ShoZu Selected by TIM for Social Media Services

ShoZu Inc. announced a partnership with Telecom Italia, enabling TIM subscribers to use ShoZu’s mobile social media services to instantly transfer photos and videos captured on their mobile devices to a variety of social networks, photo communities and personal blogging sites. Users can also leverage other ShoZu capabilities to keep up with their online social lives on the go.

TIM will pre-install ShoZu’s service on 10 handsets with a flat-rate data package offering the use of ShoZu and other data services for a fixed fee intended to encourage mobile content usage. The service will also be available as a free download from most of devices included in TIM’s portfolio.

In addition, the agreement authorizes ShoZu to sell and serve ads through the ShoZu interface on TIM handsets. ShoZu will share a portion of the ad revenues with TIM. This arrangement, along with ShoZu’s policy of allowing carriers to use its services on a royalty-free basis in return for a revenue share, is designed to help mobile operators maximize revenues generated through mobile social media channels.

The partnership adds a key mobile lifestyle service for TIM, one of Europe’s largest mobile operators with 35.9 million subscribers as of March 31, 2008. With ShoZu, users can send images and text from their phones to one or more social media sites and any email address with a click, check their friends’ social network status, update their own, have friends’ photo feeds sent directly to their handset, exchange comments with friends, and more.

Social media sites supported by TIM’s ShoZu service include Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Spaces, Google Blogger, Dailymotion, Kodak Easyshare Gallery and life.Dada.net. Users can access and interact with all of these sites from the ShoZu interface on TIM handsets without opening a mobile browser, navigating to multiple sites, or sending the same file to each destination individually.

"Every mobile user who takes pictures and videos with their handset faces a challenge in transferring those images to their favorite Web 2.0 sites. We are partnering with ShoZu to simplify this process for our subscribers," said Riccardo Jelmini, Executive Vice President, TIM Data. "ShoZu's service solves the problem elegantly while also providing an expanding menu of related capabilities to help users interact with their online communities when they are away from their computers."

“This is a top-tier partnership that clearly demonstrates the value that mobile operators place on connecting subscribers with their online social networks, our ability to support multiple social media sites with a single client, and the revenue sharing opportunities we offer,” said ShoZu CEO Mark Bole. “TIM is taking full advantage of the ShoZu platform to reap business benefits from the booming social media movement.”