Vic Mobile Developer JMango Makes Inroads into Asia

Melbourne-based mobile developer JMango has made its first inroads into the lucrative Asia market with a number of contract wins including a deal with the biggest carrier in the Philippines, Globe Telecom. It has also won a contract with the Philippine Savings Bank that will see it support the bank’s move into mobile commerce.

Globe Telecom will license JMango’s mobile platform and manage the availability of applications in a newly-created mobile app zone. The agreement will be officially announced in the next few weeks. JMango has an existing R&D centre in the Philippines and has previously announced a deal with The Associated Press to distribute its sports news content to mobile consumers in the country. Other content deals in the region include with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. Closer to home it has created a mobile application for Victorian taxi group Silver Top and will in future launch that application nationally.

JMango CEO Ilan Oosting told CommsDay that Asia would be a growth area for the company although he said the business would remain based in Australia.

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The company has been in operation for two years and has established operations in Australia, the Philippines, and the Benelux region of Europe. Its distributor in both Australia and New Zealand is Informatel.

JMango’s main development platform allows any mobile app to be built once and then deployed for any mobile operating system or phone, with support for all of the major platforms including the iPhone, Google’s Android, Symbian, Java, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Another advantage is that it can use either the Internet or the cellular data channel to send information, making applications suitable for non-smartphones.

In the Asia region Oosting believes that support for the non-iPhone market will be critical. “The market is more than the iPhone. While it’s been incredibly successful with more than one million devices, there’s a lot more mobile systems out there”, he said, noting that in many markets in Asia the high-end devices are out of most people’s budgets.

JMango marketing manager Allan Bennetto also pointed out that Asian users are more interested in functional applications than in some of the more developed markets. “Here it has been very much a marketing tool but in Asia it’s all about making the technology work”, he noted. Oosting also suggests that carriers need to find a way to make mobile applications pay, with much of the revenue now seeping outside of their networks, particularly in terms of the iPhone.

Geoff Long