By Steve Smith, Wireless Business Forecast

Backup software and utilities always have been a tough sell on digital hardware, despite the tendency of new gadgetry to crash and burn. After all, when was the last time you backed up vital data on your home PC, even though Windows XP has built-in backup software? Point made.

Santa Mateo-based Lumitrend believes things are different on the cellphone, and it is shopping around to carriers, OEMs and software vendors a suite of applications - called CellSynx, CellBackup and ringvault - designed to provide security and versatility to maintaining data on consumer phones. "We're the first company to offer a complete line of backup solutions to protect wireless data and contacts," says Garrett Larsson, vice president of business development. The company is in talks with a number of major U.S. carriers, but it already has some of its products, notably ringvault, being offered by as many as 20 partners, including Alltel and ACS.

"The cellphone is one of the most upgraded technologies - every 20 months to two years," says Larsson. ringvault holds a user's large library of ringtones and wallpapers on a backup server, into which the consumer can tap download at will. CellBackup backs up a copy of a user's phone book; CellSynx backs up and manages contacts, calendars and tasks. Each of these services is BREW-based (a Java app is coming) and adds between $1 and $2 each to the monthly bill. If a customer loses his or her phone or upgrades to a new model, all of the backed up data is saved to independent servers that can restore the data to the new phone. If Lumitrend's backup products get picked up by multiple major U.S. carriers, then customers could switch carriers and literally bring their phone data with them by restoring the old backups into the new phone.

ringvault has the added value of providing ringtone-aholics with much more storage space than any phone can handle, so they can maintain a large library of tones and download to the phone only the ones they want at a particular time. As ringtones become more sophisticated, "it gives you the ability to store a collection, just like DVDs," says Larsson. "It allows people to make collections of ringtones." ringvault also maintains samples of other available ringtones and wallpapers along with free downloads. One of the interesting aspects of ringvault is that it also becomes a marketing device for new products, tones, and graphics. They can be marketed when a user accesses the vault. "We may offer sample ringtones from other providers and use it as an outlet," says Larsson.

According to CEO Rob Meadows, the idea of backing up cellphone data, because it is so personal, indispensable, and easily lost, has much more resonance with consumers than does backing up PC data. "We have 20 carriers in ten different countries," he says, "and the numbers have been fairly impressive. We've seen between 2 percent and 3 percent penetration on many of the larger carriers. On some, like one in India, we've seen even higher penetration of between 5 percent and 10 percent of people at least trying out and subscribing." These numbers mainly reflect the CellBackup and CellSynx products, since ringvault is just rolling out now. Theoretically, it makes sense that backup solutions for personal cell phone data might be highest in markets where the phone is a primary digital device, often in place of a PC.

Lumitrend started with BREW because it was easier to tap into its contact and phone-number structure, and so it is in discussions with the biggest U.S. target, Verizon. Wireless Business Forecast tested the applications (see review below) on a Verizon deck.

While Lumitrend is targeting consumers and carriers in its initial push, the model also could be used with handset OEMs that might build the backup into the handset. "There will be discussions between us and the carriers and the OEMs," says Meadows, "and the issue is: Who makes the money? The OEM wants to build it into the handset and cut the carrier out of the deal." Of course, on the other hand, consumers are balking at all of the nickel-and-dime extra subscription charges they are accruing on networks already, and backup solutions bolt another $1 or $2 a month onto a bill for a function that on the PC is built into the operating system. Like phone-virus protection, the jury still is out on what consumers will accept as their responsibility and what they should reasonably expect to be a normal part of a handset's operation or a carrier's service. For Lumitrend's part, "we want to be the technology provider to the OEM or the carrier, whoever wins out," says Meadows.

Meadows worked on the Tivoli storage project at IBM, and he was a development manager at Slam Dunk Networks before co-founding Lumitrend in 2002. Larsson headed the Qualcomm mobile development team that produced the OmniOne application for the enterprise. >>Garrett Larsson and Rob Meadows, 800/503-7037<<

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CellBackup is the most straightforward and easiest piece of Lumitrend's line to implement. Once you download the software and use your email address to create a unique account, CellBackup has you set up automated backups of your phone book on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. When a backup is due, it automatically occurs, usually soon after you next boot up the phone. The program keeps your phone book in synch with the server, so it only needs to update any differences between the phone and the server. Restoring a phone list to a phone takes only a few seconds. The product works fluidly and simply.

CellSynx is the most elaborate program in the line because it not only backs up contact, calendar and task data but it synchronizes them across various platforms. We were unable to test whether and how it might incorporate "Outlook" data, but we did find its task and calendar format very accessible on the deck, if not especially stylish. You get a full-blown organizer here, not just a synching program.

In theory, the program is a full-featured organizer, allowing you to make appointments, to keep contact lists, to create notes to yourself and to make task lists. The calendar interface is straightforward, allowing you to drop into a date to set up a new event.

Lumitrend says CellSynx can work with the ubiquitous Outlook to keep data in synch across PC and phone. If this is indeed easy to do, then it could be the programs' biggest selling point. Being able to keep PC data in synch with the phone without having to manage a physical, wired link between the two devices would be a Godsend to users.

Surely the sexiest app in the line, and the one getting the fastest pickup, is ringvault, which lets consumers keep a limitless library of tones and graphics. The idea is simple and compelling for the growing cadres of mobile multimedia mavens: You log onto the service, and a simple list shows you the entire tone or wallpaper library and which items are on the phone only, in the remote storage vault or in both. You simply highlight the file and tell ringvault whether to upload it to the vault, download it to the phone or preview it. The ringvault.com Web site lets you manage large collections even more easily.

The marketing opportunity in ringvault is substantial, in that you also get access to free samples that could just as well be opportunities to buy third-party tunes and graphics. From the consumer's perspective, the main missing link is being able to share media. Ideally, the vault could be a hub for sending previews of multimedia to friends. In some ways, ringvault could serve as a kind of peer2peer file-sharing service. Friends could access your vault, or a designated "shared" area of your vault, in the same way P2P users examine other people's playlists to discover new material. To be sure, multiple copyright, privacy and security issues are at play here, but if software developers and carriers are aiming to satisfy consumer desire, then they should be imagining ways to overcome these hurdles and create seamless platforms for sharing digital media that mimic the media social behaviors people actually practice. We can imagine that a ringtone or wallpaper collector would show a friend the contents of his vault, and that this could become a function of the software itself.

Within the Lumitrend line, both CellSynx and ringvault are the more compelling offers. CellBackUp is such a basic service that we think it will be less appealing to consumers than to OEMs and carriers that could incorporate it into their existing technologies and offer it as a value-add. The irony of backup software is that when it works well, it is invisible to the consumer. It works in background, and so it never really has the chance to demonstrate its value until something gets lost, stolen or broken. Both CellSynx and ringvault have demonstrable value with which the consumer interacts on a daily basis. In both cases, they are not just backup software but management tools that make their cases for staying on your monthly bill.

The CellSynx app may be better-suited to enterprise software suites, and it could be used by the carrier's business sales units as a component of their enterprise offerings. Anything that purports to synch with Outlook has a built- in audience.

On the consumer side, while Verizon would do well to adopt ringvault, we think Lumitrend should be talking with Amp'd Mobile, the youth-oriented, BREW-based MVNO running on Verizon's EV-DO network. Most of all, it needs to get the Java app out there in order to exploit the larger youth market, which is where we think ringvault could have some serious traction. It does, indeed, invite the user to become a collector of mobile media. We would like to see it extended to video clips at some point.

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