Squace blog

Global reach – 1 million downloads from 130 countries – achieved with apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Feature phones

STOCKHOLM – September 27, 2010 – Responding to the rapid growth of downloads from India, Squace has developed a dedicated content starter pack comprising more than 30 links to India’s most popular news, entertainment and social networks.

The Indian starter pack was developed as Indian downloads of Squace have rapidly increased to almost 50,000 per month and Squace prepares for another huge surge.

Squace enables consumers to easily bookmark content to their mobile device as well as share content with friends and colleagues, plus instantly access their favourites such as Orkut, Chakpak, Naukri Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.

Frank Verschoor, CEO of Squace said: “India is a vibrant market for Mobile Internet content consumption and sharing. Squace enables easy and fast content access with a one click user experience. We researched and designed a starter content pack that reflects the popularity of India’s leading digital content providers.”

The current pre-selection of Internet services for the Indian market are listed below (click on the Go Mobile icon).  Nonetheless, Squace welcomes suggestions for further content link inclusions by e-mail: business at squace dot com.

“We always thought that India would be an interesting market for Squace given the high penetration of mobile internet enabled feature phones and the growth of fixed cost data plans,” said Verschoor. “Butthe demand has started to take off much earlier than we thought. We have already scheduled initiatives in India such as content and affiliate partnerships and we are building up a local presence.”

So what’s the problem? Why is Squace so popular?

To date the delivery of mobile services and content has been hindered by the wide variety of platforms and devices, and the closed, proprietary nature of these ecosystems.

Yet consumers now have an ever increasing appetite for applications and services that are easy to access and use; that make sharing of content and social interaction easy and consistent and that empowers them to control their digital lifestyle. They require services that eliminate the barrier between what they could do on their laptop and desktop computers and what they do on their mobile device, and which let them move seamlessly between the two environments.

Squace is a self personalized universal mobile interface (UMI), which is ported to the vast majority of mobile platforms and devices. Squace empowers consumers to use and share digital services, content, and information plus enables them to use sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail and many others, all from one application. This is a unique proposition enabling the aggregation of consumers priceless ‘contacts’ (and their safekeeping in the cloud) across all these consumer touch points.

The Squace (UMI) interface is consistent on all mobile devices for easy, one click/scroll or tap to access content that:

• Enables consumers to easily publish and share individual or bundled content

• Provides a single integration point for developers of applications and content distributors

• Is a cloud-based server environment that provides automated publication of content

• Enables convergent device usability between mobile or desk-based Internet services

• Aggregates and safely stores contacts from multiple sources

The Squace Starter Pack for India includes (click on the link to sign up/in to Squace):

BBC World – Breaking news, sport, TV, radio and a whole lot more 

Bharatmatrimony – No 1 in matrimony – mobile 
Bharatstudent – Mobile 
Chakpak – Latest Indian Movies & Bollywood Updates 
Cricinfo – The Home of Cricket 
Cricket – Live Cricket Scores of India 
ESPN – The Worldwide Leader In Sports 
Engadget – everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Flickr mobile – Photo sharing
Google Mobile India
Hotmail
IMDB – The Internet Movie Database
In.com – Mobile
Just Dial – India’s No.1 local search engine
MSN – Portal, offering news, sports, money, entertainment and chatt
Moneycontrol – India’s No 1 Financial Portal
Monster India – Mobile
Naukri.com – Inidia’s No 1 Job Site – Mobile
One India – News, Cricket and much more in the mobile
Orkut – social community
Pocketdoctor – Mobile Wap
Premier League – everything and more
Techcrunch – technology blog
The Weather Channel India
Yahoo!yahoo!!!
Yeswap!- Mobile Directory
Sulekha.com- Mobile

About Squace
Squace is a design driven software company based in Sweden with offices in the UK and the Netherlands providing patent protected (pending) universal mobile interface solutions (UMI). We invented technology for a grid-based, square driven user interface experience for all low and high end mobile devices that enables easy and quick Internet access.

Our approach allows users to rapidly and easily explore and share their favourite mobile Internet content and key data such as contacts, calendar, bookmarks and more with one scroll, tap or click. It gives consumers complete control and fast and easy access to “their stuff”.

We believe in a free and open Internet eco system where consumer choice rules!

Squace AB technical development headquarters are in downtown Stockholm (Döbelnsgatan 48).

Press Release: Squace Releases Special Starter Pack for India

For Media Enquiries, Photo’s or Interview requests please contact:

John Graham – Sales & Marketing
UK Office: +44 1474 854 852
M: +447515 866644 – Skype: johngrahampower

So far, we have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from users with a regular feature phone. Hundreds of users have sent us spontaneous ‘Thank you’ notes and messages, such as ‘you make me feel like I own a smart phone’. So Squace has significantly improved their mobile internet experience.
We have also been demonstrating the Squace concept to many business users with smart phone devices such as iPhone and Blackberry. Some of them said that they could not wait to have Squace on their phone, some just wanted to find out more and a few were sceptical.

We are now happy to announce that we are ready to release Squace on iPhone and Blackberry to a wider audience. This underlines our objectives of being the best Universal Mobile Interface solution globally and providing content and service providers a unique opportunity to interact with their target audience based on their behaviour rather than their device type. With our 360º distribution engine we also make it easy for B2B, B2C and D2C business’s to go mobile leveraging their existing internet services.
The Squace UMI design is now tuned to different types of handsets. A touch screen device asks for different type of interactions than a non-touch screen device. Until now we have been testing with a closed community who gave us invaluable feedback. For example, we have now introduced the Toggle function between a Grid view (excellent in remote control devices) and the list view (often better on a touch screen device).

Today we have submitted the our iPhone and Blackberry versions to Apple and Blackberry World. If you would like to be notified once the Applications are available in the Appstores just sign up as a regular user and you’ll get notified.

In the meantime you can install the iPhone App on your device via an intermediate procedure. Become a Squace iPhone Beta tester:

We look forward to continue receiving your feedback and suggestions; learning from new users ensures that Squace is as good as it can be!.
Each device platform provides us with key learning’s and user interaction improvements so that these new design or interaction functions can be incorporated into the new device types and platforms of the future. One good example of this are the lesson’s we learned in testing the Squace Android client that are now incorporated into the new iPhone version. Check them out!
Read more about Android version
Read more about Squace Blackberry version
Read more about Squace IPhone version

Squace at French Retail Summit from www.squace.com on Vimeo.

Presentation at French Retail Summit – Kista Science Tower, Stockholm, Sweden 2010-05-05.
By Frank Verschoor, CEO at Squace and Aage Reerslev, Founder of Squace.

Although all of us at Squace have been quiet for a while, rest assured we have been very busy in the background and so we are delighted to announce that, despite difficult market conditions, we have secured sufficient funding to take Squace to the next level of development.

In December 2009 Morgan Stanley released an extensive Mobile Internet Report in which they forecast that Internet on the mobile will become mainstream in the second half of 2010. In August 2009 the Aberdeen Group also released a report on the growth of Mobile Marketing and Advertising in which they made clear that for this sector to fulfill it’s expected exponential revenue growth, that the ability to target audiences on behavioral data rather than on types of mobile devices would be critical. By applying the Universal Mobile Interface principles to our strategy as of day one, Squace is well positioned to ride the wave of a dynamic emerging market.

We have benefited from constructive feedback as a result of more than 600.000 downloads of preliminary versions of our product and subsequently have gained extensive and valuable input from the users about what they truly value in Squace and what they would like to see extra for the future.

Our mantra is that it is fundamental that the user is in command. It will always be a user’s decision as to which bookmarks are on deck for instant mobile access. Although the vast majority of feature phone users are very satisfied with a personalized universal solution, those consumers who opt to use smart phones devices, such as iPhone, Android and Blackberry, want to have a solution that matches the ‘feel’ of their ‘expensive’ device. Most early users also informed us that they appreciate the embedded sharing capabilities of Squace. Many of them even would love to see us adding more functionality to the contact book in such a way that it would become a single starting point for multiple ways of communication, such as call, email, social messaging, twitter, etcetera.

This week we have launched an update for our current users in which we have fixed quite a few bugs and added new functionalities, which will ease the process of adding bookmarks into Squace whilst just browsing from a regular PC. Also this week we launched our testing process on Blackberry and Android touch screen devices. An iPhone version will follow very shortly.

In the forthcoming period we aim to release a lot of new features on Squace related to optimizing the user experience. People who are interested in the details can participate in Squace Labs.

Dedicated test communities are helping us to get the best product out. Click here, if you want to be involved.

You are more than welcome!