Think you look like a star? MMS application Twin Factor tells you which one. It works simply. You take a picture of yourself or a friend and send it by MMS to Twin Factor. In return, you receive another MMS in which your picture is "morphed" into a celebrity look-alike, along with a percentage score showing how similar you are to the celebrity.


The application was developed by Swedish company Softhouse, an Ericsson Mobility World partner, and launched in Norway and Sweden. Marketing agreements have been signed with partners for 15 other countries in Europe and Asia, and there are plans to roll out the service to 10 of those countries by the end of this year.

The biggest success so far has been in Norway, where the service has attracted more than 100,000 users, mainly aged 15 to 25, in less than six months. The price of the service is about USD 3 per time. Statistics also show that more than 50 percent of users use the service more than once.

Tord Olsson, Softhouse president, says the company is very happy with the results. "It is very good for a new MMS service and Norway is a relatively small market. It shows the potential of our solution," he says.

Twin Factor can also be used for look-alike contests, such as in connection with television programs or competitions such as the Premier League, to find the person who best matches the TV or sports star.

"We are releasing a handful of related applications as well. One is called Family Factor?, where you send two pictures and receive a similarity score between the people in the pictures," Olsson says.

The technology behind Twin Factor originally came from a solution for the security sector, based on advanced face-recognition technology. Applications are deployed on Softhouse's messaging platform, which allows for flexible constellations of different external parties. The platform makes it possible to create users with restricted access to parts of the system. It also has a domain concept allowing the platform to handle different customers with different content and keep track of each domain's usage statistics. The platform is typically hosted at a content aggregator or other hosting partner. It is linked via standard protocols to a back-end system with connections to operators, or directly to the operator's MMS-C. The technology is patented in Sweden and Softhouse has applied for international patents.

The business model is basically a combination of license fee and revenue share, where Softhouse provides the technical platform while the partner, for example a media house, provides the content ? the celebrity pictures ? and is responsible for the legal aspects of that.

In Scandinavia, Softhouse works with Norwegian-based media group Schibsted, which owns some of Scandinavia's largest dailies, such as Swedish Aftonbladet and Norwegian Verdens Gang.

Olsson says: "The best part is that it is so simple to explain how Twin Factor works. Everybody can relate to the idea of celebrity twins and it sparks people's imagination: what famous person is my look-alike?"

Read more at the Softhouse website
Read the full list of Ericsson Mobile Application Award winners

By Lars-Magnus Kihlstr?m