27 January 2009

Friends And Music Together
fring Launches Last.fm Music Audio Add-on

fring™ today announced the launch of the Last.fm music radio add-on, the first in a new series of groundbreaking developments designed to enable friends to share experiences, connect and enhance their communities together on fring’s award-winning mobile community and communication platform.

Besides offering a fantastic mobile music experience, this release represents a major strategic leap for fring – a new mash-up of community, content and communication in one unified offering, drawing on fring’s inherent capabilities, but going beyond VoIP comms and placing emphasis on friends & experience.

Millions of fringsters will now be able to launch fring’s specially mobile-optimised version of Last.fm inside the fring client, enabling them to tune and listen to streamed music radio channels, including their own Last.fm library, tag favourites or ban disliked tracks, view album artwork and take their Last.fm music account mobile.

But the real magic lies in fring’s ability to mash it’s existing social and communication capabilities into the Last.fm music experience; friends are able to view in real-time what each other are currently listening to, via a dynamic, media-rich friends list embedded into the Last.fm add-on.

They can share the music experience together and connect with each other via fring’s inherent communication services such as instant messaging chat via Skype®, MSN® Messenger, GoogleTalk TM, Yahoo!TM, AIM® and ICQ®, from inside the Last.fm add-on experience.

And, in common with fring’s core functionality, the Last.fm add-on is able to run in the background, continuously serving new music tracks from Last.fm’s service and sensing changes in both the listening and presence status of friends to provide rich, real-time info and displays about your Last.fm community.

Commenting on the launch, Avi Shechter, fring co-founder & CEO said: “The launch of the Last.fm add-on from fring achieves several important goals. Firstly, it provides our users a rich, dynamic and compelling mobile internet experience, in this case based on music, and the opportunity for friends to share it in real-time with their friends.

And secondly it represents the next stage in fring’s planned evolution – a centre of gravity shift from simply aggregating and providing mobile internet communication tools, towards providing a platform for friends to enjoy rich and dynamic mobile experiences together, with tools such as voice and instant messaging being just one part of the story.

“By combining Community, Experience and Communication in one unified offering, applied to a range of user interests, we are providing a compelling case for mobile internet in general and creating the potential for turning the mobile into the ultimate social device, capable of offering unique benefits, beyond what is even possible in the fixed PC environment.”

Based on this principle and fring’s belief in openness, fring’s API, released last year and available at http://developers.fring.com, provides the tools for any third party developer to create an add-on of its own.

The Last.fm add-on is the newest in a range of fring Experience projects currently in development, which include a number of third party-branded add-ons which will be brought to market during 2009.

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