 2007, Zumobi is a tremendous step in that direction.”
Highlights of Zumobi include:
FAST & FRESH: Painful browser loading delays are nonexistent in the Zumobi experience, thanks to an advanced background data caching technology. Unlike browsers, background data caching permits the user to interact with information and entertainment even when their phone is beyond wireless service, like on a plane or in a subway.
PERSONAL: Zumobi users can populate their personal zoom space with informative and custom-designed interactive Tiles of content that are directly relevant and interesting to their needs and lifestyles. Each of these Tile widgets are personalized to show your photos, blogs, and friends, not just generic Web sites crunched onto a mobile screen.
DESIGN: Zumobi’s novel Zooming User Interface (ZUI) is based on many years of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, led by Dr. Ben Bederson, Zumobi co-founder and an expert in the field. Using advanced adaptive user interface technologies, the Zumobi user experience adjusts to different devices and modalities: portrait, landscape, numeric keypad, touchscreen, mini-qwerty board, or traditional up/down/left/right navigational controls.
DEVICE NEUTRALITY: The first Beta version of Zumobi will be available for phones with Windows Mobile 5 and 6, with Blackberry and selected J2ME compatibility coming early in the second quarter of 2008.
REVENUE SHARE: Zumobi is free to end users and is supported by advertising dollars. Zumobi’s centralized distribution service allows for better targeting of advertising to interested customers. A robust and comprehensive revenue sharing model (based on CPM and CPA advertising models) ensures realistic economic viability for Zumobi and its business partners.
OPEN STANDARDS & COMMUNITY: A Beta version of the Zumobi SDK will be available to developers simultaneously with the launch of the Beta Program, delivering on the company’s promise of an open, device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones. Zumobi Tiles can be easily sent to other Zumobi members, allowing communities of friends to quickly create, embrace, share and use Tiles targeted to their unique interests.
About Zumobi
Zumobi, formerly ZenZui, is the open platform that is reinventing the mobile content experience. A highly-acclaimed innovator in the mobile industry, Zumobi provides developers with a device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones; enables a better way to connect consumers and the brands that define their lives; delivers a new set of benefits that carriers can offer to their customers; and gives consumers an experience that makes their mobile phones more useful and fun. More information on Zumobi is available at www.Zumobi.com.
