room33 with My WAP Page

At the CeBIT 2001 I met Peo Olsson (at that time Communications Director) from room33 AB – originally known as Palm Reach – and had a short chat about WAP. room33 was founded in May 1998 by Zaheed Haque, who said “The mobile phone will become a credit card with an antenna” (Source: room33’s view of the mobile Internet 2001-2005). The investors behind room33 were Nutek and EuroSeek and they had more than 75 people with offices in Stockholm, London, Paris, Madrid and New York. room33 AB was also a member of the WAP Forum, the Mobile Applications Initiative (formerly the GPRS Application Alliance), Bluetooth SIG and W3C.

In 2001 room33 launched a product called Cafe33 – an application supporting mobile communities. Cafe33 incorporated a range of chat functions, accessible from any device supporting WAP or Web clipping (Palm) technologies, in addition to the Web and SMS (text) messaging. On of the interesting elements was the “My WAP Page”; “the ultimate personalised service allows users to create their own WAP page hosted by the application owner and helps build a user community focusing on mobile devices. Page cration does not require programming skills. The service is primarily targeted towards the youth and early adopter segment, …”. Sounds quite similar to our service WAPmatic which we launched it in January 2000 :o)

Another interesting thing is the fact that already in the beginnings room33 aimed for partner alliances with advertising networks – somehow a pioneer: “As a complement to the Internet and traditional media, room33 is creating new vehicles for advertising on wireless devices connected to the Internet. In close collaboration with advertising networks, we intend to utilize the new technology to the full.”

I can’t figure out the date of the end of room33, but I still like their vision; “Our vision is to become the key to the mobile Internet.”

ThePhonePages with my.no

I stumbled on The PhonePages of Sweden AB in the Swedish Pavilion at the CeBIT 2002. This company was founded in January 2000 and claimed to be a pioneer in the field of event driven services for the Mobile Internet and to have more than 500 patent claims in USA, Europe and Asia protecting their technology. They also won the European IST Prize in 2003 and had a similar service to our mobile sites service called my.no. The PhonePages of Sweden AB developed a completely new technique for mobile Internet by automatically linking telephone numbers to so-called ‘phonepages’. A phonepage was a web page that could be viewed in small displays of e.g. mobile phones or PDA’s. That allowed calls to be augmented with images – ‘phonepages’ – that are user-definable allowing complete, personal autonomy over design and content. But today the domains thephonepages.com and my.no seem to be inactive.

Firstly The Phone Pages of Sweden AB was funded by Ledstiernan AB wit 24,3 Mio. SEK for 35,6% (today around Mio. EUR) and later on by Siemens Mobile Acceleration GmbH (shut down in January 2006) with 10.8 Mio. SEK for 10.7.% (today around 2.578 Mio. EUR). There is still one of their business presentations on the net, but I can’t really find out what happened to this Swedish company and the main people behind like Carina Dreifeldt (at that time CEO) and Henrik Olesen (at that time Director of Sales). However Jan Hörnström (at that time Director of Marketing) is working for another company today.

I like their old slogans, because they were somehow ahead of the times: “from Homepage to Phonepage” and “The true merger between the Internet and Telecom” :o)

WAPJAG – The Jag for WAP!

One of our very active companions in the early stages of the mobile market was the IMOCOS International Mobile Content Service AG in Osnabrück, Germany. At first the company was founded in December 1999 as WAPJAG.COM AG. I can’t find the source anymore, but I think the company was owned by the management (50%), some private investors (40%) and the VC company eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners AG (10%). IMOCOS provided a mobile site building and mobile search engine under the brand wapjag, but for some time now the domains like wapjag.com or mobilejag.com are not connected to the service anymore. Back in 2001 they claimed to have over 40 search engines in 18 languages and with over a million categories in their system, by then to have collected more than 95% of WAP sites worldwide.

But even if they made a great job stimulating the mobile market with first mobile data services, they get teased by the press, e.g. ManagerMagazin, 1/2001, pp. 88-93, Christian Rickens, “Gründer ohne Netz: Rund um das mobile Internet ist eine bunte Gründerszene entstanden. Alle hoffen auf das große Geld – doch nur wenige werden durchkommen”. The article starts like this: “Christian Ihmels is not online. His is clicking energetically on his Nokia phone, but he just can’t get connection to the mobile internet. Things like that are annoying. It’s particularly painful at the booth while you are trying to show your products to the visitors”. More mischief at boocompany “Schrei aus der Gruft: IMOCOS – Mobile Content Leiche gefleddert!“. Where are the credits for their forward-looking work?

I never met Christian Ihmels (CEO), but we had the opportunity to get to know Andreas Stecher (at that time Business Development Manager) and Ulrich Becker (at that time Head of Portal) at CeBIT in 2001. And my teammate Thomas had contact to Stephan Kasten (at that time Business Development Manager). Best wishes for your next projects and I hope to see you dudes again someday :o)