Talking Transcoding

Novarra came in for a lot of criticism last year when it deployed its transcoding solution for Vodafone UK. The solution effectively rendered some WAP sites invisible to Vodafone users. We caught up with President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan, to ask her about the affair

DM: Now when you deployed that transcoding solution for Vodafone UK, you came in for an awful lot of criticism from some quarters. Was it justified?

JR: The criticism is aged out. The problems were in the first few weeks, and while there is a community that continues to complain, the facts are that the operators are very happy and the mobile content partners are very happy. The actual fact, versus the hype, is that Internet usage in Vodafone UK is now around 1,000 times what it was before we launched with them and it has increased mobile content consumption.

DM: So just run us through the problem if you would please.

Mobile Wif-fi Made Easy

David Murphy catches up with Devicescape CEO Dave Fraser, to find out more about the company's  solution to simplify access to wi-fi networks

DM: Dave, regular readers will know that Devicescape simplifies access to wi-fi networks for wi-fi equipped phones and other devices like cameras where data entry is less easy than on a PC. We heard back in October that you had done a deal to make your application available on some Nokia devices. What else has happened in the past 12 months?

DF: Well we launched in 2007 and built outstanding device relationships with a number of companies, including Nokia. We also added several more that we have not announced yet, and we saw lot of interest in dual-mode handsets. Handset makers seem interested in accommodating wi-fi because of the amount of data traffic on the 3G network. Every handset maker is looking at our technology or thinking of some way to use it. Media player makers too, are embracing wi-fi as a service access mechanism.
Then on the network side of things, we had 300 signed up last October, and now it’s over 1,000, so we have every commercial hotspot network in our system. We added those first, but our real achievement has been in getting the assistance of the community, so ordinary folks can add networks they care about, even down to single point locations. So we have 300 universities, big networks, and then we get down to coffee shops and single locations, so you can get access where you want.
We have also cut some deals with operators to licence our technology, including BT, The Cloud and Deutsche Telecom.

DM: Sounds like a good year.

Flying the MDM Flag

David Murphy meets David Ginsburg, Vice President, Marketing & Product Management at MDM (Mobile Device Management) firm, InnoPath

DM: So give us the InnoPath story if you would please David.

DG: We launched in 2003 with FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) deployments in Japan, expanded to Tier 1 operators in N. America in 2005, and we are now extending our OMA-DM (Open Mobile Alliance - Device Management) footprint globally.
We have gone through five quarters of profitability. In September, we announced that Verizon had launched a FOTA service using our software. We are currently deploying with China Unicom, the second largest operator in the world, which is adopting MDM for FOTA updates, advanced customer care, and security, and we have also been selected by KDDI as the basis for their next-generation common platform, a BREW implementation spanning all handsets in their network in Japan.
We are firmly focused on device management, and we are seeing 2008 as a watershed year, with deployments in places like Europe and Latin America. We have a complete server-side solution that we sell into operators, and a client solution that we sell into OEM partners (handset makers), so we bring a unique understanding to the market of the problems and concerns that both the operators and the OEMs have in deploying an end-to-end solution. These solutions are part of our Integrated Mobile Device Management (iMDM) product family.

DM: And what’s on the cards for this year?

Don't Stop at WAP

David Murphy meets Meidad Sharon, Director, Product Marketing and Business Development, Content Solutions at Comverse, a company with some interesting ideas on how network operators can make money from mobile advertising

 DM: So Meidad, I believe Comverse has a pretty unusual approach to mobile advertising, can you tell us about it?

MS: When you’re talking about mobile media, the operator has two assets. The first is the ability to touch the user through multiple touchpoints. When people think about mobile advertising, they think of the mobile web, banners, search etc but operator has much more inventory than that to sell.

DM: Such as?

MS: There’s a host of things. Off-portal inventory. Messaging channels A2P (Application-to-person) and P2P Person-to-Person). And voice channels, so a bit like a ringback tone, but instead of hearing a ringback tone selected by the person receiving the call, the caller hears an ad because they have opted in to the programme.

DM: And what’s the second asset?

MS: It’s the fact that mobile media is the only 1-on-1 media, compared to TV or billboards or print advertising. Even the web, because on the web, I might think I know who the user is from the IP address, but that could be me in the morning, my wife in the afternoon and one of the kids in the evening. Also, the operator has a lot of detail on the users, historical data about where they have surfed in the past; what they are doing now. Are they on a news site or a sports site? And also socio-demographic data like age, gender etc. So they can run targeted campaigns.

DM: Can you give us some examples?

Waterfall Guy

David Murphy talks to Matt Silk, Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Waterfall Mobile

DM: So tell us all about Waterfall, Matt.

MS: We founded the company in August 2005. Myself and my Co-founder Matt Sechrest, our CEO, were both at E*TRADE at the time we looked at the US mobile marketing and mobile content sales landscape and saw that it was an extremely complex market, much more so than Europe and Asia. The situation seemed to be that if you wanted to do things on mobile you went to an ipsh! or an Enpocket or a MindMatics and you paid them 25 or 50 or 100 grand and they would get you a shortcode solution and you would get your campaign up and running and three months later you would go back and do it all again.
And we thought there had to be a better way. I was at E*TRADE for five or six years, I rebuilt the site many times, and we just thought that we should be able to hide all the complexity behind mobile marketing and mobile content sales in the same way we had hidden the complexity between trading shares at E*TRADE via a simple, clean easy-to-use website.

DM: So what was it that attracted you to mobile?

MS: That’s actually hard to say. I think we just looked at the complexity and saw a great opportunity to make things simple.
That was the hypothesis and we have just been charging forward ever since. We have built a core technology platform to empower marketing managers, to build out mobile messaging and marketing campaigns so that they can do it themselves without spending 50 grand on the solution.

DM: So tell us about the platform.

 

Eye to Eye with IMI

David Murphy catches up with Vishwanath ‘Vish’ Alluri, CEO and Founder of IMImobile, to find out more about the company

DM: So Vish, tell us about IMImobile.

VA: IMI is an infrastructure technology company. We operate in 51 countries, supporting over 200 operator deployments and over 400 content partners, and our customers include Yahoo!, Google, Jamba and Reuters along with operators such as Vodafone, Telefonica, Cable & Wireless, Maxis in Malaysia and Airtel in India. In total 3 billion messages were sent last year using systems built and managed by IMImobile.
We deliver a VAS (Value Added Services) infrastructure for content services on a managed model to operators. This includes carrier-grade messaging platforms and gateways, content management systems, and voice platforms, and through these platforms we deliver interactive portals, community and User-generated Content (UGC) applications, caller ringback tones and video streaming. 

DM: So how does it all work?

Peer-to-PeerBox

David Murphy meets Alex Lazovsky, CEO of Nareos, which operates the PeerBox Mobile content-sharing and social networking service

DM: So Alex, give us the low down on Nareos and PeerBox if you would.

AL: Sure. We were founded in 2005. Our headquarters are in Israel and we also have an office in LA. We employ 20 people. Our flagship offering is PeerBox Mobile, which is a combination of technology and supporting managed services that enable online content owners to deliver content to a network of mobile users. The service is based on our multi-peer-to-multi-peer file-sharing technology, which makes mobile content available for access and sharing by mobile users, and supports any type of content such as videos, music, ringtones, wallpapers from a diversity of sources, including User-generated Content (UGC) created online or from the mobile. For the user, it means they can access and share mobile content easily, and the partners benefit from the generation of revenues from beyond their own portal.

DM: So who are these partners?

The Ad-funded Approach to Mobile Content

innerActive provides a turnkey solution for portals, media agencies, content providers and mobile operators, enabling them to offer entertainment content at a reduced price, or free of charge, with dynamic ad placements embedded in the content be it games, video, IM or other WAP applications. David Murphy caught up with Co-CEO and Co-founder Offer Yehudai to find out more

DM: So give us the Inner-active story if you would please, Offer

OY: Sure, we are just over two and a half years old, we have 15 staff and a mix of private investors and venture capital funding. We are in the mobile advertising space, but we try to take a different approach. We are not an ad-serving technology company like Screentonic, Enpocket and others. Our focus is on ad-funded entertainment channels. We create and manage entertainment channels where users can find free or discounted rich media content for their mobile, such as video, games etc.

DM: So how does it work?

OY: We partner with content providers and give them the tools to implement our ad-serving technology to create a catalogue of ad-ready content. Then we approach the leading off-deck portals such as Jamster and Buongiorno and say that we can give them a complete ad-funded entertainment channel solution, including both the content and the ad sales. Then we launch the content on their deck, sell the inventory and offer the subscribers free content.

DM: And how many deals do you have in place?

Joining the Dots

dotmobi is planning to launch a Device Database. David Murphy caught up with dotmobi Vice President, Advanced Services and Applications, Paul Nerger, to find out why

DM: So Paul, tell us why the mobile world needs another Device Database?

PN: Well I think there are a lot of indications that the mobile Internet is finally taking off, and this year could be very significant. ESPN.mobi did more traffic than the .com site in December, so that’s great. And if you go to their mobile website, it’s pretty good, but it could be better. They are working on improving it, but one of the challenges developers have when building a mobile site is that there are so many devices with different screen resolutions and different capabilities. So what tends to happen is that companies either build to the lowest common denominator, or they build to each specific device. Now the big guys, Google, Microsoft, AOL, they can do that, and they use a Device Database to do it. They detect the device and optimise the  content or scale the image or whatever, but it is expensive. They spend a lot of money to do that and smaller companies, and when I say “smaller”, I’m talking in this respect about companies like Disney and MTV, they cannot afford to do it.
Now our investors are 14 of the largest mobile Internet companies out there, and they said that they thought this problem needs to be solved, because the data is out there, but it’s strewn around all over the place. Developers don’t want to go to the Nokia site, then the Samsung site, then the Sony Ericsson site, then AT&T, then Verizon, so we have brought all data together, including copyrighted data from the likes of Vodafone and Nokia, but also from places like WURFL, to try and make it a bit easier for developers.
So we’ll put all this data in one place and it will be free to view. There will also be an API that will return the attributes like the display characteristics, whether it has GPS, anything you might want to use in your application.

DM: And this is all free to access?

A Question of Common PixSense

David Murphy talks to Paul Singh, CEO of mobile photo-sharing company PixSense

DM: So Paul, tell us all about PixSense

PS: We started out two years ago. We have raised $7million (£3.5 million) from ATA Ventures, Innovacom and Qualcomm Ventures. We provide a software platform for preserving, sharing, publishing and monetising mobile user-generated content (UGC). It’s a big market with lots of players, companies like ShoZu, Juice Wireless. We are all in the same space, but the space itself is very large and we think we have some unique points of difference.
Clearly, there is a lot of UGC on the Internet with sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. But it’s still hard for me as a user to take a digital camera, connect it to the PC, upload my content, you really have to think about it from the point of view of a content creator, as well as a consumer.
So then you look at the mobile world. Data plans are expensive but coming down. You have phones with a good quality camera that also do video, high speed networks, so the user could be creating content from anywhere, any time but the issue we have found is this one of uploading, and there are lots of different solutions proposed by different companies. 
In our opinion, the best solution is to put the application on the handset, and we believe there will be many more businesses created in this space. We think the potential for this is three times what it is on the web, because there are 3 billion handsets compared to 1 billion PCs, and it’s any place, any time, anywhere.

DM: So you said you have some points of difference. What are these?

Fjord Focused

Christian Lindholm is known as the father of the Nokia Series 60 User Interface, and is the inventor of the Nokia Navi-Key, one of the most widely-deployed mobile user interfaces, with over 600 million units sold. He now works as a Director and Partner at digital innovation consultancy, Fjord. David Murphy caught up with him to get his thoughts on the current state of the mobile marketing nation

DM: So Christian, after working for Nokia and Yahoo! what was it that appealed to you about Fjord?

CL: I have known the founders since 2000, when we did some work together when they were at Razorfish and I was at Nokia, and we formed a pretty good bond and kept in touch after the meltdown of Razorfish. Then they formed Fjord and we worked together when I was heading the Lifeblog project at Nokia, and then when I moved to Yahoo in 2005, I engaged them in the design of Yahoo! Go Version 1 and 2.0, so I had done quite a bit of work with them.

DM: So when you look at the whole mobile marketing world today, where do we stand? Are things moving as quickly as you would like?

Going To The Dogs

UK company Intellistream aims to bring dog and horse racing to the mobile, using its technology platform to enable punters to place a bet before the race, then watch it live to see if they win. David Murphy caught up with CEO Jim Beagle to find out more

DM: So give us the Intellistream story please Jim.

JB: The development work on our platform was started in 2005 by our CTO, Jani Peltonen, and the company was founded in March 2006. I joined at the end of 2006 as part of an initiative to raise initial seed funding of just under £400,000, which came from the London Technology Fund. I was appointed as CEO, and John Leyden as CFO, as part of a move to strengthen the management team.

DM: So what’s your background?

JB: Telecommunication, software and IT services. I worked for ICL, which subsequently became Fujitsu. After that, I was at the European arm of what became Sprint, and I also spent six years in the US with a software and IT services business in Boston, before I came back to the UK three years ago.

DM: Can you tell us a little about your platform?

phling! Shot

David Murphy talks to Graeme W. Smith, VP Marketing at mobile music service provider phling!

DM: So Graeme, tell us about phling!

GS: The three founders of the company, myself, Michael Krasner, our President and CEO, and Lawrence Denenberg, our CTO, all worked for InTouch systems developing Voice portals for mobile operators. We ran Sprint TPS’s Voice Command voice-activated services, for example. The company was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was sold to Comverse in 1999 and there we built up the voice solutions division from 20 to 300 people. So we understand the mobile space. The key to mobile applications, as we see it, is ease of use for the end user.
We left in 2003 and started Oxysystems and spent a long time working with end users to really understand what they wanted in terms of mobile music and how they listen to it while they are mobile, and this has driven a lot of the features of phling!
phling! has had a series of incarnations, but it launched officially in November 2006 as a mobile music lounge where people can listen to their own music, Internet radio, independent bands and artists who upload and want to promote their music, so users can share music and opinions and find other people with similar tastes in music. So it’s like a social network tied into the mobile phone, trying to help people get more from their mobile music and to turn listening from a solitary to a social experience. Users can rate songs, find out which are the most popular songs in the phling! community and what others think of the artists.

DM: Where did the idea come from?

Get Mvolved!

David Murphy talks to Dominic Bignall, MD of Mvolve, the business networking service for the mobile industry

DM: So Dominic, what’s the big idea?

DB: Well, I decided to launch the Mvolve service after I became increasingly frustrated at the time and expense of trawling the conference circuit in order to develop relationships in overseas territories. Our service operates as a hybrid of an online networking service and a comprehensive industry directory, essentially an online, non-stop, 3GSM World Congress. 

DM: So it’s a networking service, first and foremost?

DB: It is in part, but not in the sense of the recent trend that has emerged on general business networking sites where users build huge personal networks but don’t generally extract any real value from them. Mvolve is primarily a telecoms resource hub which is underpinned with a networking element. We are about pure lead generation and providing our customers with the tools to find new revenues and at the same time market their services. The principle is simple: you have a product or service to sell and you want to sell it as cost effectively as you can, Mvolve provides you with the functionality to achieve that goal.

DM: So how does it work?

The myGamma Buzz

David Murphy talks to BuzzCity CEO and Co-founder Kok Fung “KF” Lai about the company’s myGamma mobile social network 

DM: As usual, KF, can we start with the 30-second guide to Buzz City

KF: We started out eight years ago as a dotcom company. We went through a few iterations, then around three years ago, we noticed a big uptake of the mobile Internet in some markets, so that’s when we launched our ‘myGamma’ mobile community
We launched initially in South-east Asia, so Signapore, Thailand, Malaysia and bits of China initially. Then we added India, S. Africa and then we started to grow really quickly around a year ago. We are now in 56 countries and adding two countries a month.

DM: And what’s the revenue model?

KF: Initially it was totally subscription-based. We decided to make it a paid community because we believe that guarantees the quality of the community and the level of the interactions. Then a year ago, we allowed third party content providers to sell their content in the community. And then at the start of this year, we introduced advertising, and we quickly ran out of inventory, because there is so much demand when you aggregate third party publishers. This is growing very rapidly every month now. So currently, 70% of our revenue comes from advertising, and 30% from our users. We have around 2 million registered users, and around 250,000 active users per month, and we serve 800 million ad impressions per month. 

DM: What sort of ads are you getting?

What's on the Gorillabox Tonight?

Start-up company Gorillabox aims to enable brands to engage with consumers via the medium of Mobile TV. David Murphy met CEO Christian Harris to find out more

DM: Where has Gorillabox come from Christian?

CH: Myself and the other members of the management team  have a background in developing and promoting mobile services in the UK and Europe. I started out in  broadcast TV, and have been in the mobile space since 1999. I worked for the mobile content company, Sonera Zed, and also on the mobile design side and on the operator side. Our CTO Mark Wakefield left T-Mobile to take this job. He managed a range of products in Web ‘n’ walk and t-zones for T-Mobile International. And our Head of Development, Mark Knoop, has been creating mobile applications from scratch for the past seven years. We’ve been working on the development of our platform for the past few months, and we launched officially on 8 October.

DM: And what’s the big idea?

Automatic For The People

The Pontis Integrated Marketing System is a comprehensive system for the definition, execution and analysis of targeted marketing offers, and it is gaining some traction with mobile operators around the world. David Murphy caught up with Pontis Senior Marketing Director Guy Talmi to find out more 

DM: So tell us about Pontis Guy

GT: We were founded three years ago. We are VC-backed, by Sequioa, Evergreen and others. We are more than 75 people, and our background is strongly telco industry. And we’re growing fast. We already have 12 commercial mobile operators on board as customers. 

DM: So what do you do?

GT: We automate the operators’ marketing offer management process, enabling them to continually present each customer with the most appropriate marketing offer, and then deliver that offer to them. We started out promoting content, enabling operators to promote any type of content. So information, ringtones, games or any other type of content. But in the past couple of years, we have spread into other areas, and we now cover a whole variety of operator services, including messaging, embracing SMS and MMS, and voice.

DM: And which operators you are working with?

Can You Hear the EQO?

A recent YouGuv survey found that only 13% of UK adults make international calls from their mobile phone because of fears over the cost of doing so. EQO’s mobile calling solution offers free international calls between EQO users, and substantial savings for calls to non-EQO users. David Murphy caught up with General Manager for Europe, Simon Edelstyn, to find out more

DM: Simon, can you start by telling us where EQO came from please?

SE: We have been around for three years. We first demonstrated our technology on mobile in 2006. We have a lot of technical knowledge and experience. Our founder, Colin Quon, is ex-Nortel and developed one of the first mobile soft switches. Our CEO, Bill Tam, was the founding Chief Marketing Officer at MetroNet, which was sold to AT&T for $4 billion (£2 billion). Todd Heintz, our VP, Products, is from the handset side, and myself and Rich Roberts, VP, Marketing, come from the consumer Internet side, so we have a good understanding of the integration of mobile with the web.

DM: So there are lots of solutions for people who want to cut the cost of international calls. What’s your USP? 

Highly Recommended

Miyowa was founded in April 2003. Initially, its business was producing and distributing low-cost mobile content, including games, ringtones and logos, under the 1€ brand. But this was just a means to an end, as Co-founder Pascal Lorne explains to David Murphy

DM: So where did the idea for Miyowa come from, Pascal?

PL: It goes back to 2002, when I sold Ismap, an Internet map-based search engine, to a Benefon, which was founded by Nokia founder Jorma Nieminen and makes handsets with GPS (satnav) capabilities. Soon afterwards, I decided I needed a break and some thinking time, so I packed my backpack and set off around the world for six months.
I visited 20 countries, and while I was travelling, organised various focus groups with young people around the world, in Japan, San Francisco, Madrid, London, Munich, around 10 people at a time. They were all teenagers and I wanted to know what they did with their phone, what kind of SMS messages they sent and received, and I came back with the conclusion that the mobile is a very intimate device, and that what people want to do is share emotions and text.
Now as a 34-year old, a late Internet adopter, I was amazed by this. But the fact is, kids teach their parents how to use SMS, and they spend 2-3 hours a day on MSN, rather than watching TV.
So when I got back to France. I decided to create a new company around the idea of people sharing emotions and giving them an umbilical link to their community 24/7. So four years ago, I went to MSN, Yahoo! and AOL and told them to mobilize their applications, and, in short, they told me where to go.
So I started to build a prototype, doing ringtones, logos and games to get credibility in the market, and then I went back to them with value propositions. By this point, we had signed with 10 carriers, we had a prototype approved by focus groups, and we had a successful business.
So then two years ago, step 2 was that we signed a deal with MSN and launched a mobile Instant Messaging (IM) service with the majority of the carriers we were signed with in Europe, Asia and Taiwan. This was a handset-independent, universal end-to-end client messaging technology, which we call ‘MoveMessenger’, that is compliant with all existing major standards. Then we signed with Yahoo and AOL and other local communities and carrier communities.
And we know that people like it. We still have regular sessions with teenagers, and one day one of them said: ‘This is the coolest application I have ever seen, MSN on my mobile.’ It’s obvious really, if you think about it. Most teenagers have no computer or no ADSL line of their own, so they have to do it at school or on the PC at home under their parents’ control. Now we are on to step 3, which is building the Recommendation Platform.

DM: Which is what, exactly?

Solving the Mobile Data Problem

Mobile transaction network mBlox was one of the first companies we interviewed when we launched at the back end of 2005. Chairman Andrew Bud had lots to say for himself then, and when David Murphy caught up with him recently, he found that he still has. So much so that we thought we’d run this latest interview in two parts, but having looked at it, there’s no natural place to split it, so here it is in all its glory. Fix yourself a coffee, sit back and enjoy...

DM: So Andrew, what’s new since we last spoke?

AB: We’ve carried on executing our strategy, which is built on our 8 year old vision that the mobile content and services industry finds it vital to have access to an international, specialised provider of transactional services between it and carriers to facilitate its growth. So we continue to be absolutely focused on connecting, clearing and completing these transactions, and we stick to our strategy of not getting into applications and services ourselves, and that makes us unique, and clients appreciate it because it makes partnerships much easier.
We have also continue to expand internationally, because scale is important in business as more and more content service providers find their business models scale internationally, and want a business partner that can take them in to many territories. Initially, it was the mobile entertainment companies out of Spain, Germany and Italy who first began to expand internationally, especially in to the US, and over the last couple of years, the US has been the most exciting, difficult, challenging and rewarding market for mBlox services, where we are number 1 or 2 depending on your definition, with a large market, share and where we have extended our services into participation TV.
The MMA says the off-portal market grew from zero to $200 million (£98million) in 2005 to $750 million in 2006. So the quintessential land of the portal has rapidly adopted off-portal with the support of the carriers.

DM: So what have been the main challenges?

Intelligent Interactions

SNAPin Software lets operators interact with their subscribers in real-time and in the context of their current mobile behaviour. The company’s handset-based SelfService product suite enables the delivery of interactive promotions, the resolution of many customer support problems, and allows operators to deliver a branded service experience to their subscribers. David Murphy spoke to SNAPin Vice President, Products and Support, Tom Trinneer, to find out more

DM: As ever Tom, can we start with a bit of background on the company please?

TT: Sure. The company was formed in 2003 by serial entrepreneur Brian Roundtree. Brian has been working with the same core development team for the last eight years writing software for mobile devices.
The first 18 months were spent building the core technology, with funding from an Angel investor. We raised our first round of financing in December 2004, and by that time, we had a trial product. We started commercial trials with operators in western Europe in 2005. The next stage after that was a series of pilots with real customers. These have ranged from a few hundred to low thousands, to the one we did with Orange in the UK last summer, which involved 10,000 people. We have another planned in Spain which could be as high as 300,000. We have also secured a commercial, multi-year contract with a US carrier, and the first handset will ship nationwide in a few weeks.
We’ve had three rounds of financing and raised $24.3 million (£12 million) to date, and we have offices in Richmond and our headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.

DM: So tell us exactly what your software does and how it works?

The 7 Message Trick

French company Key2Cell is preparing to launch its integrated technology platform in Europe in the autumn. The platform will enable advertisers to execute viable advertising campaigns using the mobile channel. The company says the platform can send hundreds of thousands of messages in one hit and can dynamically handle the needs of different devices among the recipient base, serving different ad formats, from SMS at one extreme, to streaming video at the other. David Murphy caught up with CEO Bruno Saint-Cast to find out more

DM: So Bruno, tell us about Key2Cell

BSC: The history of the company is that the technology was brought to me two years ago by Dominique Chouchana and Eva Benhamou. They took a thesis from the University of Tel Aviv relating to the profiling of a mobile handset or number in terms of its ability to receive different types of message, and turned this into hard code. It can vary depending on the network you’re on, the technology and the operating systems on the cellphone and various other factors.
We spent some money bringing the technology to a point where we have patent pending, due by early September. We have to be a little elusive about the core technology, but using the technology, we know, with a minimum accuracy of 70%, what the best message a phone number can receive is at any given moment.
So we stepped back and looked at the market and at various studies, including one from Cap Gemini which concludes that the market for advertising on mobile phones is huge, somewhere between $5-10 billion (£2.4 - £4.8 billion), in terms of how much money companies are ready to spend on it. But when you look at what is spent today, it’s only $250 million, and the gap is explained by a technology blocker. This is the fact that there are a lot of different formats and standards which are exclusive from one another. If your handset can only receive basic MMS, for example, there’s no way you can receive a video message, so you have to make a choice between sending a rich message that can only be opened by 30% max of the installed base, or sending an SMS which will be readable by everybody. And of course advertisers want to deliver the richest content they can to any given handset. 
Now the analysts say that advertising on mobile phones will not be feasible until 3G represents 70% of the installed base, which is not due to happen before 2010 in France and the end of 2009 in the UK. We do not believe 3G will solve all the problems, because companies like Motorola and Nokia will always bring new formats to market to differentiate themselves. The mobile industry is very competitive, so operators and handset makers will always develop new formats and ways to deliver messages. In any event, we offer an opportunity to successfully push messages out to mobiles right now, because we can identify the message which can be received by every handset and we can do this on vast numbers of phones.

DM: What percentage of phones can you handle?

Free Games, Anyone?

David Murphy talks to Michael Chang, CEO of ad-funded game company Greystripe

DM: So Michael, tell us how Greystripe came to be.

MC: Andy Choi, our CTO, and I founded the company in September 2003, and we focused on mobile marketing in 2005. We actually started life as a mobile content publisher with location-based service (LBS) applications. We had a very innovative application for taking advantage of LBS, and we won the ‘BlackBerry Location Challenge 2005’ contest hosted by Nextel and Blackberry. The Finder product was a vertical content search application for mobile, so we would take databases of vertical search information, like a coffee shop database or a restaurant guide build on top of it a vertical search application, and people could then find a local restaurant. But we soon realised how difficult it was to get good distribution, and that there was a huge need in the market for publishers of applications and games to get wide distribution on an ad-supported model, because the carriers had so much control of content distribution

DM: And were you always ad-funded?

Fronde Feelings

Mobile payments, banking and two factor authentication company Fronde Anywhere recently launched a UK operation. David Murphy caught up with Caroline Dewe, Executive Vice President, Products & Marketing, to find out more about the company

DM: So Caroline, tell us about Fronde Anywhere

CD: We’re a spin-off of a New Zealand IT service company, very strong in telecoms. We have been a development partner for telcos such as Vodafone New Zealand and Australia for many years. Our parent company has a team in Auckland that worked with Vodafone on the delivery of 3G Live and other Vodafone global products. We have built mobile top-up platforms for telcos like Orange Netherlands on behalf of other product companies, and we also have a strong capability in the banking and finance, energy and government sectors.
A number of the spin-out team originate from an early joint venture with Ericsson to build products for the mobile Internet in 2001. We ended up building platforms for telcos for the Ericsson product development program, and included in this was a mobile messaging gateway. The team working on this folded to the Fronde Group side of the business, and ended up running the messaging platform in New Zealand, as a message aggregator.
This was in late 2002, and we decided from the start that we didn’t want to be a ‘text-to-win’ company. The company we sat within sold stuff to major corporations and banks so instead, we looked at how they could use technology to improve things for their customer base. So we are always focused on mobile solutions for business, and our applications always integrate with the client’s back-end systems.
Given the global focus of Fronde Anywhere, the messaging platform is retained within the parent company and the Fronde Anywhere product business has developed a new set of products tailored specifically for banking and mobile commerce in the international market.

DM: Can you give us some examples of your applications?

In Search of Spot Relevance

Acuity Mobile’s Embedded Mobile Advertising Platform (EMAP), promises to delivers ‘Spot Relevance’ in mobile advertising for consumers and advertisers, by targeting the right content at the right person, at the right time and in the right location. David Murphy caught up with President and Co-founder Alan Sultan (pictured, right) and Gregg Smith (pictured, left), Acuity’s COO and Executive Vice President, to find out more

DM: First up, Alan, give us the Acuity story so far if you would.

AS: The technology and intellectual property date back to March 2000. The Co-founder, Chuck Rieger, a Stanford PHD and serial entrepreneur, was driving back from Richmond, Virginia one day and saw a historic building. Chuck started thinking –wouldn’t it be nice to have all the information about this plantation? Wouldn’t it be great to have some sort of service where a company would know what his interests were, would survey the surrounding area and pull information into the phone or the car’s satnav system to tell him what there was of interest in that at area.
So in March 2000, he came up with the concept and filed a patent with the US PTO (Patent and Trademark Office) and the EU equivalent, covering the ability to take a piece of content, tie it to a point on a map and deliver it to a user in any medium, based upon them entering that area.
Chuck’s PHD was in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, so he started developing a code set and technical infrastructure and architecture, and the idea from the beginning was focused on the individual, rather than the content provider or the carrier. Who is this person, what are they interested in, where are they, what sort of information do we need to make those determinations. So he worked on architecture that was extremely open, so that it could easily integrate with data sets from a client’s customer database, or third party databases, and be able to figure out what was relevant for that individual from a content perspective, and from an advertising and marketing perspective.
The company evolved and Barry Glick, the Co-founder of Mapquest got involved, and Acuity was incorporated in 2006 by Barry, myself and Chuck to take the technology and the IP Chuck had created and bring it to market. The other thing I should mention is that in March 2003, the US PTO issued the first patent on this, and we have filed a continuation and a part patent was granted in November 06. We also have a patent pending in the EU, which we expect to be granted this year.
So we have a strong and robust patent portfolio to go with the technical capability we have.

DM: So tell us how the technology translates into a mobile advertising proposition?

Snap Happy Scott

In the past few weeks, UK marketing firm Magnet Harlequin has rolled out a mobile campaign for ‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’ that offered users free content for their phone, simply by taking a photo of a movie poster with their cameraphone. The technology goes under the name of ‘Snap Happy’, but the company behind it is relatively unknown in mobile circles. David Murphy caught up with Scott Seaborn, Head of the firm’s Technology for Marketing division, to find out more

DM: So Scott, what is Magnet Harlequin and how have you ended up getting involved in the mobile space?

SS: We are a marketing services agency with real focus on technology. The company has been going for 29 years. We are 76 people on two sites near Heathrow. We were were image and artwork specialists for Disney and various other blue-chip clients. Then 20 year ago when the Mac arrived on the scene we got into that, and then around 15 years ago, we saw the money that people like Sony, Universal and MGM, were spending biking high-res image files around on CDs, so at that point, we set up our Technology for Marketing department and built some of the first FTP sites. This was before the web really happened, so it got us a lot of work.
For the past eight years, we have been very much market leaders in digital asset management and marketing portals. So for clients like Universal, MGM, Sony and Nissan, we build portals where we centralise their marketing resources, so that if a film comes out in, say, Dubai all the marketing collateral will be on the portal and it will all be consistent and follow the brand guidelines. And we do that for 35 leading global brands and around 2,000 smaller ones.

DM: So how did you get involved in mobile?

Not Searching, but Finding

Yell.com launched its mobile offering at the end of January. David Murphy spoke to Yell.com Head of Mobile Marketing, Martin Wilson, to find out more about it

DM: So tell us Martin, if you would about Yell.com mobile’s strategy

MW: We have been championing mobile for five years, so we have a reasonable amount of experience. We started out with a WAP service, went into text a couple of years later, and then launched a pilot service two years ago that taught us a lot. In January this year, we took our first serious steps as a business to invest in mobile. We see the mobile opportunity as hugely exciting because the Yell brand has a high synergy to a user when they are out and about.

DM: So what is your mobile offering?

In Search of Repeat Business

July Systems offers managed mobile marketplace solutions that enable its clients to deliver “advanced mobile content retailing services” to consumers. By making personalised offers, and stimulating repeat visits to mobile content sites, July Systems aim to help its clients improve their ROI and generate loyalty among customers. David Murphy caught up with July Systems UK MD Geoff McGrath to find out more

DM: If you’ve seen any of the interviews we run on the site Geoff, you’ll know we tend to start with the potted history, so let’s have July Systems’. Perhaps you could start with the name.

GM: Sure. We were formed five years ago in July, which of course is the seventh month of year. The founders of the company are from South India, and they believe that seven is a propitious number which brings good fortune.  We’re headquartered in Santa Clara, with offices in the US, Banglaore, where most of the engineering is done, London, Hamburg and Madrid. We are 100 people, VC-backed, with the lead investors Motorola Ventures, Charles River and Sequoia Capital.
We are, and always have been, in the business of mobile content retailing from the outset. If you think back five years when people were building vending machines to distribute ringers games etc, we set out to build a platform form the ground up to meet the need for effective retailing of content and merchandising. Not so much around how to download to the phone but a platform that would allow people to create services that would replicate the experience of buying online and on the high street. For retailing to be effective, you can’t just build vending machines. You have to combine elements of effective marketing with retail, so you make people aware of the service, promote it and get people to use it in a repeat fashion, without obliging them to subscribe to it.
In the early years, the bulk of our efforts went on engineering a platform. Now, we have evolved to include elements more geared to community building and marketing to that community and nowadays customers tend to engage with July for the deployment of solutions, so we started with the technology, then built a team over the years to build knowledge of the markets we try to sell into, which include mobile entertainment, mobile marketing and media. 

DM: So who are your customers?

Community Workers

AirG delivers white-label mobile social networking platforms to brand partners, and in six years, it as built up a user base of 10 million unique users worldwide. Its users spend an average of 59 minutes a day on the service. 59% of them don’t own a PC, and 33% of them spend $80 (£41) a month or more on their phone bill. David Murphy caught up with AirG Director Frederick Ghahramani to find out more.

DM: So tell us about AirG Fred

FG: We started out in early 2000 as a mobile games developer, and the idea was to create a massive multiplayer game to bring tens of thousands of people together. So we licensed that to around 10 to 15 operators around the world. Then we had a random dumb luck situation where we found that, three or four months in, people were not playing the game but hanging out and socialising. So out goes games and in comes community. So we started with WAP chat, SMS clubs and Instant Messaging, and then starting these various communities, like a friend community and a Latino community and we’ve done it in a replicable way globally.
We spent $5 million last year on R&D to figure out the best way to connect people, and we go to market through various different channels like newspaper companies and media owners. They put our brand in their channel, and we work behind the scenes to interconnect them all to create one global community. We take the disparate communities and interconnect them, so someone on a Hiphop-branded community in London and someone on Cingular’s CoolTalk in Chicago are connected, and can look at each others miniblogs and communicate via the mobile. It took us five years to build 5 million users, and just eight months to go from 5 million to 10.

DM: So how do you define a community?

Making Ringbacks Sing

David Murphy talks to Jon Orlando, CMO and VP Marketing at ringback tone company NMS Communications about the company’s recent NMS Success survey

DM: What was this survey all about John?

JO: The survey began in the first quarter of 2006 among an audience of mobile operators. We surveyed 26 mobile operators that have deployed the NMS MyCaller ringback tone service to look at penetration rates and to compare and contrast the performance in different regions and look at some of issues that have cropped up with the service. It’s a bit of a thought leadership piece on ringback that we will make available to the operators that worked with us.
In each region, we looked at the clear leaders and clear laggards and spent lot of time talking to the operators, especially the ones who were not seeing the results they wanted, about what they can do.

DM: So what did you find out?

A Question of Security

David Murphy talks to Lorcan Burke, CEO of Irish mobile security company, Adaptive Mobile

DM: So Lorcan, tell us about Adaptive.

LB: We started off in 2003. Half the founders were from a security background, the other half from the telco side. We wanted to look at how to address the security issues of mobile operators in particular. There were lots of solutions for enterprise, but nothing for the carrier for anti-spam, anti-virus, content filtering and control. We said that if the operators wanted to secure the network or provide security services to their customers, they would need a highly scalable platform that works across, SMS, MMS, email, WAP, all their data services, in fact. So that’s what we set out to deliver. Our solution plugs into the SMSCs, WAP gateways etc. It’s like an intelligent network control platform, on top of which we plug in third party applications from people like Symantec and SurfControl and Websense. Then on the basis of the traffic coming in, we work out, in real-time, what security policy should be applied and apply anti-virus controls or content filtering or whatever’s needed.

DM: Can you explain how that works in practice?

LB: Sure. On the web and WAP traffic side of things, if someone is using their browser to access content, we would work out who the user is, what content they are trying to access, and what content they are allowed access. So if it was a minor trying to access an adult site, or someone trying to access an illegal site, we would lock it out. And if there were viruses within the network being propagated by SMS, we would work out which users had been infected and push a disinfect tool out to their handset.

DM: And how does the content filtering work?

The Numbers Game

They’ve been around since the days when mobile was being hyped first time around, and they’re still around today. David Murphy gets a history lesson from Anil Malhotra, VP, Marketing & Alliances at Bango

It’s 2001, and UK start-up Bango has come up with a cunning plan called Bango Numbers that will make it easy for consumers to access mobile Internet sites using numbers instead of letters. The idea is simple. If you are, for example, Nokia, you register the Bango Number ‘66542’ which of course spells ‘Nokia’ and then all consumers have to do to find your WAP site is key that number on their handset from a compatible portal. Nokia’s happy, the consumer is happy, and Bango has made some money from selling Nokia the Bango Number so it’s happy too.
Fast Forward six years and you don’t hear much about Bango Numbers any more, but Bango is still very much on the scene, and as a glance at its website confirms, it is still very much concerned with making it easy for consumers to access mobile Internet sites through things like Bango Txt Trigger and Bango Web Trigger. So what has the company been up to in the six years since the world first heard, and got excited, about Bango numbers? Over to you Anil…

AM: The first idea we had, in 2000, was that the mobile Internet is going to be extremely pervasive; that more people on the planet will be able to access entertainment and information on the mobile, than on any other device, and that we have to make it easier to use.
So we started by asking ourselves how we could provide a platform that would enable a content provider to tell someone how to get to their mobile Internet site on any network on any device: a generic, global way to access services from mobile phones.
To turn this into a business, we needed to be able to extract value from that idea. We knew that end users would pay for content, but that they would not pay for the right to access that content. The parties that would pay, we thought, would be the ones who benefit from end users being able to access content, namely, the content providers, so our business model was: ‘Let’s extract money from content owners for driving people to their content.’
So then we had to decide how we would do it so we looked at: what is the unique, global universal way that anyone with a mobile can access something on the mobile Internet and we decided that the one thing the 1 billion then, and 2-3 billion now, mobile phone owners in the world could all do, whatever language they speak, was type a number into the phone.
We also had enough foresight at that time to say that even if people would not type a number into the phone, the numeric address would be the way of getting to the thing, so even in 2000, we thought maybe there will be a way of scanning the number through a barcode or whatever, so we saw numbers as a good platform, both in terms of people using numbers to access sites, and also in terms of building better technologies on top of a number-based system.
The one thing I would concede is that back then, we said that people would no type a URL into a mobile phone. In actual fact, people do.

DM: So what happened to Bango Numbers?

3GSM Interview: Mobile Cohesion

David Murphy catches up with Mobile Cohesion Founder and Chairman Denis Murphy

DM: Denis, first I should point out that we’re not, to the best of my knowledge, related, though we do share the same surname and initials which has rather screwed up the template for interviews, but I can live with that if you can. How has 3GSM been for you?

Denis: Fantastic. Absolutely manic. It’s like 1999 all over again.

DM: That’s good to hear. What have you been showing?

Denis: The big news for us is our new, hosted HYDRA/LIVE solution?

DM: Which is what, exactly?

Denis: We were set up in 2002 out of Openwave and the problem we set out to solve was around connecting people with the content to the network in order to help the operator monetise the relationships.
A lot of telcos thought they could be media companies and I think even Vodafone with Vodafone Live! Realises now that it’s not going to happen, and if Vodafone can’t do it, then it’s going to be really difficult for anyone to do it. What the networks need to do is to offer the most sophisticated communications capability out to third parties so that it is incorporated in the applications, and that keeps them relevant in the value chain.
It’s quite a simple idea, but unfortunately, we had two years of ‘nuclear winter’ where it was difficult to get any dialogue with the carriers round new products, but now the market definitely sees the need for this product. We are moving forward with the licensed product and what we are announcing here in Barcelona is that we are making this available as a hosted service, because there are a lot of smaller service providers that want this capability but don’t want to have to manage it themselves.

DM: So how long has the licensed version been available?

Denis: Since 2003. We’re on version 3.2 now, so it’s very mature, and we have six big customers, including Hutchison Indonesia and Iceland Telecom.

DM: So can you give us an example of how the hosted service will work.

Denis: Sure. We have a customer in Indonesia who we host the platform for in Belfast. They used to have no way of reconciling  what they were selling to subscribers and what they were paying back to content partners to provide the services, so they use our system to reconcile their payments to the content providers. It’s hosted in Belfast and they log in  over the web and it works very nicely for them.

DM: So why should an operator outsource this sort of thing to you, rather than doing it for themselves?

Denis: I think for smaller operators and MVNOs it’s very appealing. We are specialists in the area, and from our work with other carriers, we understand best practice business processes. There is a trend in a lot of telcos to outsource a lot of operations, and we are tapping into this.

DM: And is this on-portal, off-portal or both?

Denis: It’s all off-portal. There are companies that do something similar for on-portal services and applications, but all our work is off-portal, managing the third party communities, signing them up, putting in place the necessary agreements and managing the off-portal services those partners introduce.

3GSM Interview: Picsel Technologies

Picsel Technologies has had a busy 3GSM, announcing a deal to bring Marie Claire magazine to the mobile, as well as a $46 million funding deal, and another to bring PriceRunner to the mobile. As if all that was not enough, the company is also producing a mobile version of show Organiser Informa’s Telecoms.com magazine. David Murphy caught up with Head of Marketing Zubair Salim to find out more.

DM: Zubair, can you give us the 2-minute guide to Picsel for those who don’t know the company?

ZS: We started off back in 1999 with high performance graphics software for mobiles. It was clever stuff. We had comic pages that you could zoom and pan, and then within one of the frames you could actually go in and play a game. It was very new, unprecedented really, so people were very interested in what they could do with it, but it wasn’t easy to deploy on the handset because no-one could figure out a business model.
So we went away and put together a series of technologies we thought would be easier for the bigger players to consume, so we put together a File Viewer to support, Excel, Word, PDF, all the main applications, and deliver all of that through one application that did the job very well. This enabled people to look as documents on a mobile just as you would on a PC, using the zoom and pan interface.
This is now pre-loaded onto many devices from all the major manufacturers and those that have not yet deployed it are about to. We are on around 70 million devices overall. We have also done a mobile web browser that does all the things the File Viewer does, and also enables you to browse the web.

DM: So what are you up to currently?

ZS: Well now we find ourselves going back to the converged services angle. We have done a deal with Marie Claire to bring the magazine to the mobile. This is significant, because if you look at Marie Claire, it has very high production values and a very strong brand presence. Moving onto mobile was a big problem for them because they did not want the richness of the Marie Claire experience to be destroyed when it went across to mobile. But the solution we have developed on the handset looks fantastic, and for Marie Claire, it gives them an opportunity to go after new readers who might not have bought the magazine, but who will interact with it via mobile.
We also have the deal with Informa where delegates here at 3GSM can download the  Telecoms.com magazine on to the handset. Informa, in fact, has become the first member of the Picsel Media Consortium. This is a partnership programme where we invite key thought leaders to make sure they see our technology and help us to enhance their brand going forward.

DM: So how do people get the Picsel technology that enables them to see these publications on their phone if it’s not already pre-loaded?

ZS: They can go to www.picselpowered.com and download it, or wait for the Marie Claire launch, text the shortcode that Marie Claire we will be promoting, and download the link with the application as part of it.

DM: And is there a definitive list of handsets that it’s pre-loaded on?

ZS: There isn’t in fact, but we are on over 300 models worldwide with all leading manufacturers. For example Samsung has deployed us across the board – so you can see us on the Samsung D600, D900, X820, Blackjack, Ultra series handsets. We’re also on the Motorola Q, the A-series, the Nokia 9300i and the Palm Treo700W and 700P.

DM: And yesterday you announced the PriceRunner deal.

ZS: Yes. We’re looking to put together the first mobile price comparison service. The service will run as a piloted in the UK in Q2 2007, and then roll out across multiple regions over the next 12 months.

DM: And on top of all that, the small matter of $46.5 million worth of funding?

ZS: Yes. In fact, we became profitable at the end of last year, so there were no real funding requirements, but we are trying to take the company towards an IPO round about the end of this year or beginning of the next, and these new shareholders are heavy investors who want a good return for their money, and they see us as a big opportunity for them to capitalise on the mobile content space.

Bringing Magazines to the Mobile. Read. 

3GSM Interview: Ikivo

David Murphy quizzes Ikivo Director of Sales and Marketing Samuel Sweet, about Scalable Vector Graphics, on-device portals and the battle with Flash

DM: Ikivo has a lot of technology to talk about with Mobile SVG Tiny, the Ikivo SVG player, your Rich Media Client and the Enrich family. Can you tell us how it all fits together?

SS: Sure. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the underlying open standards technology, the open standard equivalent of Flash. It’s a standard developed by the mobile industry to provide a presentation framework for the delivery of interactive rich media applications, and moving on from that, for the delivery of Web 2.0 content.
It was standardised in 2001, and became mandatory as part of MMS Release 5, so anyone integrating MMS services would have to choose SVG as a mandatory component. So SVG is a W3 Internet standard and SVG Tiny is the mobile-specific profile for mass-market feature phones.
We have built our strategy and products around SVG, along with others, and we have been busy providing two types of products. One is in the client software domain, where we have a rich media player embedded into the phones. We work with most of the tier 1 and 2 manufacturers and OEMs, and we have shipped so far on around 150 million handsets worldwide, out of a total of around 225 million SVG-enabled phones
Initially, the player was designed for graphic, animation-type content, but now it’s doing video, text, audio and graphics using open standards, rather than proprietary standards like Flash.
But it’s not all embedded. We also provide an application development environment where developers can script and create applications quickly and distribute Rich Media Clients over the air for the consumption of rich media.
We are now starting to concentrate on the operators too. Last week, we launched an on-device portal and Mobile TV solution for Vodafone in Germany (pictured, right). We  are also launching a Mobile TV solution with another operator in Europe, and we have three others coming on stream with Mobile TV or rich media services in the next 3 – 4 months. Enrich is a product family around tools and the Rich Media Client to give the market an integrated solution. For the Vodafone Germany Bundesliga application, they used Enrich tools to create the content, the user interface and user experience, and then they use the Ikivo Rich Media Client to build the application on top of that and launch to users. So with the Enrich family, we are trying to show how we are bringing a much richer experience to mobile, providing the environment and the tools.
But we don’t do this on our own. We provide application-enabling software and tools and then work with other companies, with partners and large network equipment providers to deliver an end-to-end solution.

DM: So what are your primary areas of interest?

SS: The first is Mobile TV, and it really doesn’t matter whether that’s 3G, Unicast, DVB-H or whatever as we are just providing the presentation environment. The second area is the on-device portal, like the Bundesliga client, where we have smart caching and content downloaded to the phone in a smart way so that there is fresh content for the customer every time they switch the phone on. And then thirdly music, podcasting, social networking and all those types of applications.

DM: So  how do you see the battle between SVG and Flash playing out?

SS: We think that SVG will continue to roll out. It’s going from strength to strength with most OEMs embedding it now. And you just have to look who’s supporting it. You have Joost, backed by the Skype founders, this start-up doing desktop IPTV, and the user interface for this has been built using SVG. You also have companies like Sling Media and of course Nokia is a big supporter of SVG. So as a technology, it’s been pretty much unknown but now it’s seeing a lot of deployment.
Against that, you look at Flash Lite, it’s expensive. It’s a desktop technology that they have tried to adapt and cut down for mobile, but it’s still heavy and proprietary, and a lot of manufacturers and operators want an alternative, and beauty of an SVG-based environment, like Flash, is that it scales. You don’t have the issue of making an application for each phone. You just create it once and then you can deploy to different phones, regardless of screen sizes, resolutions and everything else.

AdMob Happy

Thanks to his excellent blog, MobHappy, Russell Buckley’s passion for mobile is well known to many. But earlier this year, he strengthened his ties to the mobile industry when he took up the post of Managing Director of Europe with mobile ad-serving company AdMob.  David Murphy caught up with him to find out more about the man, and the company

DM: So tell us about AdMob

RB: It’s a pretty simple business really. We find people with mobile Internet sites (publishers) and invite them to let us run ads on them, and we share the revenue with them 60:40 in their favour. Because we have a self-serve model, publishers can come and get the code and strip it on to their site and get up and running in matter of minutes. So we can turn any site that has some traffic into money. Even if you only have a couple of pages a day, you’re not precluded from doing it. Once we have some inventory, i.e., sites with pages, we can sell those to our advertisers.
Advertisers bid for the ad space. They tell us how much they will pay for a click and then they win the bid or not. To help people bid, we give them a minimum, medium and maximum price guideline, and we compress the ids, so if you say you will pay 30 cents and the next highest bid is 15 cents you only pay 16 cents to win the bid. And we have algorithms in place to make sure that your ad is served even if you are always being outbid. For example, if someone has seen an ad three times and not responded to it, we don’t serve it again, so in that instance, the next highest bidder’s ad would be served.

DM: And how is the business going?