Who would guess that a bunch of sports fans would point the direction that mobile data services are heading? Prior to last year's World Cup tournament, French developer Atchik launched a chat, gaming and news package for hundreds of thousands of football fans. This "lifestyle value added service", as Atchik describes it, was an immediate success, launched by 13 international operators in 11 countries. Ericsson Mobility World has just signed a global Marketing Cooperation Agreement with Atchik.

Atchik offers mobile operators a range of off-the-shelf products that can be developed into tailored service bundles. It has helped operators to introduce user-friendly chat and messaging services, then enhanced these services by adding community-building services such as games, localized chat and dating to round out the lifestyle service bundle. The idea is that once consumers have experienced how easy a service is to use, they will then want to use other services. Barry McInerney, Business Manager at Ericsson Mobility World, says: "It's all about increasing the sustainable user base and the size of the community while encouraging loyalty." He says Atchik has experience in supporting operators with marketing a service launch and to build on the success of an existing service – this sets them apart from other application service providers.

For the World Cup 2002, Atchik launched its Football Arena sports community solution. This chat, gaming and news package was available to more than 30 million subscribers before the first game of the tournament was played. Members of the international community could chat with each other or challenge one another in a worldwide interactive football quiz. Live World Cup updates were also offered to community members by Reuters news agency. This campaign resulted in 215 000 new members within two weeks, two messages sent per active user each day and more than ten messages sent per day by 20% of the active members.

Bertrand Darrouzet, CEO of Atchik, says: "Ericsson Mobility World has raised the visibility of Atchik's mobile community offer in markets where we were not yet present." He adds: "Ericsson Mobility World can help to increase Atchik awareness amongst the decision makers."

Today, Atchik has been launched commercially with more than 30 mobile operators. It targets two distinct end-user groups: 15-to-25-year-olds, offering mobile communities around chat, gossip, dating and game services; and early adopters in the 25-to-35-year-old range, offering them new multimedia services. "Atchik has been successful partly because it worked with existing technology, and because it segmented the market and geared services accordingly," McInerney says.

Cenk Bayrakdar, head of partner management at Turkcell, says that by 2004 lifestyle services will account for most of the traffic and revenue for operators, starting with chat and SMS. "Atchik knows this, and has been there since 2000, McInerney says. "They have a very sound business case, with more than 30 commercial deployments as testimony to that". This success is one of the factors that makes Atchik attractive to Ericsson Mobility World. McInerney says: "We want to work with them because they are a niche specialist in lifestyle services, and have considerable experience in providing operators with appropriate marketing support." Darrouzet says: "Such a relationship is mutually beneficial - it adds value to both Atchik's and Ericsson's offerings"

As part of Atchik's SMS-based lifestyle community solutions, it can upgrade a solution to bring in location-based and MMS elements over the existing SMS services. McInerney says: "It also offers a good portfolio of MMS applications, including Multimedia Studio – which comprises a composer, an album, a player and an MML (multimedia library) – MMS Gallery, MMS Chat and, Speed Dating, MMS Games (such as Cannon Man and Celebrity Quiz), MMSX (adult content service package including Kama Sutra and Strip Quiz) and MMS information services (such as weather, news and sports).

"The future for the types of services that Atchik offers is bright and lucrative," McInerney says. "Operators are looking to expand their SMS and MMS offerings and these targeted lifestyle community services are a great way to do it."

Today, Atchik's services are available throughout the world to an audience of over 75 million subscribers. Visit Atchik's website to learn more about the company.

Kris Walmsley