Funambol launches Lion Sniper

REDWOOD CITY, USA: Funambol, a provider of open source push email and mobile sync for the mass market, has launched Lion Sniper, a new localization community program that complements its earlier Phone Sniper and Code Sniper programs and extends Funambol's leading cross-platform mobile open source project.

With active Funambol installations growing more than 50 percent this year and approaching three million downloads, Lion Sniper enables and rewards the company's leading mobile open source developer community to localize and adapt Funambol for an increasingly global audience. 'Lion' is a play on 'L10n', which is shorthand for 'Localization', as there are 10 letters between 'L' and 'n'.

"Funambol is a global community of mobile open source developers. Programs like Lion Sniper allow us to harness the power of community to accomplish amazing feats quickly, something that proprietary vendors cannot achieve," said Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager. "Funambol has seen its most successful year to date and would not be expanding so quickly to meet such global demand without a dedicated community that is working with us."

As the world's leading cross-platform mobile open source project, Funambol will be hosting its first annual mobile developer conference in Milano, Italy, on November 25, 2008. In the last month alone, Funambol's registered mobile open source community has added more than 1,500 developers -- a figure that coincides with a 30 percent increase in downloads since the start of 2008.

Funambol's newest community program, Lion Sniper, focuses on translating Funambol software, online help and the Funambol Community Forge into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. After translating the Funambol Forge into Chinese earlier this year, the company has seen adoption rates in China skyrocket.

Funambol's Phone Sniper and Code Sniper programs continue to grow as well. Any mobile user can be a Phone Sniper that is paid to verify that Funambol runs on a mobile handset. Phone Sniper is currently testing BlackBerry, Samsung and LG phones. Code Sniper, which offers cash bounties to work on Funambol mobile projects, is currently focused on projects that integrate with Google Docs and social networking sites, such as syncing Facebook and MySpace.

In addition, the Funambol Forge, which is the online face of the Funambol community and is based on CollabNet software, is gaining additional capabilities. Funambol recently moved its open source code into Subversion to improve collaboration, efficiency and flexibility for Funambol code contributors.

"Global mobile open source is cool and we've been doing it more than five years. It's amazing to see the viral adoption of Funambol worldwide," said Maffulli. "Our community of mobile developers has invested significant amounts of time and energy to spread Funambol. We're seeing incredible activity in many countries around the world, including China, Japan, Spain, Poland, Pakistan and the U.S."