The Norwegian Olympic sailing team's blogging service allowed fans to follow the athletes' training and life day by day, just like a diary.
oneBlog is a mobile blogging and multimedia album solution designed specifically for mobile operators. It allows people to post and share photos, text, audio and video directly from their mobile phones.
David Sinnott, vice-president, sales, at NewBay, says the sailing team really enjoyed using the service. For Telenor, it was a great way of promoting the use of MMS.
"The goal of this solution was to promote MMS and to support Telenor's involvement with the Norwegian Olympic sailing team. The team had fun using it and each member set up a personal album using MMS. They even personalized them with pictures of their friends and families," Sinnott says.
The solution allowed the team to instantly post still pictures and 15-second video clips taken on their camera phones, accompanied by text messages. They then sent the clips and pictures themselves to their personal web pages.
NewBay worked with partner multimedia company Smartcom to provide a customized service. "It required cooperation between Telenor, Smartcom and us," Sinnott says. "We provided a customized phone-blogging system and Smartcom created the web structure."
Telenor also got several news sites in Norway and around the world to link to the site, which meant it reached even more users.
The service this time was limited to blogging but it can also include several other functions, such as personalized web pages for visitors, chat functions and discussion forums.
"We have for example provided T-Mobile USA, SETAR NV in Aruba in the Caribbean and O2 in Ireland with more advanced FoneBlog applications to drive MMS and data traffic," Sinnott says. "This allowed the users to post and share photos, text, audio and video direct from their mobile phones in a fun, safe environment.
"The solution we developed for SETAR is especially interesting. The operator was launching MMS and wanted a compelling application that would instantly drive the adoption of picture messaging. The blogging service was promoted towards teenagers and became really popular in just a few weeks. It shows how blogging can increase MMS penetration by getting people to use camera phones in a fun and simple way by actually creating the content and posting it themselves."
Application developer NewBay Software was founded in 2002, and just a year later won best information application prize at the Ericsson Mobile Application Awards for its FoneBlog mobile-blogging solution. Now in its second year, it is a profitable, venture-capital-backed company with business in full swing.
