Source: www.telegram.com
Westboro firm links phone books
By Martin Luttrell TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
mluttrell@telegram.com
January 7, 2009 – WESTBORO — Feyzi Celik recalls trying to organize a desk drawer awash in business cards while working at a company in his native Turkey. Years later, with advanced degrees in engineering and business from Massachusetts institutions, his ideas for simplifying the exchange of contact information have evolved into a mobile communications product targeted at more than 3 billion cell phone users.
After getting a master’s degree in engineering from Boston University and a master’s of business administration from Babson College, Mr. Celik founded OnePIN in 2002, developing a way for mobile phone users to exchange phone numbers, text information and e-mail addresses. Now, with $16 million in venture backing, the company has mobile phone companies as customers in South America, Europe, Turkey and the Middle East.
OnePIN’s product, called CallerXchange, allows mobile phone users who subscribe to the service to exchange contact information with others with the push of a single button, enabling their mobile phone books to become social address books without taking the time to manually keystroke the information.
And with cell phones increasingly used to access online social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, Mr. Celik sees opportunities for rapid growth.
CallerXchange is provided through a SIM card, or subscriber identity module, a portable memory chip used in some models of cellular telephones, that is manufactured for OnePIN by the French firm Gemalto.
“You have the complexity of hundreds of networks, and this will work with any of them. … This is standardized for every GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) and hand held devices.”
A first round of venture capital funding of $5.5 million came from FA Technology Ventures and Egan Management Capital. A second round of $10.5 million from Greatcroft of New York and Apex Partners. The company has 29 employees, about half of them in Westboro, Mr. Celik said.
Last year an estimated $29 billion in SIM cards were shipped by Gemalto.
Once you buy it (CallerXchange), you don’t have to change anything,” he said. “It’s definitely a unique way of going to market. It’s a single distribution network. “
OnePIN now has a subscriber base of 25 million, he said. One of the company’s customers is Orange, the French telecommunications giant. The company has contracts with mobile operators in South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, though he declined to name them.
“There is more and more focus on Europe and Russia,” he said. He said that he is optimistic of closing another contract this year for a subscriber base of 100 million.
“This is pretty much sending a business card with one click,” he said. “Six months later, if my information changes, I can send you an update.”
“We try to mimic everything a business card does. We try to build the technology around that.”
He said that the mobile phone has become ubiquitous, even in areas like rural Africa, where there are not many consumer electronics. “They may be lacking in other things, but they still want to be connected,” he said. “What we do is essential for a lot of people. We’re riding that curve right now. It doesn’t matter if it’s Europe or the Congo. People want to communicate.”
Each time a customer uses CallerXchange a charge of 10 to 15 cents is added to their bill, like a directory assistance call, Mr. Celik said. OnePIN gets a portion of that, he added.
Ken Mabbs, a managing partner with Egan Managed Capital, who also serves on OnePIN’s board of directors, said he was impressed with OnePIN’s technology and a strong partnership with Gemalto, which has about 60 percent of the SIM card market worldwide.
“This not only works on their customers’ phones, but they can exchange contact information with a mobile user who doesn’t have the software,” Mr. Sekhar said.
“They have a development team of under 15 people. We did spend a lot of time getting to know them. They’re like a group of No. 1 draft picks. You’ve got these people with super brains, with academic pedigrees behind them.”
Tole J. Hart, an analyst and research director for consumer services at Gartner, said OnePIN has niche applications that become more beneficial to users as they use their phones to communicate in different ways, such as texting, e-mail and social networking.
“It makes sense. I have not heard of any competition,” Mr. Hart said. “It’s very niche. How they grow revenue depends on how popular it is.”
Mr. Celik likened the company’s revenue stream to a “raindrop” business model, with all the millions of connections totaling “a lot of revenue.”
He declined to discuss specifics about the company’s revenues.
“Globally, nobody is doing what we are doing,” he said. “It’s difficult to build a solution that impacts so many.”
“When we sell to one, others will want it for competitive reasons,” he said.