Mobile Content Russia

i-Free, a leading provider of content services in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, has designed a new mobile social networking utility for New Telephone Company (NTC), a Far East-based cellular provider. It is Russia's first free (WAP traffic is free, in fact) mobile social utility, and the first one offering GP services.

i-Free, which was among the pioneers of mobile social utilities in the former Soviet Union, has amassed considerable expertise in creating and promoting mobile community resources. In 2004, i-Free launched its own social utility, Jamango, which currently lists over 10 million registered steady users worldwide.

i-Free has developed branded community portals and portal pages for numerous Russian cellular providers, including MTS, MegaFon, Tele2 and, most recently, NTC. The resources developed by i-Free bring users together, forming a mobile community that enjoys access to some great communication tools.

»2sim on NTC» (Tusim on NTC), the mobile social utility most recently developed by i-Free for NTC, a cellular provider based in the Russian Far East, is domiciled at the provider's portal, wap.vntc.ru. «2sim» is a completely new product that's in a league of its own, offering unique benefits for both its users and the provider, such as free WAP traffic and GPS services.

»2sim on NTC» has a lot to offer to its users, including former schoolmate search, instant messaging, access to friends' posts, photo and video uploads and the option to comment on photos and videos posted by other users.

»We want our subscribers to both communicate freely and enjoy great services,» said Ksenia Popelnitskaya, a senior executive at the GSM and VAS Marketing Department of NTC. «Which is the whole point of our new community portal, «2sim on NTC,» created in partnership with i-Free, a major Russian content provider. We expect this new utility to be vastly popular with our audience.»

The coolest thing about «2sim on NTC» – and its primary competitive strength – is free WAP traffic: users only pay a monthly subscription fee of no more than 30 rubles (approx. 1 US dollar), which covers everything.

Some other great advantages are geo-positioning and geo-blogging. With the GP service, users can see where their friends are in the same town; all they need to do is mark their own location on the map.

The geo-blogging service is a way to find out what your friends are doing, if they are in the same town. For this to work, the user needs to post his or her own location and status.

«2sim on NTC is a great social utility for both users and the provider,» said Ilya Mashyanov, who manages the project from the i-Free side. «Offering exciting new networking opportunities for subscribers, it takes care of many marketing needs for the provider, like cementing user loyalty and boosting revenue.»

Users of the existing NTC social utility will be able to move their account to «2sim on NTC» with everything in it.