Santo Domingo.– A new service recently launched in the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic has showed hot it is possible to expand popular online services to low income mobile subscribers.

The new service is called vSocial and is being offered by the local mobile network operator, VIVA, to its 700,000 subscribers. The service is based on software supplied by ForgetMeNot Software and enables regular handsets to use ‘internet-free apps’ to send and receive internet messaging on any GSM phone with SMS.

“People across the island now have access to internet-free Facebook, email and online chat apps on any mobile phone at any time, all from the palm of their hand,” commented Jose Holguin, manager for value added services with VIVA.

The stats for the Dominican Republic are extremely interesting. Nearly 40 per cent of the country’s 10 million inhabitants have access to the internet, of which 2.2 million are on Facebook, for example.

Although there are 90 mobile subscriptions to every 100 people, only 2.4 per cent of the population have a mobile internet subscription, according to figures supplied by Internet World Stats.