iMediaShare

A personal portable set-top box

BACKGROUND
Converging home and mobile.
Today, we are surrounded by a multi-level convergent media world where all modes of communication and information are continuously reforming. Mobile devices manufacturers are constantly competing in offering more and better functions for our cell phones. For a short period of time the mobile phone turned to be not just a voice communication tool but a complicated device incorporating various media and communications options. The modern cell phone now is a high resolution digital camera, mp3 player, camcorder and voice recorder, GPS navigator, just to name a few. All these features convert the phone into a mobile multifunctional data carrier.

Still, cell phone’s main purpose remains communication. That is why communicating with others, the pictures we have taken with our phone’s digital camera is a natural consequence. We can use Bluetooth® or data cable to copy them to the PC or upload them in Facebook, Picasa or Flickr or just send them via MMS. But can we share the pictures with our friends on the large TV screen at home just with a single click on our handset?

The short answer is “Yes”.

CHALLENGE
Cell phones are now connected to home media center.
People are always looking for the fastest and the easiest way. That is how all the innovations came to life. That is why Bianor’s team faced the challenging task for developing a mobile application that will allow cell phones to communicate with the TV sets.

We created a simple, user-friendly tool that provides convergence of mobile devices with home entertainment systems, allowing seamless media sharing. The tool allows multimedia files located on users' mobile phones to be transparently viewed on TVs at home.

SOLUTION
Absoutely amazing. Worked on my xbox360 first try.
Bianor’s engineers built a lightweight technology based on UPnP/DLNA protocols to provide Wi-Fi communication channel to share transparently images, video and audio files between cell phones and DLNA compliant devices, such as the playing consoles PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. These devices connect the cell phone with the TV set. In the next 2 years more than 80% of the new TVs are expected to have built in DLNA compliant client, so that no mediating devices will be necessary.

Once having the technology know-how Bianor’s team had to apply it in the real live. The best choice was iPhone being a true, next generation multimedia device with strong users’ community and well-developed apps distribution. That is why we chose iPhone’s OS for the proof of concept. That is how the name iMediaShare was born.

iMediaShare was listed at Apple’s App Store in November 2009 and only in 3 weeks it reached more than 60,000 weekly downloads. The application ranked second to Adobe's Photoshop Mobile on Photography Top Free Apps and was among top apps at New & Noteworthy Chart for more than 2 weeks.

"The first version of iMediaShare for iPhone enables only images sharing. The next major product milestone is enabling audio sharing on the iPhone platform," Kostadin Jordanov, Bianor's CEO said. "We are working towards achieving more and even better functionalities for other mobile operating systems," Jordanov added.

In March 2010 Bianor launched iMediaShare for Android in the Android Market. The company is now working to deliver iMediaShare on all major smartphone platforms.

Development
iMediaShare for iPhone and Android proved to be an app with high potential. It provoked Bianor’s engineering capacity to make mobile media sharing available for larger audience. On one hand we had to further enable more sharing options at iPhone’s app, and on the other to develop the application for other mobile OS.

"Bundling iMediaShare application with mobile devices makes them an even more useful and functional, adding more value to their users. iMediaShare is available for different mobile OS and device manufacturers looking to differentiate their product and respond to customers' demands for more functionality," Jordanov said.

What iPhone users say about iMedia Share:
"Works great on my Xbox 360. All I had to do is go to the Picture Library and choose iMediaShare as a source. What a great app."

"Works great on ps3. So you can show your photos without plugging in a wire."

"Great app, works perfectly with my ps3, amazing!"