Social Application Storefront
Believe it or not, poker is a form of communication.
Truly enabling social connectivity means being able to deploy any communication utility. Even Texas Hold ‘Em poker. While it is true that poker is a game, through the ANTHEM platform it is also a form of social connectivity. People meet new people, join them at a virtual table, and play against each other, each move communicating something about their strategy. A worthy opponent might get added to a buddy list for future invitations to play.
Deploying these third-party services presents many challenges for a wireless carrier. Delivering even a few of the most popular communication tools can take months of negotiation, multiple business relationships, several vendors and myriad technical integrations. Even then, if you pick the wrong solution, there may be no guarantee that it will work on any but the most powerful smart phones.
ANTHEM enables the universe of social applications to enable the mobile industry to go far beyond simple communication and evolve to social connectivity.
ANTHEM enables a sort of mobile mashup. Because all social applications are enabled from a single platform, functional associations can be made that were previously impossible in the mobile space. Without the ANTHEM platform, mobile applications are an isolated, single experience that have to be terminated before another application can be used. With ANTHEM, social applications can be deployed specifically to interact with other applications, and the mobile consumer has the power to add as many applications as they want. The result is the ability to play a social game with your MySpace friends or to use a social photo sharing utility on Bebo.
Since all social applications are added at the platform layer, no changes or updates have to be made to the handset software. It just works.
Never before possible in the wireless industry, the popularity of social applications on the web can now be replicated on mobile devices.