Funambol, the leading provider of Mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source, announced new Code Sniper projects to encourage its global community of mobile open source developers to write apps that sync content between mobile phones and social networks.

Code Sniper is Funambol’s community program that rewards developers with monetary bounties to work on open source projects that benefit mobile users around the globe. This new slate of Code Sniper projects ranges from syncing pictures of friends on social networks to the address book on a mobile phone, to making it easy to invite your mobile contacts to join your favorite social network. All of the apps developed as part of Code Sniper are made freely available under standard open source licensing.

“Funambol has always been about delivering cool new mobile open source services, apps and data to the broadest array of mobile phones for free or low cost, and these Code Sniper social networking projects are no exception,” said Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol. “There’s a tremendous amount of content on social networks that users would like to access on their cell phones, and these projects enable this. I personally can’t wait to use some of these new mobile social networking apps.”

Funambol introduced the popular Code Sniper program about a year ago. Several dozen mobile developers have worked on and delivered many useful community projects, such as mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Yahoo!, GMail, Thunderbird and JAJAH. The new Funambol Code Sniper mobile social networking projects announced today are:

• Get Icons/Photos of Your Friends on Your Mobile Phone. Many cell phone address books allow you to associate a picture or icon with the names in it. Many of your friends have put omething that represents them on Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo and other social networks. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to fetch those icons and sync them with the address book on your phone? This project consists of writing an app that takes your list of contacts from your phone’s address book, fetches the respective icons from Facebook (or another social network), and merges the icons back into your phone’s address book. All of the syncing can be done via Funambol.
• Sync Events. On your favorite social network(s), you have people who you like to hang with. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to easily sync events from your favorite social network to the calendar on your mobile? And send events from your mobile phone to the social network? The project consists of writing an app that syncs social network events, using Funambol as the sync engine.
• Invite Your Contacts to Join Your Favorite Network. Make it easy to get the contacts from a Funambol account (which could be from your mobile phone address book or virtually any source e.g. Yahoo!, GMail, AOL, Outlook, etc.) into your favorite social network and invite them to become your social network friends. This project consists of an app that fetches the contacts from your Funambol account and invites them to connect with you on your preferred social network.

For more information or to submit a proposal to develop one of these projects, please visit http://www.funambol.com/opensource/codesniper.php.