14 DAY TRIAL // NewBay Software announced that Orange UK has licensed its UGC Gateway to enable easy integration with third party mobile blogging, album and other social networking sites. Orange UK is already using NewBay PIXOTA handset imaging client to drive one-click uploads to the Orange Photography album. With NewBay UGC Gateway, Orange UK customers will be able to instantly upload photos and video from their mobile to multiple websites of their choice. Initially, Orange UK will provide direct upload of images and video to Photography, Pikeo by Orange and Belbo, with other leading social networking brands to follow.
"Online social networking has become a huge trend in the UK and we want to give our customers choice so they can instantly upload their camera phone photos and videos to their favourite online sites. NewBay UGC Gateway made this easy for us to do. We didn't have to worry about integrating with multiple sites. We simply specified the sites we wanted to offer to our subscribers and NewBay did what was required at the back end to make it happen," said Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Development and Innovation at Orange.
NewBay UGC Gateway handles all the aspects required for mobile operators to connect to third party websites, including posting media, viewing WAP pages and sending text alerts to users' mobile devices. To date, for mobile operators to support multiple blogging and social networking sites they need to integrate with each individual site, which takes time and resources. With NewBay UGC Gateway, operators only need to make one connection and then simply decide which sites they would like to make available to their subscribers. UGC Gateway removes the challenges and costs by managing the integration with third party websites and routing the multimedia content to the requested blog or album service.
"Our mobile multimedia solutions are uniquely designed to make it as easy as possible for mobile users to post and share user generated content such as high resolution photos and video to blogging and social networking sites. We developed the UGC Gateway to enable mobile operators to offer subscribers the ability to post to multiple sites of their choice. This will increase traffic and revenue for the operator but it will also make real mobile social networking possible today for the user," said Dr Nagappan Arunachalam, CMO of NewBay Software.