Last month TechCrunch wrote about Kalaida, iSkoot‘s software platform purposed for connecting standard feature phones to social sites and other online content in a way not unlike that of a smartphone.
This evening, iSkoot has announced that they are expanding their offerings to include KalaidaLIVE, the always-on connectivity solution that allows their Notifier application to receive content updates without manual or timed refreshes.
As iSkoot puts it:
KalaidaLive opens a persistent connection to iSkoot’s notification server to listen for updates from the various Web services that the subscriber uses. Once new information has been retrieved, the notification server uses this persistent connection to return all relevant new and cached information. The process is optimized for bandwidth efficiency by using a user-sensitive content retrieval system. In addition, iSkoot’s KalaidaLive server can rapidly provision new applications and manage authentication and provisioning as well.
In other words, KalaidaLive allows manufacturers to easily push web content (E-mail, Twitter/Facebook feeds, etc) to their non-smartphone handsets out-of-the-box without requiring them to develop their own content-pushing back end. It’ll also allow them to distribute the latest version of applications directly to handsets in a way that is fairly transparent to the user.
iSkoot isn’t currently providing exact details on the costs involved for manufacturers, though they claim it’s a “small investment”.