By Ellen McCarthy
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Local executive Neville Street has a firm rule against bringing cell phones to company meetings. He knows how tempting it is to quietly pull out one of the devices and fire off a few friendly text messages while the bosses discuss the business at hand.
During Street's meetings, the business at hand usually involves encouraging people to send more text messages.
Yes, he sees the irony.
Street's company, Mobile 365 Inc. , has emerged as an important player in the rapidly expanding wireless content market. Like many small tech firms, the Chantilly-based business is built around helping much larger companies operate smoothly -- in this case delivering information across wireless phone networks owned by different carriers.
So, for instance, when a college student who is a Verizon Wireless customer sends a text message to the cell phone of a friend who uses Cingular Wireless -- "Happy hour in 20 minutes," perhaps -- Mobile 365 makes sure the information is delivered. The company picks up the message from one network, routes it to the other, tracks the billing information for both carriers and charges a small fee for each transaction. Before Mobile 365, text messaging between carriers had been more limited -- not impossible, but constrained by a patchwork of policies and technologies employed by different carriers.
Mobile 365 isn't the only vehicle for messages that move between the different cell phone services. But it has captured nearly 80 percent of the market.
The small fees -- a fraction of a cent for each message -- add up quickly. Last month the company delivered about 1.5 billion text messages, and for the year ended in March, Mobile 365's revenue totaled $75 million, according to the privately held company's executives.
"The average consumer on the street will never know about us . . . but we enable a lot of cool things," Street says.
Mobile 365 was created last August after Chantilly-based InphoMatch Inc. merged with Mobileway , a French firm that specialized in creating content for mobile devices. InphoMatch was founded in 1999 and raised $26.5 million through four rounds of funding from a group of venture investors that includes Reston-based Draper Atlantic and the Grosvenor Funds of the District.
The firm, with 250 employees in two offices, is now focused not just on delivering text messages, but on helping other companies tap into the wireless medium. Mobile 365 powers a text messaging service for Citibank's customers in Asia, for instance, so that users are notified each time their balance slips below $100.
It also manages text voting for "Pop Idol," the European show that inspired "American Idol." And 20th Century Fox hired the company last year to help it promote the release of "Alien vs. Predator." Consumers could vote on which creature was the fiercest, and download ring tones of the movie's music.
Speculation abounds that an initial public offering is in the works for Mobile 365, but Street will say only that the company will try to tap the capital markets "when the time is right."
Dexter M. Briscoe likes being in charge, watching market fluctuations and playing the price adjustment game so that his products sell for just less than those of his competitors.
The Suitland High School sophomore is blunt about the reason he started an online clothing retailer. "I wanted to make money," Briscoe says, with the casualness of a veteran entrepreneur.
His company, Gore-Dex Sportswear , was one of the 38 businesses founded by at-risk high school students and on display last week at the annual dinner of the Washington chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship . The organization has been around since 1987, but in recent years has largely been adopted as a pet project of the local technology community.
"I think that the tech entrepreneur starts a business in the absolute rawest form. They have an idea, but they don't have revenue or customers," said S. Tien Wong , chief executive of Opus 8 Inc. , a Chevy Chase private investment firm, and chairman of the event. "When you see high school kids starting their businesses -- whether it's cookies or jewelry -- that's entrepreneurship in its rawest form, too. I think they can relate to it."
Among the techies wandering throughout the student booths during cocktail hour were Roger Mody , founder of Signal Corp.; John Kealey , chief executive of iDirect Technologies Inc.; John W. Holaday , founder of EntreMed Inc. and chairman of the Harvest Bank of Maryland; and Raymond Rice , co-founder of KenRay Partners , an executive search firm that caters to the technology industry.
The foundation runs courses to teach disadvantaged students the fundamentals of starting and running a small business. Students write business plans, create companies and eventually compete for regional and national awards.
The tech crowd came out in force May 3 to admire the handmade bracelets and greeting cards being sold by the students, and to support Raul J. Fernandez , founder of Proxicom Inc. and chief executive of ObjectVideo , who was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the foundation. The 680 people who showed up at the Wardman Park Marriott hotel raised $435,000 for the NFTE.
Overheard: "I could tell you about the litany of advice I got back in the '60s when I first went into networking -- that it was a dead end. That there was no 'there' there," said Robert Kahn at a Tuesday night gathering of the Washington chapter of the Internet Society . Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf , who are often called the "fathers of the Internet," reflected on the Web's past and future during the society's meeting at the McLean headquarters of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc . The two were recently named winners of the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award , often considered the Nobel prize of the computing world.
Ellen McCarthy writes about the local tech scene every Thursday. Her e-mail address ismccarthye@washpost.com.