Surfkitchen claims on-device leadership

TRY TO GUESS what a leader in on-device portal applications would like to do. The answer is customising software for mobile phones.

Somebody obviously had a bad day when they coined that particular piece of jargon. Anyway, Brit based SurfKitchen claims the leadership role in on-device thingys with 18 major global customers signed up to date.

It also signed up deals with over half the handset manufacturers out then. So that would be everybody but Nokia, then?

Anyway, the company's actual products are interesting. Effectively the software allows pretty deep customisation of a handset's GUI. So you can brand the handset's idle screen to whatever you like.

Now SurfKitchen has acquired customers such as Orange Netherlands who are doing some heavy duty customising for niche markets. Orange is producing handsets for a trendy organisation for an outfit called the Supper Club.

Thanks to OTA (over-the-air) technology, Orange can change a Supper Club subscriber's idle screen from a day menu to a night menu. Sophisticated stuff, eh?

The objectives are twofold: to increase both customer retention and data downloads. If you can customise to this level, you can send messages promoting products which you're sure they'll want to purchase.

SurfKitchen aren't alone in offering such a facility. 3GLab, which became Trigenix before its acquisition by Qualcomm offered something very similar. And French software house, Abaxia, has rival software which it calls its Mobile Portal.

SurfKitchen reckons the typical discovery time for somebody trying to discover content on the mobile Internet is 120-150 seconds. As analyst, Bena Roberts commented, "Patience is a virtue, but not for consumers waiting for mobile content via WAP."

The question is… how long before an industry giant snaps up SurfKitchen, then? µ