Convergence Partners investee company Integrat continues its strategic role in the industry via the election of its Operations Director, Dieter van Rooyen, to the WASPA management committee for the 2011/12 term. WASPA is the Wireless Application Service Providers Association, a self-regulating body that governs mobile telecommunications value added services.

Integrat has been a member of WASPA since its inception in 2004 and has served on the management committee for two terms, says Norman Parkin, Integrat CEO, who has stepped down from the WASPA management committee.

Integrat has been operating in the mobile space since 2001 as a wireless application service provider (WASP) aggregator. “As a self-regulating body, industry members need to get involved with setting policy and ongoing regulation, says Van Rooyen. “I am looking forward to providing a valuable contribution; as one of the largest aggregators in the industry, it is in our interest to be hands-on in order to continually protect our customers and the consumers.”

Compliance has become a central part of value added services. WASPA has a very mature Code of Conduct, but new challenges arise, for example, with the imminent implementation of the Consumer Protection Act. “This will be one of the biggest challenges facing the WASPA management committee in the following 12 months, says Van Rooyen. Industry bodies need to align their existing policies to meet the requirements of the new Act; it is going to significantly change the landscape.”

Integrat is committed to serving WASPA and strives to continually improve the quality of service that its members provide to consumers.

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Convergence investees SkillPod Media and Integrat have launched their joint mobile games portal, Play4Games.co.za, which supports all the most popular smart phone handsets. The site has been branded as Play4Games and forms part of Integrat’s mobile entertainment brand Play4. The platform makes use of the Integrat High Gate mobile payments platform and the SkillPod Media mobile games platform.

Gaming is increasingly moving from the console and PC to the smartphone. This trend is driven by factors including the higher penetration of smartphones, the affordability of these devices, easier access to app stores, increased penetration of Flash on mobile devices and the ever growing installed base of the Opera Mini browser.

In the past smartphones were targeted at business users, but this trend is steadily changing and today it’s become a trend for the youth to be seen with their smartphones.

Research figures show that worldwide mobile game sales will reach- €7 Billion by 2013 (Source: BuddeComm). This will be fuelled by greater penetration of new generation handsets, cheaper data costs and increased connectivity speeds, fuelled by increased network speeds and access to wireless networks. The mobile web is on the increase and in South Africa more users access the web from their mobile phones than from computers.

Web browsers play an important role in this growth, as they are striving to improve the functionality, user experience and speed of the mobile web. Opera’s iPhone browser was downloaded more than 2.6 million times, during April, creating 70% of user growth in the month for Opera’s mobile browser. In June alone more than 26.4% of cellphone browsing has been done through Opera’s browser, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

In conclusion it is safe to say that mobile gaming is here to stay, both locally and internationally and it remains an incredibly popular form of entertainment and technology is driving the growth from a multitude of angles and across multiple devices.

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SkillPod Innovation

SkillPod Integrat

SkillPodMobile

Integrat has launched myTXT Mobile product – a free desktop bulk messaging application ideal for marketing campaigns. myTXT allows a user to send single messages or bulk SMSes to your group of contacts that you import from Microsoft Outlook.

The simplicity of the application is that a user can write their messages now, save and send them even while being off-line. myTXT will store messages in the outbox and automatically send it when a user is reconnected to the Internet. In addition, myTXT spoils delivery reports, ideal for tracking the safe delivery of messages. Message templates can be stored and retrieved when using a specific message often. This saves time and effort in writing or saving a message elsewhere.

The recipients may reply to your message, and their replies will appear in your myTXT Mobile application’s inbox.

Corrie Henn, product manager of myTXT Mobile, says: “This desktop application supports bulk messaging, ideal for marketing campaigns. Creating a myTXT account requires no set-up fees, monthly fees or contracts. Users only need to pay for their SMS bundle, and the beauty is that SMS messages will never expire. Bulk messages can be imported from Microsoft Excel or any other delimited text file at your own convenience.”

“A user may also use custom fields to store their specific information about a contact. When sending messages, they simply refer to the custom field, and myTXT will automatically substitute it with the store data in a contact database. Setting up reminders, alerts and meetings via SMS is as simple as clicking a button. You may use this feature not only to notify your clients, but even yourself, so myTXT can remind you of anything from meetings, which will send an SMS to your client as a reminder, to birthdays and anniversaries. Your customised calendar can, in addition, manage staff timetables, preventing meeting schedules that may clash, and can create repeating events that occur on regular intervals,” adds Henn.

The myTXT desktop application will notify a user by means of a visual alert every time an automatic SMS is sent.

For more information, visit http://www.myTXT.co.za

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