Sue Abu-Hakima, president and CEO of Amika Mobile. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Ottawa companies Amika Mobile and Firehot Solutions Inc. are teaming up to offer e-mail alerts on customers' mobile phones.

The two firms have signed a partnership agreement to offer e-mail-to-SMS (short messaging service) content for any mobile phone on the Firehot Mobile-Message portal, providing consumer and business users with e-mail alerts at an estimated 10 per cent of the cost of typical mobile messaging solutions.

"The killer application for mobile phones is messaging, where over 215 billion e-mails and 500 billion SMS text messages are exchanged each and every day," stated Amika Mobile CEO Sue Abu-Hakima. "Firehot Solutions's service allows any mobile user to receive and respond to key e-mails promptly through SMS, increasing their productivity and boosting business performance. This capability is particularly important for small businesses or work from home users who cannot afford to pay high data fees and do not want to have all their emails flooding their mobile phones."

The new service supports mobile message alerts from multiple e-mail accounts, including web-based services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.