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Worldreader Partner Update

Posted by tim.wightman, May 9th, 2012

By Clare Joy

Did you know that you have a library full of exciting material on your phone? With Worldreader Books in a few easy clicks you could be reading our free articles on health, falling in love with a contemporary short story or browsing classic fiction from some of the best writers of our time.

We’re always adding new books and looking for great new stories so we wanted to keep you in the loop. In March we had almost 310,000 readers, mainly from Nigeria, India and Ethiopia. Using biNu’s clever cloud based technology, we brought you local and international stories; classics and brand new tales, along with useful non-fictional content on Health and Sexual Education.

The most popular book was Nigerian author Myne Whitman’s A Heart to Mend. This steamy page-clicker is set in Lagos, where reality is getting in the way of romance. Next up, people are reading African stories, such as easy reader Bee Ninja by Ghanaian writer Diana Mcbagonluri. Romantics and adventure addicts are clicking through Louise McCann’s Someone like me and Fiona Snyckers’ teen series, Sisterz. Stats show that popular classics include The Count of Monte Cristo.
How do we do get such great books onto our App? We have great partners, such as biNu, many international publishers and authors and… You! We need help from our readers, to find out what books you’re reading and what you want to read.
Tell us on twitter @worldreaders #booksforall or by taking part in a quiz.

Curious about Worldreader? We’re a non-profit dedicated to transforming how the world reads by using new digital mediums. We work with schools and organizations to bring e-readers, like the Kindle, to children who have traditionally had poor access to paper books. Devices like the Kindle help reduce transportation costs and enable one child to carry around an entire library. We’re also on cell phones, just like the one you are using, so that anyone with a cell phone can also have access to a world of great books and valuable information.

See more at www.worldreader.org

Posted in biNu News, Featured Apps, Product Updates | No Comments »

BBC on biNu: Turning dumbphones to smartphones

Posted by tim.wightman, May 1st, 2012

The biNu team were very excited to see recent coverage of biNu by the BBC. In his article, BBC reporter Clark Boyd reminds us that despite all the glitz and glamour of smartphones, feature phones remain the workhorse for the majority of mobile users and that a very healthy after-market exists for companies that improve the performance and usability of feature phones and low-end smartphones. In their recent study VisionMobile quantified this market stating that there is “over 50% smartphone penetration in developed markets, but less than 20% in emerging markets.”

biNu started out life as an app to improve the performance and usability of web-browsing on mobile phones, but driven by the needs of our users, biNu has morphed into an entire suite of cloud-based apps that include reference, search, translation, ebooks and email. No wonder our users say we make their dumbphones, smart! Just as it is in developed economies, social networking has also become a big deal in emerging economies and our Facebook and Twitter connectivity apps are very popular. However, biNu is taking another big step here by also providing fully integrated and seamless social networking capabilities within biNu itself. So if you want to tell your friends about a good book you read on Worldreader Books, get into a conversation on a sporting event or just express an opinion on anything via biNu beats, you can do so on the go, wherever you are, whenever you like and all without the need for an expensive smartphone or laptop computer.

Original BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120405-turning-dumbphones-to-smartphones

Link to VisionMobile study:
It’s still a feature phone world

Posted in biNu News, Industry News | No Comments »

Worldreader talks about delivering books on mobile using biNu

Posted by mark.shoebridge, March 21st, 2012

At the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference – Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Elizabeth Wood from Worldreader delivered a keynote address and introduced how they plan to deliver ebooks on mobile devices using biNu.

Here is a short video and demonstration of the application. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7iM5Yke7VY

Worldreader now delivers books on any regular mobile phone that have a data service. Last month biNu and Worldreader had over 100,00 readers of books. Most of which were using feature phones not high end smart phones with big screens. By leveraging biNu, Worldreader’s increases its reach and delivers locally authored content to users who that may never get see a local author’s work in a printed medium.

With increased network coverage and high levels of mobile phone ownership, the mobile phone itself is an excellent mechanism for getting books into peoples hands and allow them to read books. In the emerging markets of Africa and Asia if you only have a phone that is data enabled this is your primary access to the internet. Lets not forget the luxury of e-readers, home PCs and tablets are out of the reach of many.

In the Worldreader app, if a reader does not understand a word they can translate it using Google, or look it up in the online dictionary provided by Wordnik, or further investigate terms in Wikipedia and or do a Google search. biNu also provides social connectivity tools which allows readers to share comments and discussion on the books they’ve read.

For a demonstration of the Worldreader app on biNu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9hH5Pw7YQE&feature=related

For more information about Worldreader please visit http://www.worldreader.org

Tags: ebooks, internet, mobile
Posted in biNu News, Featured Apps | 1 Comment »

biNu Messenger In-app Notifications!

Posted by tim.wightman, March 7th, 2012

This long awaited feature is now live on biNu! The way it works is as follows: If a new biNu-to-biNu chat message is received in your Messenger Inbox while you are inside biNu, the notification icon will appear. The notification is a green button with an asterisk (*) located at the bottom of the screen between Menu and Back. To navigate to the notification screen, you can simply click the * key on your keypad, or if you have a touch screen device, touch the button directly. The notification icon will disappear once you have navigated to the Inbox of the Messenger app. We hope to add more types of notifications to the system soon.

Posted in biNu News, Featured Apps, Product Updates | 8 Comments »

New languages supported in Google Translate API

Posted by tim.wightman, March 2nd, 2012

Finally! Google just added more languages to their translate API. For a few months, some languages were supported via the web interface but not via the API. We are sure that this will please so many of our users who have been eagerly awaiting their languages to be supported, especially Bengali and Urdu. The new languages are: Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Georgian, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. Enjoy!

Posted in biNu News, Featured Apps, Product Updates | 1 Comment »

biNu and Worldreader Partner to Bring Digital Books to Millions of Mobile Users

Posted by mark.shoebridge, February 15th, 2012

Sydney, Australia and Barcelona, Spain (PRWEB): biNu, a content rich, social networking platform optimized for mobile feature phones and low-end smartphones, today announced a partnership with Worldreader to deliver digital books to biNu users. The partnership provides a new distribution channel for Worldreader – a social enterprise whose mission is to transform reading in the developing world so that people can transform their lives.

Worldreader makes digital books available to all in the developing world. The organization identifies schools, trains teachers, works with communities and local officials, partners with local and international publishers and other top-tier companies to bring e-books to under-served families in the developing world. By providing access to digital books, Worldreader empowers children and families to rise out of poverty.

“Long-term, technology will help create a real culture of reading in parts of the world where that’s not been possible before,” said Worldreader co-founder Colin McElwee. “Mobile phones are central to technological and educational development in countries in Sub Saharan Africa– especially in rural areas, where there is little to no infrastructure.”

biNu’s patented technology utilizes cloud computing to create a virtual smartphone experience that provides instant discovery, switching and sharing of apps, within a social network and messaging platform. biNu is 10x faster and 10x more efficient on data usage than standard mobile browsers and is an obvious choice for anyone looking to fully utilize their mobile phone – particularly in emerging economies where mobile phones are the primary Internet access device. The beta version of the Worldreader App for biNu is available immediately and gives biNu users instant access to a cloud-based library of digital books from local and international authors.

“Worldreader improves the lives of millions of people in the developing world,” said Gour Lentell, CEO for biNu. “I am pleased we are able to extend their coverage and I hope biNu will play a part in their overall success.”

With this announcement, biNu joins other Worldreader’s other forward-thinking partners like Amazon.com, Penguin Young Readers Group, and USAID. Said Worldreader CEO David Risher, “Together with the some of world’s best-known organizations, Worldreader and our partners are bringing books to all.”

Worldreader (www.worldreader.org) is a not-for-profit organization whose aim is to put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet, using electronic book technology. Worldreader has established e-reader programs in schools in Ghana and Kenya, and Uganda with plans to expand throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

For a Worldreader press kit, please see http://bit.ly/oBVyZm.

For more information, please contact Susan Moody, Director of Communications

susan@worldreader.org

Spain: 34 639 366 634

U.S.: 1 206 588 6057

For more information on biNu, please contact:

mark.shoebridge@binu-inc.com

Australia: +61 2 8438 0104

http://www.binu.com

biNu nominated for 2012 GSMA Global Mobile Awards Most Innovative App

Posted in biNu News, Press Releases | No Comments »

Happy Valentines Day!

Posted by tim.wightman, February 14th, 2012

To show love to our users out there, we gave away an extra 4 bonus free credits to all registered users today! These credits can be used to send messages to loved ones or even transferred to friends as a gift. baby i Need u! :)

Tags: credits, day, free, love, thanks, users, valentines
Posted in biNu News, Product Updates | No Comments »

biNu Shortlisted for 2012 Global Mobile Award, Most Innovative Mobile App

Posted by mark.shoebridge, February 7th, 2012

Sydney, Australia, February 7^th 2012: (PRWEB) biNu, suppliers of a virtual smartphone app that dramatically improves the usability, performance and social connectivity of mobile phones,today announced they had been shortlisted in the Most Innovative Mobile App category for the GSMA 2012 Global Mobile Awards.

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide. Spanning more than 220 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world’s mobile operators, as well as more than 200 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies, and media and entertainment organisations. The Global Mobile Awards are part of the annual GSMA Mobile World Congress.

“Reflecting the intensity of competition and innovation across the mobile ecosystem, we saw a record 600 entries and an exceptionally high quality field of contenders vying for this year’s Global Mobile Awards,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA. “It is a significant achievement to have made the shortlist, and our warmest congratulations go to all the nominees announced today. We look forward to the unveiling of the winners at the Mobile World Congress next month.”

With the biNu virtual smartphone app, feature phones take on the characteristics of a smartphone, while smartphones run faster on congested networks. By executing in the cloud, biNu is not constrained by the processing capability of a handset and allows feature phones and low end smartphones to run apps normally associated with high-end smartphones – such as social networking, social media and news services. Optimization and compression techniques are deployed giving both feature phone and smartphone users blisteringly fast access to the Internet.

“Being nominated for this prestigious award is a real achievement for biNu,” said Gour Lentell, co-founder and CEO at biNu. “Whilst there has been a lot of innovation in high-end smartphone technology, the market for low-cost smartphones and feature phones is huge and continues to grow significantly. Bringing innovation to these users – as biNu does – presents the company with an exciting opportunity.”

Today there are 5 billion mobile phone users, most of whom do not have high-end smartphones and who use their mobile as their primary internet access device. biNu connects them all to a super-fast, low cost, mobile, optimized social network of communication tools and instant application services.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9164961.htm

Tags: cloud, Global Mobile Awards, GSMA, Mobile Internet, Smartphone
Posted in biNu News, Press Releases | 1 Comment »

Onward and upward!

Posted by tim.wightman, February 4th, 2012

January 2012 – a new year bringing millions of new biNu users and very strong growth in sessions and page views! Monthly page views saw an 11-fold increase over the year, from 29m to 341m. Monthly user sessions grew from 1.3m a year ago to 15.7m, and unique monthly users rocketed from 370k last year to 3.1m in January. As we add new products and improve existing ones we expect growth in all metrics to continue apace. Check out our usage stats page for more details.

Posted in biNu News, Product Updates | No Comments »

Facebook Messenger (Chat) now on biNu

Posted by tim.wightman, February 4th, 2012

Facebook Messenger

With the popularity of instant messaging exploding across the mobile world, especially in emerging markets, we are pleased to be able to offer unlimited access to Facebook Messenger on our platform. The Messaging interface can be accessed via the main Facebook app or directly from the biNu home screen. We intend to add other messaging networks such as Google Talk and a new biNu Messaging service as soon as possible.

Visit m.binu.com on your mobile now to download biNu and try our Facebook Messenger, Twitter and many other apps for yourself.

Posted in biNu News, Featured Apps, Product Updates | 23 Comments »

Smartphones only 27%. Feature phones 73% of global phone market

Posted by mark.shoebridge, December 6th, 2011

A recent article in TechCrunch titled ”It’s Still A Feature Phone World: Global Smartphone Penetration At 27%” by Sarah Perez has highlighted the fact that mass-market feature phones are still and will remain the dominant mobile device across the globe for some time to come. (Note these figures are for new phone shipments. Existing install base of smartphones is actually only 18%). This is especially true in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Asia. The article was based on a report from Vision Mobile.

Image courtesy of Vision Mobile

The article prompted many comments questioning this fact. And to counter these comments it is clear we view the world differently. In the developed world we need to increase our field of understanding and put ourselves in a different place. A place that is not surrounded by computers and high tech gadgets but a place where Maslow’s hierarchy of needs plays a greater influence, a place that just doesn’t care about Android, Apple, RIM or Symbian. It is about communicating. It is arguable that Maslow’s hierarchy can be adapted to include this overall human need to communicate. It is the same in the emerging markets as it has been in the developed market – a phone has become an essential item for talking, sending SMS and browsing the internet.

People in the emerging markets want to communicate with family and friends, they want to access the Internet and they do – in the millions. Many access it everyday, but not like developed economies on a computer but using their phone. Perhaps on a “crappy old” Nokia or a no-name brand in Africa. In India a person has a choice of one of 150 phone manufacturers.

Price is a major factor in the lack of smartphones for sure. But there are also other critical requirements.

The standby life of a phone is a very important consideration. The “crappy old phone” can run for days between charges. When was the last time your Smartphone was attached to a power socket?
The phones need to be robust to cope with the environment where humidity and dust can spell the end for an electrical device.
Lastly, a major factor outside of major economic centres (and in some cases inside them too) the network infrastructure is just not there.

Here are some other statistics from other leading analyst companies:

Ovum say Feature phones will still have 63% of mobile market share by 2016.
In recent Gartner report – India accounts for 12% of device sales globally with smartphone sales making up only 6% in the first 3 quarters of 2011. This is expected to increase to 8% by the end of 2012.
According to the GSMA – Africa has overtaken Latin America to become the second largest mobile market after Asia. By 2015, the total number of connections is estimated to reach 84% of the total African population.
According to CISCO – GSM mobile data traffic is set to grow at 26 fold between 2010 and 2015 with the mobile-only Internet growing to 788 million by end of 2015.

To address the emerging markets, phones need to address the above considerations. Nokia is being bashed in the press for its smartphone initiatives however when it comes to mass-market feature phones they have invested significant resources in the design and manufacture of their devices to ensure they meet the toughest conditions. There is a reason why Nokia is still the number one choice in emerging markets. They make bloody good phones that last.

The bottom line is mass market feature phones are here to stay for the significant future, they will be re-cycled, reused and refurbished just like those Toyotas that run for ever across the Sahara.

Tags: app downloads, feature phones, GetJar, mobile cloud services, Mobile Internet, Smartphone
Posted in Industry News | No Comments »

biNu Exceeds 2 Million Downloads per Month on GetJar

Posted by tim.wightman, December 1st, 2011

Sydney, Australia (PRWEB) November 30, 2011

From zero to 15 million downloads in less than a year on GetJar, biNu exceeds all growth expectations. biNu, suppliers of software that dramatically improves the usability, performance and social connectivity of mass-market feature phones, today announced they had surpassed two million downloads per month on GetJar the world’s largest free App Store. biNu is a 100% cloud-based platform that delivers a lightning-fast smartphone experience to mass-market feature mobile phones. It is 10 times faster and uses 10% less bandwidth of a mobile browser even on congested networks.

biNu, suppliers of software that dramatically improves the usability, performance and social connectivity of mass-market feature phones, today announced they had surpassed two million downloads per month on GetJar, the world’s largest free App Store.

“Getjar has a prominent position in the mobile app space and have allowed us to rapidly grow our install base,” says Gour Lentell, CEO for biNu. “Achieving two million downloads per month in less than a year is a milestone for the company and exceeds our growth expectations.”

biNu provides a smart phone like experience on mass-market feature phones delivering ultra-fast internet services and social applications. It is a first choice application for anyone looking to fully utilize their mobile phone in emerging economies, where mobile phones are the primary Internet access device, and therefore the opportunity for biNu is vast.

“We’re thrilled to be part of biNu’s success in reaching 15 million downloads on GetJar so far” said GetJar COO, Chris Dury. “For our feature phone customers, biNu has been able to bring the smart phone experience to them too through their browser, SMS, and search applications.”

About biNu
biNu is a privately held company that develops the biNu mobile suite of apps that dramatically improves Internet access speed, usability and social connectivity of mobile phones. With biNu, even basic mobile phones exhibit smartphone-like capabilities. biNu supports millions of users globally with rapid adoption rates in emerging economies where mobile phones are the primary Internet access device. Today, over 100 apps are available for biNu including social media, search, reference, books, SMS, news, weather and entertainment.

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prwebbinu/GetJar/prweb8997811.htm

Tags: app, biNu, Downloads, feature phone, GetJar, million, mobile
Posted in biNu News, Industry News, Press Releases | No Comments »

Snaptu users: get Twitter on biNu

Posted by tim.wightman, November 1st, 2011

Warning: This post contains a lot of number 1s. Today, on 1/11/11, biNu released a new app for Twitter users on feature phones and smartphone Twitter users seeking a faster experience. This announcement comes close on the heels of the super-fast Facebook app released by biNu a few weeks ago.

With Snaptu officially ending its support for Twitter on 11/11/11, biNu is ready and willing to welcome any Twitter users affected by the Snaptu end-of-life announcement.

Visit m.binu.com on your mobile now to download biNu and try our Facebook and Twitter apps out for yourself.

Tags: app, biNu, fast, new, Snaptu, Twitter
Posted in Featured Apps, Industry News, Product Updates | 6 Comments »

SmartPhones on the Wrong Side of the Tracks

Posted by javed.patel, October 17th, 2011

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/07/tech/mobile/amy-gahran-cell-phone-bridge/

In her recent blog, CNN reporter Amy Gahran highlights a digital divide between those with easy access to the Internet and those without. Since the Internet is key in our socio-economic fabric, this digital divide is a big deal affecting jobs, services, education, public safety, health care and so on. Amy also cites research from IDC that going forward “more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices.” For those on the rich side of the digital divide, this is all about accessing the Internet on-the-go with iPads, Androids and iPhones (how did we ever manage without them?). For those on the poor side of the tracks, the good old feature phone reigns supreme. While a divide between haves and have nots is the norm in a free market economy, we can take some comfort in the fact that in a free market, products emerge to opportunistically fill gaps. And this is no more so than in hi-tec.

biNu is a good example. biNu closes this digital divide by giving feature phone users a smartphone like experience. biNu apps run in the cloud and don’t need an expensive smartphone processor. Data optimization reduces bandwidth and low-cost speedy Internet access results. As you would expect, biNu is seeing double-digit growth where feature phones are de rigueur and the #1 device for accessing the Internet: India, China, Brazil and other emerging economies. But based on IDC’s findings, it looks like biNu will play a prominent role in the developing mobile economies of the developed world.

Tags: amy gahran, digital divide, mobile economy, smartphones
Posted in Industry News | No Comments »

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