ShoZu Inc., announced today that it is now providing mobile social media services for the BlackBerry Pearl and the BlackBerry Curve Series smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIM; TSX: RIMM). Owners of these smartphones will soon be able to use ShoZu’s service to quickly and easily transfer photos and videos from their BlackBerry smartphones to more than 30 social media sites including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Google Blogger, as well as receive automatic content feeds to their smartphones from select sites. With ShoZu, BlackBerry Pearl and BlackBerry Curve users can upload a given image and associated tags, titles and descriptions to any supported online community and/or email address, or mass-publish to multiple communities and emails simultaneously from the ShoZu menu without creating multiple messages.* In addition, BlackBerry smartphone owners who use ShoZu can easily stay connected with their friends and online communities through the service’s unique two-way multimedia capabilities. Users will immediately be able to receive and respond to friends’ comments from sites such as Flickr from the ShoZu interface. They will soon be able to have friends’ Flickr photos sent directly to their BlackBerry smartphones and more.The addition of ShoZu for the BlackBerry Pearl and BlackBerry Curve smartphones saves time for end users who regularly send images captured on their mobile devices to multiple destinations.The announcement reflects the growing importance of offering easy wireless connectivity for users to their online communities and friends. It also validates ShoZu’s strategy of providing an open gateway to multiple social destinations, aligns ShoZu with two of the most popular smartphones on the market, and brings the total number of ShoZu-supported devices to nearly 340 models from leading manufacturers.The ShoZu service will be available as a free download to BlackBerry Pearl or BlackBerry Curve smartphone users from ShoZu’s website (www.shozu.com) and WAP site (m.shozu.com). The download will also be featured on Mobile.BlackBerry.com, as well as the Built for BlackBerry and BlackBerry Owners Lounge web sites.“The BlackBerry Pearl and the BlackBerry Curve are among the best-selling smartphones today, and ShoZu enables users to wirelessly transfer their images to multiple preferred social media sites without complex navigation or repetitive actions,” said ShoZu CEO Mark Bole. “The value of our service is in blending the online and mobile spaces, providing the market’s broadest choice of community destinations from a single menu, and going beyond uploading to offer advanced services such as sending Flickr photo feeds and other content directly to the mobile device.”In addition to providing wireless image publishing capabilities to multiple online destinations, ShoZu is also the only service of its kind that allows users to upload the photos of their choice at either full or blog-quality resolution, send video clips up to 10 minutes in length, and add descriptions and tags before or after uploading.Online destinations currently supported by ShoZu include leading photo community and social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Picasa, Faces, Buzznet, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Samsung Fun Club, Box.net, Moblog.uk, Dada.net, Pikeo, Faces.com and blip.tv. Other choices include personal blogging and citizen-contributed photojournalism sites such as Google Blogger, LiveJournal, Textamerica, TypePad, Vox, WordPress, MetaWeblog, CNN, the BBC and Scoopt. Users can also send images to multiple email and FTP addresses.
