WidSets brings communities and the creative spirit of Web 2.0 to mobile phones

15/05/07

WidSets, a consumer service that delivers Internet content to mobile handsets, today launches in the UK to bring its user driven mobile Internet community to the tech savvy British audience. WidSets expects to reach one million registered users by the end of the month.

WidSets is a handset manufacturer-independent service that brings the best bits of the Internet, such as communities, news, blogs, reviews, and weather reports straight to the mobile phone. It uses mini-applications called widgets to deliver up to date Internet content to mobile phones and enables the user to create their own widgets. WidSets was born out of Nokia Emerging Business Unit and represents a first step in Nokia’s vision of mobilising the Internet.

“WidSets service is free, and the easiest and most enjoyable way for mobile phone users to keep in touch with the content, blogs and communities they love because the service is constantly updated with feedback from the users,” said Ulla Särkikangas, Director, Consumer Internet Services, Nokia Emerging Business Unit. “Nokia, by driving WidSets, wants to offer people a growing variety of ways to access and interact with the web from mobile devices.”

WidSets recognises that the future of the Internet and the mobile Internet is its communities. It is tapping into existing communities and building its own around people’s content interests and needs. The widgets deliver an alert when someone has posted a comment to a blog, informs the user about a traffic jam, and makes it possible to play games and interact with individual web communities from the mobile phone. The comprehensive library currently has more than 1300 widgets. But if the user cannot find their favourite website in the library, there are straight forward templates that make it easy to create your own widget.

According to Martin Garner, Director, Wireless at Ovum “Using widgets opens up the mobile internet to a large community of developers worldwide. This will enable many more useful applications to be developed for mobile phone users faster and with lower risk than before.”

WidSets has evolved its social networking service further and developed new sharing features for Email and Private Chat. The WidSets Email widget notifies the user of any new emails and includes simple read and delete functions. It currently supports a wide variety of email systems, by enabling communication using standard IMAP4 and POP3 protocols. The WidSets Private Chat widget is an online chat room controlled by the user. This could be for a group of friends, just for family, or even work mates.

The UK specific widgets in the WidSets library feature applications such as Nokia store locator that guides you to the closest Nokia store. Other UK widgets include:
Foreca - weather forecasting for European cities,
Properazzi, when new properties appear on the market, WidSets acts as a kind of automatic property watch, collecting information about properties that fit the requirements of the user,
Netvibes Ecosystem of more than 85,000 feeds by Netvibes,
Fotolog, one of the world's largest social networking sites, where members communicate and connect through photographs.

WidSets works on a wide variety of mobile phone brands and is compatible on more than 300 mobile devices. User can easily download WidSets at www.widsets.com or on mobile at get.widsets.com. In addition, the UK based users of Nokia N73 multimedia computer, Nokia E50, Nokia E60, Nokia E61, Nokia E61i, and Nokia E65 devices can get started with WidSets via the Download! folder in their devices. WidSets will be subsequently rolled out to many more devices during the second half of 2007.