Imagine playing air hockey with your friend in an arcade; movements happen in real-time, you are both attacking and defending as the pace of the game shifts with each strike of the puck and you can communicate as you wish. Now, imagine that exact same scenario on two mobile devices. Welcome to the world of real-time, rich communications.

Rich Communications Suite (RCS) is the next generation of mobile communications. Capabilities such as video chat, instant messaging, group chat, file sharing and video sharing are just some of the services available today.

Jibe Mobile is a provider of the world’s first open technology platform for the new era of telephony and its technology provides an all important link for developers to easily unleash new rich capabilities for consumer and business-driven mobile applications. The Jibe Mobile Developer Portal and App-to-App platform SDK gives application developers the tools to infuse their applications with real-time app-to-app and multiuser capabilities.

Jibe’s app-to-app platform will allow developers to incorporate powerful real-time in-app rich communications into new ‘carrier grade’ mobile applications for areas such as multiplayer games, distance learning, remote diagnosis and healthcare, customer care, sales and service and enterprise collaboration.

The company has closed $8.3 million in financing with investments by Vodafone Ventures, Tokyo-based game creator MTI (News - Alert) and other investors. The investment will help Jibe to continue bridging the world of standards-based communications and agile Silicon-Valley application development to connect consumers around the world via the next generation of rich communications – video chat, real-time gaming and other innovations – regardless of their location, mobile device or telecommunications plan.

Jibe will continue developing the world’s first open technology platform leveraging the most advanced telecom industry standards — including GSMA (News - Alert) joyn and RCS 5 — and enhance its open APIs enabling developers to rapidly incorporate real-time, “rich communications” into mobile applications.

I had a chance to speak with Amir Sarhangi, Jibe CEO, and Dan Seyer, VP of marketing and developer relations, about Jibe’s technology and what it means for the industry.

“What we’re doing is kind of a merging of two worlds – the mobile world and the content world,” said Sarhangi. “This investment is really a validation of our vision. The future is all about connected applications. In the future, all apps will have some kind of real-time engagement built right into them, whether it’s real-time video chat, voice or connected apps around games.”

The Jibe Cloud powers gaming possibilities such as the real-time, virtual air hockey as well as games such as Reversi.

Traditionally, when it came to communicating to another person on a phone, all you would do it pick up the phone and dial. Now, there are endless possibilities of communicating with another person just from a single device. Applications are gradually adding real-time, rich communications capabilities that allow users to communicate through different apps and mediums.

“As these applications become more sophisticated, there’s a higher need for richer connectivity. What we do at Jibe is make it extremely simple for developers to be able to add things like video chat, VoIP, low latency data through our API, and all they need to know is essentially Android (News - Alert) or iOS,” said Sarhangi.

Two years ago, Jibe and Vodafone teamed up and the result of their work together is the innovation the industry now calls joyn. joyn is the consumer brand for a new range of communications services being offered by mobile network operators to their customers. It extends native mobile network capabilities beyond voice and SMS to include chat, file sharing and video sharing – basically, the next version of SMS.

“The investments from Vodafone (News - Alert) and MTI will help us continue to innovate and extend our platform. We look forward to the next stage and ongoing strong partnerships with our expanding carrier and developer networks,” said Sarhangi.

Jibe offers Jibe On, a private cloud solution, joynNet, Jibe App-to-App and Jibe + joyn + RCS5 solution. Its SDK allows operators to use their investment in joyn+RCS5 to go beyond basic capabilities and deliver truly differentiated services tailored to their customers’ specific requirements. To learn more, visit www.jibemobile.com.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.