Pikkoo has teamed up with Foreca weather service and introduces Foreca Live Weather Screensaver for mobile phones. The product is said to bring interactive location based weather forecasts to mobile from 140.000 locations worldwide.
Pikkoo (see our previous coverage) uses Adobe’s Flash Lite technology, already available in tens of millions of mobile phones in the market, and native programming to allow fetching data from web services and displaying that in a custom screensaver while the user’s phone is in idle mode. When seeing something interesting on screen, the user can also choose to interact with the screensaver instead of the screensaver just disappearing with a button press. Pikkoo’s Live Screensaver also offers way to get more detailed information from foreca.mobi.
Pikkoo (see our previous coverage) uses Adobe’s Flash Lite technology, already available in tens of millions of mobile phones in the market, and native programming (mainly Symbian at the moment) to allow fetching data from web services and displaying that in a custom screensaver while the user’s phone is in idle mode.
When seeing something interesting on screen, the user can also choose to interact with the screensaver instead of the screensaver just disappearing with a button press. Foreca Live Weather Screensaver uses this functionality by offering way to go and get more detailed information from foreca.mobi. In this sense the screensaver is essentially another type of widget, featuring information in bits and pieces, and launching the phone browser when further information is wanted.
This seems to be a good win-win partnership – Pikkoo gets associated with an acknowledged brand and lots of traffic to their service; Foreca on the other hand gets another good way to reach out to the mobile consumers with a new service that many will hopefully find useful, and also drive traffic to their mobile site.
Of course, it is easy to see this is just the beginning for Pikkoo – the interactive screensavers could be likewise used in a variety of ways. For example bringing your latest Facebook or Twitter feeds on the idle screen would be a great screensaver. However, to really tap the global mass market, a solution that works well also on other than Symbian phones needs to be found as well. Also the homescreen widgets now becoming more common may pose competition, being a somewhat similar a service. Widgets are after all typically supported by the phone platform by default, while Pikkoo needs to get the user to install an additional piece of software.
