We’ve just closed our third significant round of funding. We’re looking forward to using this capital investment to continue making fring more accessible and more compelling for our millions of fringsters in just about every country worldwide, and for many more users who will soon be able to join us communicating, sharing and interacting with their friends and all their favorite online communities and services via fring on their mobile phones.

Over the coming months you’ll see this vision realized through fring compatibility with more mobile environments, more internet communities taken mobile via fring as add-ons contributed by developers worldwide, great new social features and a steady stream of usability improvements reflecting what you, our users, have told us you want.

So without further ado, cheers to new opportunities for fring, our community of fringsters and partners, and mobile users worldwide who via fring will join the rest of us who have already shifted our social nexus to our mobile devices.

For full PR released today, please click here.

fring’s new WeFi add-on provides you with easy and free access to millions of Wi-Fi hotspots straight from your mobile devices, saving you valuable time looking for somewhere to logon, and providing you with affordable internet access while traveling either locally or internationally, for business or leisure.

To get the new WeFi add-on on your Symbian or Windows Mobile Device, you’d need to download fring’s latest version here. In order to locate and access millions of hotspots in your area, simply subscribe to the WeFi add-on from the add-ons tab within fring and start locating Wi-Fi hotspot closest to you, automatically, using your handset’s GPS, or manually by typing in any address worldwide.

Developers can start creating their own add-on’s today by using fring’s developers site where they’ll find the fring API documentation, code samples and open source add-ons (twitter and last.fm) which they can use to leverage their current web expertise (e.g. PHP, .NET, Java) to create their own mobile internet applications using the same tools they’d use to create any web application.
[Check this YouTube for more details]

Following the enthusiastic response to our other localized blogs, we are happy to welcome Enes Kul to the fring team, Enes will be blogging for all our Turkish friends.

A warm welcome to the fring team Enes, we hope you will soon feel at home

fringsters, feel free to follow your new Turkish blogger here: http://www.fringcall.com/turkey/

“A $6 cardboard box that uses solar power to cook food, sterilise water and could help 3 billion poor people cut greenhouse gases, has won a $75 000 prize for ideas to fight global warming. ”

“The Kenyan-based inventor hopes it can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world, supplanting the use of wood which is driving deforestation.”

“Costing 5 euros ($6.60) to make, it can also make it easier to boil polluted water.”

“We’re saving lives and saving trees,” the Kyoto Box’s developer Jon Boehmer, a Norwegian based in Kenya, said in a statement.” Boehmer then went on to say that he “would carry out trials in 10 countries”, including South Africa, India and Indonesia. He would then collect data to back an application for carbon credits.”

Jon, this sure looks like a great concept, keep up the good work.

Breaking news across South Africa today is that Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who has served South Africa as minister of communications since 1999 has died of natural causes in a Pretoria Hospital at the ripe old age of 71.

“Expressing his condolences to her family and friends, President Kgalema Motlanthe said Matsepe-Casaburri was “an outstanding leader and servant of the people of South Africa”.

A few tech savvy South Africans seem to be divided on the ‘outstanding leader’ part though, and some are breaking the news about Matepe-Casaburri’s passing less tactfully: Toby Shabshack for example thinks the President “must be looking at a different track record because that is not true of her decade as Communications Minister.”

Toby goes on to say: “While government spokesmen will be quick to eulogise her, they have forgotten how she hamstrung an entire industry for the benefit of Telkom’s profiteering. This was ultimately at the expense of ordinary South Africans, who were forced to pay ludicrous telecoms costs.”

Although many would agree that Toby’s comments hit the nail on the head, taking into account Matsepe-Casaburri’s age, I would have to say that for an elderly lady she did quite well, I mean just think how well your grandmother would do as the minister of communications.

Maybe a new and hopefully younger minister, will be better equipped to take South Africa into the digital age.

On behalf of the entire fring team I would like to express our condolences to the family and friends of Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

Ever heard of Twitter? If not you may be missing out on life, love and everything else.

The video below gives a great overview of the wonderful world of Twitter.

Ok so have you joined yet? This has got to be the funniest Youtube video I have seen in ages.

Anyway here’s a little social experiment, lets see how many tweeters will tag this post on twitter. Please spread the word and tag your tweets using this hashtag #twitfring

Hi guys

As you know, we released the new iPhone version a few days ago and the feedback so far has been great!
Several people have asked us about their always-on presence option even when fring is turned off, so here is a communal explanation for y’all:

The new Always-On feature keeps you logged into fring even when the fring application is closed on your iPhone/iPod touch.

It works like this:

To activate the Always-On add-on, click on ‘More‘ –> Add-ons –> Always on.
You’ll get the following screen

Enter the email address you have configured into your iPhone and click ‘Send‘
Within a few seconds you should get an activation email. Open the email on your iPhone and click the link to activate the service.

Once you’ve clicked the link and activated the service you can click the home button and fring will keep you logged in. This of course works with all the services you use on fring ( fring, Skype, MSN, Google talk, ICQ, Yahoo etc)

How do I get the notifications?

To get the notifications in real time you should have your email address configured to be “pushed” to your iPhone/iPod. Once you got that done, you’ll get an email whenever someone’s trying to call/chat you. Just open the mail and click the link –> fring will open up on your phone and display the message.

If you don’t click the link within 5 minutes - we will log you off from the Always-on service and won’t send you more notifications until you log in again to fring (we don’t like spam…)

I’ve registered to the add-on, Now I want to go offline, How do I do that?

Open fring, click on ‘More‘ –> Add-ons –> Always-on.

You’ll get the above pop up. If you click on ‘Disable’ we will log you off from the service until the next time you open fring. Or, you can unsubscribe from the add-on completely (but why would you want to do that ! ? )

A few things:
1. Currently this feature is available for UK and US users only but no worries… we will gradually make it available to all countries.
2. Once you’ve subscribed to this service we will keep you online for between 2-4 hours. This time frame may vary based on country as we are still fine-tuning this process in order to optimize your experience.
3. As we mentioned in the initial blog post, this feature will eventually use Apple’s 3.0 firmware notification SDK, once it’s made publicly.

We are hoping to add more countries in the next few weeks so stay tuned for more news.

As always, your comments and feedback is much appreciated!

The fringTEAM