CONNECTIONS welcomes Val Ornoy, VP Strategy and Business Development, Funambol is a speaker on the session, The Evolution of the Personal Cloud. Enjoy as you learn more about Funambol’s developments and strategies.

* What do you feel is the biggest challenge/obstacle for your company right now?

Funambol's biggest challenge right now is managing the growth of our business in light of the response to our new white-label MediaHub software that is like 'iCloud' for all mobile phones and connected devices. There are many large mobile companies interested in working with us, including phone makers, carriers, portals, and more, and we need to handle this growth carefully to ensure that all of our customer deployments are successful.

* What new advances/changes has your company made in the last 12 months?

Funambol's single largest advance is our new MediaHub software that provides a white-label cloud digital locker for syncing, securing and sharing a users' data and media across the most number of mobile phones and connected devices. The personal cloud is the next big wave of computing for the mobile industry and MediaHub is the right solution for the industry at the right time.

* Do you feel your company is the strongest player in the market? If so, why?

Funambol is the leading provider of white-label cloud digital locker and personal cloud solutions due to our extensive mobile expertise and platform that has been developed for over a decade. The biggest challenge for providers is the diversity and fragmentation of devices that need to be supported, and Funambol offers the broadest device compatibility via our unique basis on open source.

* Do you have any new products/services? If so, please elaborate on their features.

Funambol MediaHub is a brand new product that just became generally available (GA) on June 15. It is like Apple iCloud except that rather than only supporting one brand of mobile devices, it supports the most mobile phones and connected devices, i.e. cross-brand and cross-device. In brief, it allows users to sync, secure and share their data and media via the cloud with all of the systems they interact with on a daily basis.

* What is your company's greatest asset/strength?

It is a combination of Funambol's ten years of extensive mobile expertise, along with superior mobile technology and vision, and it is all amplified by our basis on open source, which uniquely enables Funambol to support the most mobile phones and connected devices in the industry.

* What is your company's mission?

Funambol's mission is to provide open and flexible software that syncs any data with any mobile device. Our software is used by many of the largest and leading companies in the mobile industry to do exactly that for many millions of users worldwide.

* How does your company promote their product(s)/service(s)?

Funambol is a B to B to C company, meaning business to business to consumer. We market our white-label cloud digital locker solutions to device makers, carriers and other types of mobile service providers who then deliver mobile services to consumers based on our software. We market our software via a combination of methods, many of which are traditional, such as pr, email marketing and social media. What truly sets us apart though from any other company in the industry is the benefit we get from being based on open source software. Our open source software has been downloaded more than five million times by 50,000 mobile developers in 200 countries. Often, they work for large mobile companies and download our software to prototype a cloud sync project. Our software works extremely well and before you know it, the prototype blossoms into a full-blown deployment. At this stage, many companies contact us about using the commercial version of our software as it many more capabilities and is scalable for millions of users.

* How does your company use social media to build your brand and attract consumers?

Funambol has a very active presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as on websites that cater to open source developers, where we interact with a wide range of people, including consumers, developers and mobile company executives. It's a great way to learn about what people are interested in as well as to get our messages out.