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Funambol (News - Alert) is a company that was started in 2001, with its primary origins existing in terms of providing synchronization across feature phones, java phone and smartphones. The company’ s mission statement is to secure, sync and share all types of mobile data across all types of devices with plans in the near future to get into sourcing, securing, syncing and sharing digital assets.

Today, Funambol released its brand new MediaHub Software. I was fortunate enough to speak to Amit Chawla, CEO of Funambol all about the new software and its various capabilities, how the MediaHub separates itself from other cloud storage devices currently on the market and where the future of the media cloud syncing service industry is headed.

 MediaHub offers multiple capabilities. Chawla stated, “The iCloud announcement of last week allows Apple device users to take all of their data including their calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, videos, music, ebooks and pictures and synchronize them through the cloud to all of their other devices, so once sourced data is synched, it is then secure across all other devices. However, it is restricted to just the Apple platform and Apple OS devices. Our solution can best be outlined as the xCloud with x standing for the different types of OS platforms, so in terms of synchronizing your data it makes it available to you across all types of mobile devices regardless of the fact if its an Android (News - Alert) or OS device, Symbian, Rim and Apple of course. We will support the entire suite of data types across all of the different OS that are available on the market today. This makes it a very heterogeneous digital locker, as opposed to the closed homogenous digital locker that the Apple iCloud offers.”

Chawla added, “Our strategy from a go to market strategy is unlike Apple and a bunch of other players who do a B2C business to consumer plan. Our strategy is B2B2C, or business to business to the consumer and the middle business are usually mobile operators, device manufactures, and system integration partners who provide value added services to the carriers. Our solution is a white label version and does the sourcing, thinking and sharing of digital assets on a white label basis giving the carriers ultimately the ability to provide a value added service to their end users, which are the mobile consumers across a heterogeneous device space. Our solution gives them a revenue stream today and layer of stickiness with the service. Going forward, it gives service providers a media store capability to actually sell capabilities to their end users, while taking a share of the transaction along the way. So the solution is one of the few if not the only white label solution on the market that supports all data files, all mobile devices, all carriers and their end user customers.”

MediaHub differs from other cloud storage services for several reasons. “If you look at the people who have solutions today, they are only providing elements of this solution. At a holistic level if you can visualize an XY access, on the Y axis you have different types of devices from Mac, iPhone and iPad to Windows PCs, Androids tablets and phones, Blackberry phones and tablets, Symbian (News - Alert) Window phone, feature phones, and other collective devices like TV sets or picture frames so there is a whole ecosystem of heterogeneous devices that exist today in our mobile world. If you can visualize all the data types that people have to support on the X axis such as emails, pictures and video files, from an Apple perspective that solution is restricted to only the Mac, iPhone, iPad and the PC at the desktop level but not from a mobile perspective. It’s a closed system, it is not white label and Apple will not resell it to anybody. Therefore, it is not a solution for the carrier per say. If you look at Google (News - Alert), the company offers support for Android devices but the way of the solution is that the user has to go through different elements of the portal for all types of data files that they would use on a daily basis. Our solution instead is a one stop device agnostic cloud synching solution,” Chawla commented.

As far as the future of the media cloud syncing service industry, Chawla responded, “I think in terms of capabilities, and it comes as a surprise to some people the amount of utilization that cloud solutions services provide such as Flicker, YouTube (News - Alert) and Facebook—your digital assets are splattered all across the spectrum. In our vision, the ability to have your data consolidated into a single cloud application works in conjunction with the whole concept of picking assets from desktops and USB cables from USB storage devices and putting them in the cloud—I think that is step 1. That’s a huge growth area with several companies focusing on that space. Right behind that, is the fact that people are buying increasingly more and more of the digital media assets in the cloud. Apple did it, Google did it and Amazon’s trying to do it, as carriers are looking at getting in there and giving people the ability of rather than putting a transaction on a credit card the purchases can actually go on a monthly bill as a prepaid phone bill or postpaid phone bill, so that its ubiquitously accessible to users across the globe who may or may not have Paypal or credit cards to be able to buy digital assets like videos, ebooks and music and then share it within the rights of the license content across the user base.”

“This is a multibillion dollar industry that is emerging here in Cloud solutions and you must first be able to secure it and then share it,” Chawla concluded.