14 DAY TRIAL // Wireless carrier Orange and Netvibes announced recently a partnership aimed at the delivery of the world’s largest collection of mobile widgets to users of all types of mobile phones. Netvibes has a catalog of around 200,000 real-time widgets, all of which will become available to the carrier's users via Orange widgets, a service present on 80 percent of all handsets shipped by Orange.
Moreover, the catalog will also become available on djinngo mobile, a service delivered by Orange to all mobile phone users in the world. Not to mention that the mobile phone carrier also aims at including Netvibes' widgets in the recently launched Orange Application Shop, so that all Orange customers can access them in a simple way.
The collection of widgets is known as the Netvibes Ecosystem, and comes as a library of popular widgets from a wide range of content providers all around the world, and users will be able to access them via Orange widgets with a simple click on the Orange homescreen. The widgets are available for a variety of mobile phones on the market, including basic phones or sophisticated smartphones, the wireless carrier notes.
Paul-François Fournier, executive vice-president, Audience and Advertising, Orange said, “As the largest independent provider of real time widgets across 90 languages, Netvibes was the ideal partner for us. Our strategy is to make mobile widgets a reality for everyone – not just the mobile multimedia fans with sophisticated smartphones. Our approach is to offer diverse local content, in all languages, with an intuitive and simple experience that will appeal to all. Netvibes’ catalogue includes widgets from content developers around the world and this was important for us as we will be offering widgets across Europe, Middle East and Africa”.
The newly announced partnership will be mainly focused on mobile widgets in the beginning, but it will also expand to other screens, benefiting from Orange’s reach in broadband Internet and IPTV segments. In addition to delivering a user-friendly widget service to its users, Orange also offers content developers the possibility to deliver content to a new market of users. The carrier announced that it planned to facilitate this through the development of a software developer kit.
“Our vision is to personalize the entire online world and empower consumers to customize their entire Web experience. Thanks to our partnership with Orange, we are bringing personalized widgets to millions of consumers everywhere,” said Freddy Mini, CEO Netvibes. “The era of the real-time, personalized Web has truly begun.”