Bebo has signed a deal to to allow its 40 million plus members to produce and share content on their mobile phones. The client application will be provided by Intercasting, which provides the Anthem platform connecting mobile carriers with social networking sites and entertainment companies. Bebo announced yesterday that it had signed a deal with T-mobile in the UK where it also has an existing partnership with operator Orange. In Ireland, Bebo is currently partnered with O2.
Having a mobile application means you can get greater integration with the phone camera for picture sharing and also hook into the owner’s personal directory of contacts on the SIM card creating another way of inviting people into Bebo. Indeed, the SIM card is the new battleground for mobile applications.
Yesterday Yahoo! said it’s oneConnect software automatically goes out to the Web to find contact details of friends in services such as News Corp’s MySpace, AIM, Bebo, Xing, Friendster or Orkut and merges them into the user’s mobile phone address book.
And Danish start-up ZYB has been gradually opening the Kimono (see Mobile Crunch) an yesterday launched its Social Phonebook, which uses the SyncML to copy your phone’s contact and calendar data back to ZYB’s server, where it’s accessible via a web-browser, as well as sync contacts in a Plaxo-like manner with other ZYB users.