Microsoft continued to expand its mobile portfolio June 26 with its acquisition of MobiComp, an open-source cloud computing company that specializes in storage, backup and restoration of mobile data. Microsoft declined to reveal the financial terms of the deal.
Microsoft also didn’t provide details on MobiComp’s role at Microsoft although Reuters reported Redmond plans to use the company as a research and development unit.
Based in Braga, Portugal, MobiComp targets mobile operators and service providers with products such as MobileKeeper, a suite of backup services focused on social networking, and Active mTicker, a news feed service. Through MobileKeeper, users can post comments directly from their mobile phones to social networking sites such as Facebook.
Mobicomp’s services also allow users to back up personal content stored on a phone, publish updates to online communities and get entertainment and news content delivered to their phones.
“People expect their phones to deliver the best experiences from PCs and the Web right to their pockets,” Todd Peters, corporate vice president in the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Peters added that the addition of MobiComp would “extend the capabilities of Windows Mobile and Windows Live to help us provide the most innovative and seamless way to stay connected.”
Carlos Oliveira, co-founder and CEO of MobiComp, said his eight-year-old company believes in an “open and innovative mobile platform and deep industry partnerships.”
MobileKeeper automatically backs up and restores all types of mobile data and applications to business files such as Microsoft Word and Excel. The backup takes place automatically and data can be easily recovered through a simple Web interface.
Mobicomp’s Active mTicker is a “zero-click” application that pushes personalized information to subscribers through a scrolling ticker that runs along the bottom of the screen when the device is in idle mode.
MobiComp counts among its customers Vodafone and Portugal’s and Saudi Arabia’s dominant mobile carriers.
