For the general
public, 2010 will mark the year of the rise to power of the mobile
phones connected to the Internet. It is likewise expected that in
December 2010 France will count over 15 million mobile phone surfers. At
the end of 2013, the world market of mobile applications should
represent €15 billion. The Proxima Mobile portal was launched with the
purpose of supporting the community of the French developers, as a
pump-priming measure.
The goal of Proxima Mobile is twofold:
on the one hand, to create services that facilitate the daily lives of
all citizens and, on the other hand, to promote the strategic ecosystem
that the mobile Internet represents for the French economy. The portal
comprises services in fields as varied as law, culture, education,
employment, consuming, disabilities, health, the elderly, local life,
tourism, sustainable development and home help services.
The fifteen services which enlarged the catalogue in September 2010 include: Jaccede Mobile - a collaborative mobile service aimed at people with limited mobility; Handicap.fr - a service for the geo-localisation of parking spaces reserved for people with disabilities; Légimobile - the official portal of French law for mobile phones; Infogreffe - search for companies in the commerce register; MobiPOF - official professional orientation & training portal; Métiers d'enVIE - presentation in text and video format of 80 job sectors; ADELE - a geo-localised service for searching student accommodation; UnivMobile -
'my mobile digital university', the official application of the Paris
Ile-de-France Digital University, providing news articles / podcasts and
allows the geo-localisation of services; iSommeil - an information and detection service against sleep disorders; Triez Facile
- an information service on how to sort rubbish for recycling and a
service for geo-localising recycling structures; and several local
services for tourists.
Proxima Mobile provides access to 50
applications and services on various mobile platforms. Over 100 mobile
services are planned to be made available on Proxima Mobile by the end
of 2010.
Among the success stories of Proxima Mobile is the
application of the Louvre Museum, one of the most downloaded cultural
applications worldwide, with two million users (60 % of which are
located in the United States). The mobile service for car-sharing users,
Comuto, has proved to be a genuine success at European level; it
gathers over 750 000 regular users and was adopted by four countries
(Spain, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg). Other applications that
have already been downloaded by several hundred thousand users are the
Foreign Affairs Ministry's traveler advice service, Culture Clic or the
Kidnapping Alert service.
Another mission of the portal consists
of helping the Internet actors anticipate change in Internet access
modes. Indeed the same platforms will soon be used to develop
applications for mobile phones, interactive tablets and connected TVs.
It will be possible for the services established on these new platforms
to have the Proxima Mobile label.
The second innovation of September 2010 is the launch of the European version of Proxima Mobile: www.proximamobile.eu.
It will make it possible for French businesses to cooperate closer with
companies of other Member States of the European Union in order to
achieve pan European services in sectors like tourism, transportation,
health alerts or sustainable development.
"France and Europe have
key assets to become the major actors of mobile Internet. I wish for
the first European-level call for projects of Proxima Mobile to be
focused on mobile services relating to digital cities." said Nathalie
Kosciusko-Morizet, the State Secretary responsible for the Development
of the Digital Economy. This first European call for projects has a
€200 000 budget and it will be launched by the Delegation for Internet
Usage at the end of October 2010.
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