NEW YORK-Room33 AB has opened its doors here to tap into the city’s content creation hub and give the Stockholm-based company easier access to potential American customers for its mobile software and WAP-centric portal.
“New York’s Silicon Alley makes the perfect beachhead for our entry into the U.S. market,” said Zaheed Haque, chief executive officer of room33.
“Being close to the Internet’s ground zero will allow us to better serve the U.S. market and to more profitably exploit our partnerships with such U.S.-based partners as Ericsson Cyberlab and fusionOne.”
Tim Meyer, managing director of the New York office, was on the staff of Cyberlab for the last two of his eight years with Ericsson. In the early 1990s, the dawn of wireless data, he was product manager for Viking Express. Ericsson developed this wireless e-mail system for use with one of the earliest personal digital assistants, Hewlett-Packard’s HP 95LX.
The room33.com portal, available in a dozen languages, is quite popular in Europe and is gaining enthusiastic customer reception here, even though the company is not actively marketing it in this country, Meyer said.
Room33’s main focus in the United States is selling the framework built to sit atop an application server. The company is furnishing that framework, which Meyer likened to the software version of an empty room, with a suite of services.
The first set of services includes electronic mail, contact lists and personal calendars. The second category comprises content, like weather and jokes.
The first offering in the third group is FusionOne’s Internet-based synchronization for multiple devices, including personal computers, handheld organizers and mobile phones.
“Unlike traditional sync solutions that require physical contact between devices, fusionOne utilizes its unique store-and-forward architecture and the power of the Internet to ensure that devices stay consistent,” fusionOne said of its offering.
Room 33 aggregates these applications and content, using eXtensible Markup Language as often as possible in order to simplify the information exchange, Meyer said.
“WML (Wireless Markup Language) could be considered an XML, but it is not there yet because it requires more standardization,” Meyer said.
“WAP as XML will evolve into XHTML, and we already are looking at how to evolve to that. Our value proposition is that we are future proof.”
Room33 has identified corporate enterprises with mobile workers and value-added service providers, like banks and credit card issuers, as its primary potential market in the United States. In early November, room33 announced a partnership with VeriSign Inc. to provide secure transaction applications for wireless consumers.
Room33 is offering its framework for sale through license fees or for rent in the mode of an a la cart application service provider.
In Norway Room33 has signed a co-branding agreement with Telenor Mobile, which also is working with it on research and development for location-based services.
Globe Telecom of The Philippines has a co-branding agreement with Room 33, which is in negotiations for a similar arrangement with Telia AB of Sweden. Room 33 also has a global hosting agreement in place with IBM Corp.
