Israeli company enables simple mobiles to run smartphone apps

An Israeli technology company has developed a method which allows old or outdated phones to run apps available only on smartphones.

With the system developed by the VascoDe company, users can obtain apps with the firm's cloud-based system that required no downloads and use the text-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), similar to the Short Message Service (SMS), according to Xinhua.

With this, customers would now be able to use many apps available until now for smartphone users only, but the only difference is that the apps would be seen only in black and white.

The USSD system did not allow access to the internet, but rather it used the API (Application Programming Interfaces) from pages like Facebook, Gmail, and the like, according to technology and health website Israel21c.

According to VascoDe CEO Doron Mottes, 83 per cent of cellphones in the world were simple and did not connect to the internet, which meant that almost 4 billion people in the world could not check their email on the go.

He added the difference between the ability to check emails and respond to them, could make a whole difference in a world so hung up on the internet, as it could give users the possibility to respond to job offers, for example.

The company's main markets were developing countries like Brazil, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, where most of the population could not afford internet connection or a computer and had to rely on expensive internet shops to log their accounts.
 
VascoDe, launched in 2009, and was on track to sign on its first millionth subscriber. Accordig to Mottes besides the company's South African customers, deals with another six or seven operators are in various stages.

Mottes who travels to many countries said it was important to get a feel for the local culture and how people were really using their phones. VascoDe, employs immigrants from Canada, Ethiopia and Russia, as also ultra-Orthodox Israeli women and Arabs.

Mottes said to be innovative one could not have people that were all the same.

With most cell-phone in the emerging world costing around $10 users upgrading en masse to smart phones was a distant possibility.

But by way of a hedge against that, VascoDe would have a large enough installed base that it could then start selling more advanced services if and when users moved up to smartphones.