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Visto Chosen by Japan's Vodafone K.K.By DAVID SIMS TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist Visto Corporation, a vendor of push mobile e-mail, says its Visto Mobile 5 with ConstantSync technology has been chosen by Vodafone K.K. to power Vodafone Office Mail, what the company's billing as Japan's first "True Push" wireless e-mail. Visto's device-agnostic push wireless e-mail offering lets Vodafone K.K. sell push e-mail and PIM on handsets. This release of Vodafone Office Mail's service follows Visto's signing a global contract with Vodafone Group Plc, which was announced in April 2005. Japan is the latest region to launch a Vodafone wireless push e-mail service powered by Visto Mobile. Yesterday Reuters reported that Visto, a rival of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd., "signed a licensing agreement with patent holding company NTP Inc…. the two firms said the latest agreement gives closely held Visto access to NTP's patents until they expire. They said NTP had also acquired an equity stake in Visto." Industry observer Tom Krazit has reported that NTP has "now obtained license agreements from Visto, Good Technology Inc. and Nokia for patents that describe a system of sending e-mail messages wirelessly to handheld devices, also known as push e-mail." With Visto Mobile, Vodafone K.K. can offer two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts and calendars to select phones. Mobile users can check e-mail, make appointments or update contact lists away from their desks. Politeness is a big characteristic of Japanese society, and Shinkichi Kawakami, Executive Officer, Enterprise Business Unit Director, Vodafone K.K. was appropriately polite when he said "I am entirely convinced that Vodafone Office Mail is the perfect service to enable Japanese workers to be just as productive outside the office as they would be sitting directly in front of their office PC." The Visto platform enables two-way delivery of e-mail, contacts and calendar updates to devices across "all operating systems," company officials say, including Symbian, Palm, Microsoft Windows Mobile, J2ME MIDP 2.0, IMAP4 and SyncML. Brian A. Bogosian, chairman, president & CEO of Visto Corporation said his firm is "empowering the wireless operators like Vodafone K.K. to drive mass enterprise adoption of mobile e-mail." He told Reuters that Visto's deal with NTP will ensure his company's technology will be a "viable alternative long after other players have seen their solutions silenced."
David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page. |