New year, new funding, new release

We may only be a couple of days in, but 2010 is already promising to be another exciting year. After twelve months of steady growth (and one which saw us regularly exceed our limited technical capacity), late last month we were pleased to secure significant new funding. A $150,000 grant - our first from the Rockefeller Foundation - will allow us to increase the size of our FrontlineSMS developer team and better service the growing needs of our user, partner and developer communities. A huge thanks to Rockefeller for their support. o/

The revamped version of FrontlineSMS - originally funded by the MacArthur Foundation in 2007/2008 - has only been available for just short of 18 months, but we've already put out two significant upgrades, with a third imminent. Each of these has been shaped by user feedback and requests for new features, all co-ordinated through our active and growing online Community, probably one of our greatest achievements. The latest release includes new language support, a mapping module and extended ability to connect external software applications.

Over the past few months we've also been quietly working on a new SMS-based initiative with partners Wieden+Kennedy, Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP) and the GSM Association. Technical development on this Hewlett Foundation-funded project - which will solve one of the biggest challenges faced by many grassroots mobile initiatives - starts next month. More news on that, and the new FrontlineSMS release, soon!