SA company imports Obama's Internet software

Winner of the Mobile Marketing Association's Global Award for Innovation, the iLoop Mobile Platform is said to represent world-leading technology for development and hosting of mobile Internet sites, content management to mobile, ad serving to mobile, mobile enabled online websites and more.

According to Grapevine Interactive CTO, Cliff Court: “Forrester Research has reported that the next billion users will have their first online experience via mobile devices. This, coupled with the fact that mobile handset penetration involves such a large percentage of the South African population, makes effective mobile site development especially important.”

Major international brands, direct marketers, ad agencies, content publishers and other companies use the iLoop Mobile Platform to create mobile marketing campaigns and mobile sites worldwide.

Obama campaign

The platform was used by the Obama campaign to create its mobile Internet presence. This was a state-of-the-art mobile site offering video, viral voter messaging with rich content, news, information, email integration and a host of other features for unprecedented voter outreach.

Chris Wayman, vice-president of sales at iLoop Mobile explained the choice of Grapevine: “iLoop Mobile is building an international partner channel by working with leading mobile services providers, who can deliver mobile Internet site development and mobile marketing campaigns powered by iLoop Mobile's platform,” adding the SA company impressed with its credentials serving major SA companies and its knowledge of the SA market.

Self-service

The platform allows both self-service SAAS and fully managed options. With a self-service SAAS licence to the platform, a company has access to a full range of mobile Internet site development tools enabling it to create a site of any scale, from a simple landing page to a complete mobile content storefront using the platform's enterprise-grade content-management system. When companies do not have the resources to build a mobile site themselves, Grapevine aims to provide all the necessary skills and system management for the customer.

Grapevine has further extended the value of the platform in the South African market by providing SMS short codes for requesting links to a particular mobile Internet site using keywords, and making mobile surveys easy to create and analyse through a survey reporting system. Additionally, the company has linked the platform to the OBS/EBB reverse billing systems of Vodacom, MTN and Cell C, making selling of mobile content through the system possible.