Funambol Mobile Open Source Community Testing Grows 2,000%, Downloads Gain 34% and Active Servers Increase 42%Developers and users gravitate towards open source mobile sync & push email
in response to economy; mobile social networking projects jump in popularity
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – April 29, 2009 – Redwood City, Calif., April 29, 2009 – Funambol, the leading provider of mobile open source cloud sync and push email, today announced that its community experienced record growth in the past few months, as developers and users increasingly adopt open alternatives to proprietary sync and push email software. In the past three months, Funambol’s open source community testing increased 2,000%, open source downloads grew 34% and active servers increased 42%. Funambol’s community continues to enhance the software’s interoperability with many systems, including Google apps, MS Exchange, Android and Mozilla Thunderbird. Furthermore, Funambol’s expansion into mobile social networking has fueled significant developer interest and activity.
Among the projects created by Funambol’s developer community, AvatarGrabber tops the charts as the most popular mobile open source social networking app. Developed by Alfredo Morresi as part of Funambol’s Code Sniper community program, it enables Facebook, MySpace and other social network profile pictures to automatically sync with mobile phones. As people change their profile picture on a social network, their photo is updated in other people’s mobile phone address books.
“Our community is growing rapidly because in this economy, people are increasingly turning to open source standards-based software that interoperates with all major mobile phones and desktops,” said Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager. “Nobody wants to be locked into an expensive proprietary sync service. Funambol is the Switzerland of mobile sync and push email, it lets users easily switch phones, desktop apps and webmail services while retaining their personal data.”
Funambol’s basis on open source provides the industry’s broadest mobile device compatibility, for billions of mobile phones. Its open source software is backed by the world’s largest mobile developer community, which helps test Funambol software on thousands of smartphones and feature phones. Funambol open source can be freely used for internal projects, as well as rapidly translated into different languages.
About Funambol
Funambol is the leading provider of mobile open source cloud sync and push email. Funambol open source software has been downloaded over three million times by 50,000 developers and project participants in more than 200 countries. The commercial version of Funambol has been deployed at mobile operators, portals, device manufacturers, service providers and ISVs including customers such as AOL, 1&1, Earthlink and CA, Inc. Funambol is headquartered in Redwood City, California with an R&D center in Italy. For more information, please visit http://www.funambol.com. You can follow Funambol on Twitter at http://twitter.com/funambol.