LEMONADE: A cool, refreshing drink for push e-mail providers : Technology expected to speed delivery for low-cost providers

As the days get longer and the mercury rises, a handful of mobile e-mail developers are reaching for the LEMONADE.
Shorthand for the License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented And Diverse Endpoints-thank goodness for shorthand-LEMONADE is a group of standards designed to optimize mobile e-mail protocols such as Internet Message Access Protocol and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The open-standard technology is being heralded as a major step forward for developers looking to expand mobile e-mail beyond high-end users to the mass market.
“What LEMONADE is doing is looking at those protocols and saying, ‘What can we do to improve the user experience on a mobile phone,’ ” explained Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica plc, a U.K.-based wireless e-mail startup. “IMAP, for instance, has been around for seven years, it’s very well established. But it wasn’t designed for the mobile environment; it didn’t have the concept of push.”
While Research In Motion Ltd. and its rivals battle for the high-end corporate user, Synchronica, Funambol Inc., Isode and a few others are targeting more casual users with cheaper solutions for mass-market devices. Funambol’s service is based on SyncML, an open-source technology; Synchronica and Isode support IMAP, which is based on open industry standards.
So while SyncML’s source code is available on the Internet and can be tweaked by developers, IMAP’s cannot. Funambol’s service uses a downloadable application, while Synchronica’s solution doesn’t.
Isode and Synchronica are hoping LEMONADE allows them to deliver push e-mail and data synchronization more efficiently, giving them a leg up on Funambol and others. LEMONADE became reality last fall when Isode demonstrated a key function of the technology: the ability to forward a message to another recipient without first downloading it. The message contained PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents, weighing in at a hefty 55 megabytes, according to Will Sheward, vice president of marketing for Isode.
“The whole process took 26.3 seconds compared with the four hours plus it would have taken had you been insane enough to try this using normal forward with download over a GPRS link,” Sheward wrote on Isode’s blog. “That’s 15,099 times more efficient than forward with download.” Synchronica this week is expected to announce the addition of the Open Mobile Alliance E-mail Notification, which sends a silent text message from the server to “wake” the handset and receive the message. The company is adding the service to its OMA IDLE offering, which establishes a continual connection between server and device.