Omlet Open Messaging Now Shipping on New ASUS ZenFones

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 08, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- MobiSocial today announced the inclusion of Omlet Chat, the world's first open mobile sharing and collaboration platform, as a factory-installed app on all new ASUS ZenFones.  With the launch of its new ZenFone on April 8, ASUS is the first hardware OEM to ship new phones with Omlet pre-installed.  This innovation makes the ASUS ZenFone the world's first open and natively social smartphone.  Thanks to Omlet's open platform and guarantee of user control over data, the ZenFones are also the first smartphones that let groups share photos and chats easily with true data privacy.

"The ASUS ZenFone is ushering in an entirely new model of mobile sharing," said Monica Lam, co-founder and CEO of MobiSocial, the makers of Omlet Chat.  "The photo gallery on the ZenFone is the first natively social gallery on smartphones because you don't have to join an external network to share — just use your phones." 

Native Sharing

Omlet's unique ability to broadcast a chat at a location allows people at an event to chat and share pictures without previously sharing contact information.  The photos collected make a truly collaborative photo album, as they are contributed by different people in the party.  Just a few people take pictures at an event, and every participant gets a collaborative album for the event on their phones.

User Privacy

To protect users' privacy, all photos and data are shared in real time using Omlet's messaging service, which does not monetize users' data and instead stores it in Baidu Cloud, Box, or Dropbox, according to the users' preference. 

Do-It-Yourself Customization and Development

In addiction to native sharing and enhanced privacy, Omlet offers creative types the chance to create their own fun stickers and apps on top of the platform.  Users can create custom stickers by cutting up their own or friends' photos.  New apps are also already being developed by Omlet users on the platform. 

Social Gallery

With Omlet, the ZenFone social gallery redefines what social photo sharing means.   The ZenFone social gallery is now a set of albums that correspond to a specific group or people or to an event.  Every album has a descriptive name, the name of the chat room, and a representative photo is shown as a cover.  Clicking into the album shows a display of photos, each of which can be viewed individually.  Best of all, friends can "like" the pictures—the heart shown below each picture grows with the number of likes your friends give! And with one click, you can go into the chat room to comment on the pictures.  The photo gallery is now truly social – simple, direct, and real-time.

"Unlike Facebook and other photo sharing platforms that require users to navigate through a portal into a central repository of photos stored on their servers, Omlet lets users share and like photo albums without any central data storage," said Lam.  "This is the first time users can enjoy all the fun and features of mobile photo sharing without signing away their rights to their own images."

The ZenFone social gallery is built on top of the open Omlet Chat app platform.  This means it is fully inter-operable with any Android and iOS phone that has Omlet installed, from the iTunes Store, Google Play, or Wandoujia in China.   The Omlet Chat app platform is also open to all developers, cloud service providers and device manufacturers to develop new apps.  

About MobiSocial

MobiSocial is the creator of Omlet, a new chat platform that enables the rapid creation of innovative mobile social apps while letting consumers own their data. MobiSocial is founded by Prof. Monica Lam and her Stanford Computer Science Ph.D. research team, Ben Dodson, T. J. Purtell, and Ian Vo.  With the support from a group of visionaries: Dale Fuller (Chairman of MobiSocial and AVG), David Lee (Silicon Image Founder), Patrick Soon-Shiong (Nantworks Founder), Horizons Venture (Li Ka Shing Foundation), Lightspeed Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and ASUS, MobiSocial has offices in Silicon Valley and Taiwan.  For more information, visit www.omlet.me and www.mobisocial.us.

Editorial:
Jeff Lettes, MobiSocial/Global Media Strategy Communications
[email protected]
1-408-406-1161

SOURCE MobiSocial