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Big News! New Bible App for Symbian Phones

We’ve been working hard to bring you a new Bible app for the Symbian platform and we’re excited to announce that it’s ready and available for download now in the Opera mobile store and on GetJar.com. Many Americans aren’t familiar with the Symbian mobile platform, so we’ll take a moment to explain why we believe this is a big deal.First, Symbian accounts for about 40% of smartphones in the world. There are hundreds of millions of people carrying a Symbian-powered device in hundreds of countries. Second, because Symbian is so ubiquitous outside the United States, we’re excited to see how God uses this step to reach the world with the Bible, helping millions more engage with Scripture.

Like the first version of our mobile Bible app on other new platforms, the Symbian app is currently a basic Bible reader that accomplishes our foundational purpose of increasing Bible engagement around the world. Future development will bring more features you’ve come to love on other mobile platforms, like Reading Plans, social sharing with Twitter and Facebook, YouVersion Live, and more.

Have fun with the new Symbian app and don’t forget to tell your friends to download the YouVersion Bible app on their phones. It’s the easiest way to give someone a free Bible!

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Free YouVersion Promo Video – Download now!

We love seeing more people engage the Bible through YouVersion, so you can imagine that we’re pretty excited that the YouVersion Bible app is being downloaded to a new mobile device every 4 seconds. But individual downloads aren’t the only thing to celebrate. We’ve been encouraged by how small groups, churches, conferences, and universities are adopting YouVersion Live as part of their events and gatherings and we’ve seen even more groups simply encouraging their people to download the Bible app during their regular meetings.

So, to make it even easier for churches, conferences, musicians, universities, small groups, coffee shops, and others to share the Bible and YouVersion, we’ve made the video above available as a free download on OPEN, LifeChurch.tv’s library of free digital resources for churches and other ministries. (Choose “Week 3 Whispers Promo” in the list near the bottom of the page.) The video can be downloaded in multiple formats and is free for you to use at church, in your small group, or just sharing with a friend.

Have fun and don’t forget to let us know how you plan to use the video to tell people about how they can engage the Bible through YouVersion for free!

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Introducing Norsk Bibel 88/07: A New Norwegian Bible Translation

We’re excited to announce the recent addition of the Norsk Bibel 88/07 to the growing list of YouVersion Bible translations. The Norsk Bibel 88/07 is an extremely popular Norwegian translation of the Bible and we’re thankful to the Norsk Bibel AS for their generosity in providing this translation to the Norwegian speaking members of the YouVersion community around the world.

What makes this announcement even more exciting is that it comes right on the heels of the completion of the localization of the YouVersion.com interface into the Norwegian language. We’ve been able to accomplish this push to reach the Norwegian speaking community with the help of Norea Mediemisjon, who was instrumental in translating the web interface and also helped solidify the relationship with Norsk Bibel AS.

We hope our Norwegian speaking friends will enjoy this new addition! Keep an eye out for further developments as we work towards enabling people around the world to engage the Bible their native language.

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Lifeway & YouVersion Partner to Help Thousands of Churches

From Bible publishers to foreign media organizations, many first-rate organizations have teamed up with YouVersion as we work together to help millions engage with the Bible in new ways. We’re pleased to announce another strategic partnership, as YouVersion becomes a part of Lifeway’s Digital Church initiative.

Digital Church is a collection of web-based services endorsed by LifeWay Christian Resources to help churches and ministries to become more efficient and effective growing their church and the Kingdom. By recommending trusted solutions, LifeWay allows churches to focus on leveraging technology for ministry.

We’re honored to be included in LifeWay’s Digital Church initiative and look forward to equipping even more churches with the innovative Scripture engagement tools offered by YouVersion. In addition to YouVesion’s online and mobile Bible, churches can take advantage of YouVersion Live for mobile interaction during events like church services, youth events, and more.

We’re excited about this partnership and the great relationship between YouVersion and Lifeway. We know that God will use this connection for great things in His Kingdom.

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NEW! Introducing Profiles on Palm Pre/Pixi

A new version of the YouVersion Bible app for Palm Pre/Pixi was made available last week in the Palm App Catalog and brings lots of brand new features that I’m really excited to tell you about. Because of the speed of development for WebOS, Palm has turned into the proving grounds for great features for YouVersion. That means that our Palm app is likely to be a preview of what you’ll see very soon in all of our other apps.

Introducing Profiles
The biggest new component in the Palm app is the section called “Profiles”. The Profiles component is a full experience where you can interact with all of your YouVersion friends, information (Contributions, Likes, Tags, etc.), and activity streams. The best explanation of Profiles is that it puts the entire YouVersion community in the palm of your hand.

It’s such a big update that all it would take too long to explain all of the capabilities of the Profiles component here. You’ll just have to download it and check it out for yourself to get a complete idea of how it works. If you don’t have a Palm Pre/Pixi, take a look at a few screenshots below to whet your appetite for this amazing new feature.

YouVersion Live

Also included in this release for Palm Pre/Pixi is the addition of YouVersion Live. Now you can interact with church services and other live events right on your Palm WebOS device. This addition means that YouVersion Live is now available on four major mobile platforms including iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

We hope you enjoy this update to the Palm Pre/Pixi. If there’s something missing or if you think we could improve something, please let us know at http://youversion.com/support.