Pinger showed off its new mobile phone application to thousands of Mac World attendees. 

The programme provides a simple interface for communicating with phone contacts, as well as friends on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. An intuitive menu allows users to call, text, IM, mail or even send a Facebook, MySpace or Twitter message to their connections.

"Billions of messages are sent across instant messaging and social networking platforms every day," Pinger CEO Greg Woock told IT Examiner. "Pinger Phone integrates all these communication types into one place, making it easy for the user. There is no need to navigate back and forth between different applications when communicating with friends."

Woock also noted that if people under 25 designed mobile phones, they would be sure to insert IM and social network messaging options alongside dialing, texting and mail.

"With more than 30 billion messages sent on IM and social networks every day, it's about time someone deeply integrated them into the basic mobile phone experience," added Woock.

Indeed, Pinger offers free texting to any US mobile phone and features a horizontal keyboard for faster and more accurate instant messaging. In addition, the programme supports AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN IM and Google Talk.

Pinger Phone is currently available free of charge for the Iphone and Ipod touch devices. However, the company plans to develop versions of Pinger for the BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian.

As IT Examiner previously reported, a number of software companies have recently released mobile-based applications for Apple devices. For example, Truphone has created an application that allows users to place and receive Skype calls from an Iphone or Ipod touch.

"Truphone believes this is one more step towards openness but more importantly a shining example of how Truphone has enabled conversations to become multi-mode - people regularly converse via text messages, instant messages as well as phone calls," Tom Carter, President Americas for Truphone, told IT Examiner. "With the addition of Skype and the instant messaging services, Truphone users can easily engage in these mix-mode conversations at any time across hundreds of millions of users."

 In addition, Soonr introduced an Iphone application at Mac World 2009 that automatically backs up documents to a secure cloud. Iphone users can then access, share and print the documents in real time, whether they are in Word, Excel or Powerpoint format.

"Soonr's Iphone application makes the files on your Mac or PC accessible on your Iphone, no matter where you are, and regardless of whether your computer is turned on or off," explained Ginger Holt, VP of Marketing at Soonr. "Not only can you view them in perfect rendering, but you can also send them directly to others with comments, and even print to a remote printer. And newest versions of your documents are automatically and instantly sent to your 'personal cloud' every time you're online, so it's always up to date."

Holt also explained that the documents were stored in the cloud and viewed on the Iphone, thereby "negating the need to download memory-intensive documents onto the Iphone or download applications to view them". X