Nimbuzz will add Social Spice to India’s Spice Mobiles
Nimbuzz, which provides mobile social interaction service, has signed a
distribution deal with Spice Mobiles, a handset vendor in India. Its new
handsets will have the Nimbuzz application pre-installed for users to
chat, message, and send files on the go.
From
December, according to Nimbuzz, most of the new Java and Windows Mobile
handsets will be rolled out to the Indian market via Spice Mobiles'
approximately 25,000 retail outlets with the full Nimbuzz communication
portfolio installed.
In a
similar arrangement, recently India’s mobile service provider
Bharti
Airtel decided to go with envIOWorks platform that enables social
marketing of mobile content to add social marketing to its Hello Tunes
service. The envIOWorks platform is supporting Airtel’s Hello Tunes
Manager, which is available for free download to Airtel’s mobile
consumers, which are claimed to be over 75 million.
The
addition of Nimbuzz will be announced to Spice Mobile customers by a
multi-territory marketing campaign including Nimbuzz logos, links and
service description on the Spice Mobiles website, POS promotions, and
links to Nimbuzz on its WAP Portal, informs Nimbuzz.
Of late, Nimbuzz – based in The Netherlands – had announced that it can equip social networks with
real-time web and mobile communication features.
And StudiVZ, a German social network,
is the first site to integrate Nimbuzz technology
for its community.
"This
deal ensures significant market penetration for Nimbuzz across the APAC
territories and we will be working closely with Spice Mobiles to
encourage future shipment of new handsets," says Nimbuzz CEO Evert-Jaap
Lugt.
The
Spice Mobiles deal, according to Nimbuzz, is a global contract. In
addition to India, it says, pre-installed Spice Mobiles devices will be
sold in other APAC (Asia-Pacific) territories.
"We
turn to leading technology providers such as Nimbuzz to add the best
value services, such as instant messaging and social networking, to our
devices," says Spice Mobiles CEO, Kunal Ahooja.
Today,
with nearly 300 million mobile subscribers, India’s mobile market seems
quite lucrative to global players. However, the stagnant voice-only ARPU
(average revenue per user) levels are causing worries for mobile
operators. That’s among the reasons that they want to aggressively sell
data services to consumers. The local market for mobile data services
has not yet taken off.
