MUMBAI: US mobile phone marketing leader - ipsh!, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Omnicom Group Inc., announced its new mStore for Start Soma.
Start Soma, a San Francisco art gallery for emerging visual artists will roll out Smart Mobile powered by ipsh!. Smart Mobile will be the first gallery to sell new art for cell phones, transforming the devices into pocket galleries.
The ipsh! mStore is a mobile storefront that enables companies to display, promote and sell any type of mobile content, including wallpapers, ringtones, mobile videos, games, and now art. According to the Gartner group, more than 800 million phones will be sold in 2005, so the market for new mobile applications, services and accessories like mStore and Star Mobile offers huge potential for companies and organisations using this technology to expand their business.
"To ipsh!, this is more than mobile commerce, this is the convergence of the artistic flavor of San Francisco’s south of market culture and new mediums of display, in this case the phone screen. We first worked with Start Soma in 2003, using SMS messaging to promote its art openings, and are excited about this new venture into selling mobile art," said ipsh! CEO Nihal Mehta.
"With thousands of original works by hundreds of artists, we required a decidedly robust and powerful platform to power our mobile gallery, which is why we chose ipsh!. We’re excited to bring new art to the most popular consumer technology device used today -the cell phone. Without ipsh! there was no way to ensure the level of quality we required to effectively showcase the amazing range of artwork available via Start Mobile, and we are absolutely honoured to be the first mStore," said Start Soma founder John Doffing.
ipsh! mStore is built on the firm’s proprietary Prism platform and includes connectivity to all supported North American carriers. Mobile content is automatically optimised to the customer handset and is billed through the carrier. The product is available either as a complete customer-facing solution, providing web and wap full-service, storefront experiences, or as a back-end service/interface for existing web or wap sites. More than 100,000 images are currently for sale in the Start Mobile mStore.
All art showcased on Start Mobile is optimised for display on more than 200 handsets from national carriers. Users will be able to buy art for their phones using premium SMS, billed directly to their phone bill.
