AVAILABLE
SOON: U2opia Mobile will launch its Twitter service for users with
entry-level mobile phones which cannot access the Internet, in the first
quarter of next year. - Reuters
U2opia Mobile, which has a similar tie-up with Facebook Inc, will
launch its Twitter service in the first quarter of next year, Chief
Executive and Co-founder Sumesh Menon told Reuters.
Users will need to dial a simple code to get a feed of the popular trending topics on Twitter, he said.
More than 11 million people use U2opia's Fonetwish service, which
helps access Facebook and Google Talk on mobile without a data
connection.
Twitter, which boasts of about 230 million users, held a successful
initial public offering last month that valued the company at around
US$25bil (RM75bil).
U2opia uses a telecom protocol named USSD, or Unstructured
Supplementary Service Data, which does not allow viewing of pictures,
videos or other graphics.
"USSD as a vehicle for Twitter is almost hand in glove because
Twitter has by design a character limit, it's a very text-driven social
network," Menon said.
Eight out of 10 people in emerging markets are still not accessing data on their phone, he said.
U2opia, which is present in 30 countries in seven international
languages, will localise the Twitter feed according to the location of
the user.
"So somebody in Paraguay would definitely get content that would be
very very localized to that market vis a vis somebody sitting in Mumbai
or Bangalore," he said.
The company, whose biggest markets are Africa and South America,
partners with telecom carriers such as Telenor, Vodafone and Bharti
Airtel Ltd. U2opia usually gets 30 to 40% of what users pay its telecom
partners to access Fonetwish.
"For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it's going to be their first Twitter experience," Menon said. - Reuters
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