Frequently Asked Questions
Corporate Q&A
Is SNAPin a venture-backed company?
Product Q&A
What does SNAPin SelfService do?
Why do operators need SNAPin SelfService software?
How does SNAPin relate to device management and provisioning companies?
How does SNAPin relate to UI or On Device Portal companies?
What problems do SNAPin's products solve?
What software products does SNAPin make?
How do SNAPin's products work?
Does SNAPin have anything to do with convergence?
Which mobile phones does SNAPin support today?
Which mainstream handset manufacturers does SNAPin work with?
Are SNAPin's products available today?
When was SNAPin founded?
SNAPin was founded in July 2003. The company spent the first 18 months of its existence building out its core technology platform and building its substantial intellectual property portfolio.
We closed our Series A round of venture financing in December of 2004, which funded expanding the marketing and sales activities of the company.
Since then we have opened our European headquarters, completed the development of our core technology, and completed multiple field trials with mobile operators, including Vodafone, Orange and BT.
The company is now fully funded, having raised $13M in February of 2006, bringing the total funds raised to date to $24.3M.
Who founded SNAPin?
Brian Roundtree founded the company. Brian also founded Action Engine, and is a renowned technologist, having been awarded numerous patents and receiving several honors, including an award from the National Science Foundation and being named as a Smithsonian Laureate.
Is SNAPin a venture-backed company?
Yes, our investors include Oak Investment Partners, Trilogy Equity Partners (John Stanton's new fund), Frazier Technology Ventures and Hunt Ventures. These venture investors have over $7 billion in funds under management, and have collectively invested $24.3 million in SNAPin since the company's inception.
Who are SNAPin's investors?
Oak Investment Partners led the round, joined by Trilogy Equity Partners (John Stanton's new fund), Frazier Technology Ventures and Hunt Ventures.
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What does SNAPin Software do?
SNAPin Software, the leader in mobile interaction management, lets operators interact with their subscribers in real-time and in the context of their current mobile behavior. The company's handset-based product suite, SelfService, enables the delivery of interactive promotions, the resolution of most customer support problems, and allows operators to deliver a branded service experience to their subscribers.
SNAPin SelfService helps drive new service discovery and adoption by providing operators with a platform to interact with their subscribers by presenting targeted offers that are highly relevant and tied to the context of the subscriber's own behavior. SelfService Applications react to user events as they occur on the mobile device, with context sensitive triggers presenting just the right content or service at just the right time and are delivered in a much more visually compelling way, as compared to other forms of promotional messages such as a WAP banner ad or a text message delivered to a mobile inbox.
SelfService delivers interactive promotions and context sensitive offers on any mobile device, driving adoption of advanced services and generating incremental revenue. An operator's marketing team can design promotions and offers initiated by the end user's behavior, such as promoting a contact list backup service after a certain number of entries have been added to the address book.
Mobile operators worldwide are struggling with the cost of delivering customer support. Typically, only 20% of call types are generally handled by self care solutions such as automated voice systems and self care websites, leaving 80% of all calls to flow through to customer service representatives.
With each live-agent call costing as much as $30 (€22) and most calls flowing through the live customer service representatives, operators are spending millions every month providing customer support – a mobile operator with 10 million subscribers would spend in the neighborhood of $50 (€39) million every month. If an average revenue subscriber calls the mobile operator more than 3 or 4 times per year, they might lose money on that subscriber for the entire year!
SNAPin SelfService intercepts calls to customer support organizations and presents each user with personalized tools to resolve most support issues on the device, quickly and easily solving as many as three out of four customer problems without requiring a call to the service center. Additionally, operators can micro-segment their subscriber base and present each segment with different interfaces and tools in the subscriber's preferred language.
SNAPin SelfService automatically repairs critical device and network settings, such as those required for roaming, messaging, or data networking. In many cases, configuration settings are detected and repaired even before the subscriber is aware of the potential problem. For complex problems that cannot be resolved automatically, SelfService can triage the problem on the handset, place a call to the appropriate customer support group -- such as the group responsible for mobile email -- and enable real-time remote troubleshooting over-the-air (OTA).
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Who are SNAPin's competitors?
While there are many companies that focus on device management, including updating device firmware and settings, and many companies that target back-office customer care including improving the efficiency of call centers, SNAPin focuses its SelfService suite of products on the mobile user and their service experience with handset-based software.
How does SNAPin relate to device management and provisioning companies?
Companies that deliver Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA DM) solutions, as well as those providing OTA provisioning solutions are complimentary to SNAPin SelfService.
OMA DM solutions for FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) can sit “below” SelfService and provide a transport for publishing SelfService Applications, and provisioning the SelfService Client.
Provisioning systems concentrate on getting device settings distributed correctly, but offer little to maintain them over time (other than manual re-provisioning). SNAPin SelfService can monitor critical settings and restore them automatically, even calling the provisioning systems directly if desired.
How does SNAPin relate to UI or On Device Portal companies?
On Device Portal solutions designed to deliver content and experiences in unique branded interfaces can sit “above” SelfService and provide a fully or partially unified UI for the device and its features.
SNAPin SelfService can mimic the native handset user interface when engaging mobile users with promotions, training, or customer support applications, or SelfService can integrate with any alternative user interface that might be available on the mobile device.
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What problems do SNAPin's products solve?
With SNAPin SelfService software installed, mobile users answer their own questions, and solve their own problems. SelfService intercepts calls to customer care and resolves 3 out of 4 problems right on the device, saving mobile operators millions every month.
The software can also automatically correct problems as they occur, for example noticing that an email password or mailbox setting is incorrect and fixing it automatically, even before the user notices that a problem exists.
Our software can even drive usage in revenue producing applications, for example by letting camera phone users know that their pictures can be forwarded via email or multi-media messaging to their friends – and leading them through the process step by step.
What software products does SNAPin make?
The SNAPin SelfService product suite makes it easy for operators to deliver a unique self-service experience across all handsets with products designed to teach, support, maintain and measure. SNAPin SelfService was designed to support any phone, over any network. Unlike most self-service products, SNAPin SelfService requires no training or changes in user behavior – SelfService automatically reacts to events as they occur on the mobile phone.
- SelfService Campaign delivers interactive promotions and context sensitive offers right on the device that prompts usage, configures applications and teaches users with easy step-by-step instructions how to use features and services.
- SelfService Care intercepts calls to customer care and presents each user with advanced tools to solve their own problems right on their devices.
How do SNAPin's products work?
SNAPin's SelfService product suite is small, highly secure, and may be run on any device and used over any network.
The SelfService suite may be installed over the air, or installed by the manufacturer, and are customized via an ECMA compliant scripting language similar to JavaScript. The portable SelfService scripts may be written once and deployed to all devices types. Operators may use SNAPin's technology to distribute software and scripts, or they may use multiple OMA Device Management platforms.
Does SNAPin have anything to do with convergence?
SNAPin has been involved with leading convergence-minded operators and the Fixed Mobile Convergence Alliance for over a year. We were invited to participate in the alliance due to the many issues related to configuration, support, and diagnostics with respect to any UMA-based (Unlicensed Mobile Access) convergent product. The UMA standard has sorted out how to make a Wi-Fi and GSM network cooperate, but a wide gap remains between the standard and a supportable service that an operator might launch.
Some examples of how SNAPin SelfService can help a convergence product include:
- Delivering high visibility alerts to users indicating when users move from a UMA network to a cellular network, indicating the change in rates (commonly referred to as “advise of charge”)
- Using the cellular network backhaul to diagnose and repair the UMA/Wi-Fi side of the phone, or even in the in home Wi-Fi access point (can also use a working UMA network to diagnose setting on the cellular/GSM side). Such diagnosis and repair may be proactive and automatic, or real-time remote troubleshooting from the call center can be performed
- Maintaining a list of “friendly” UMA access points giving both operators and consumers control over when to use UMA networks that may become available
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Which mobile phones does SNAPin support today?
Our software was designed to support any phone platform, whether it is based on a proprietary platform as are most mass-market feature phones, or it is based on an open platform as are most smartphones.
Today we can support over 100 individual handsets running variants of the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems, including Symbian versions 7, 8, and 9 in both Series 60 (second and third edition) and UIQ versions, as well as Windows Mobile 2003, and 2005, and PocketPC Smartphone Edition.
SNAPin is currently engaged in development activities with leading handset manufacturers regarding making SNAPin's SelfService Client available on mass-market proprietary feature phone platforms. SNAPin anticipates making announcements relative to these activities in the near future.
Which mainstream handset manufacturers does SNAPin work with?
SNAPin works with several handset manufacturers with respect to their proprietary OS feature phones at the request of our mobile operator customers, but unfortunately due to the non-disclosure agreements we have in place we are not able to name those manufacturers at this time.
Are SNAPin's products available today?
Yes, SNAPin SelfService is available today. Operators may purchase and deploy the software, or take advantage of special field trial pricing to prove out the return on investment prior to deployment.
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Forum Nokia PRO
Award Winner 2006 »
SNAPin Software wins the Innovator of the Year and Best Productivity Application at the 2006 Forum Nokia PRO awards.
About SNAPin
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