Cellebrite to attack OTA backup market

MOBILE PHONE backup specialist Cellebrite is hoping to repeat its success with dedicated PoS terminals by moving heavily into the OTA (Over-The-Air) backup arena.

Cellebrite boss Yossi Carmil reckons his company has something like a 90 per cent share of the in-store handset backup market. Now the company is hoping to steal the lion's share of the OTA backup sector.

Cellebrite has a cunning plan. It aims to persuade its network operator and retail chain customers that they should migrate to Cellebrite's OTA service by downloading the relevant client to mobile phones when their customers are backing their handsets up.

The company has moved away from just being able to backup a handset's phonebook towards backing up a wide range of phone content, too.

The list includes text/SMS, photos, videos, ringtones and music files. By adding this capability to its UME (Universal Memory Exchanger) terminals, Cellebrite already knows what handset type and OS it is dealing with.

So it would be a piece of cake to offer terminal owners the chance to download its OTA client program while they are migrating one handset to another.

UMEs are already installed in T-Mobile's own shops so this will almost certainly be Cellebrite's first potential UK customer for its OTA service.

Carmil reckons that consumer awareness of an OTA service is the biggest problem. By offering the client app during a normal customer visit, Cellebrite believes its clients will overcome this obstacle.

The UME's basic purpose is to transfer a subscriber's personal information from an old handset to a new one when he or she upgrades a mobile phone in store.

The device can even save all the relevant information to a USB memory stick - so if a subscriber loses or breaks a handset, the data can be restored. Sadly this information isn't editable by its owner.

The INQ thinks the UME could work well with an existing mobile music service such as Omnifone's Musicstation.

When a subscriber acquires a replacement phone, it would be relatively easy for the UME to connect to the Net and download all the music tracks a particular user has already purchased. µ