In the modern age of mobile TV and wireless porn, a simple caller-ID application may not get your pulse racing. Unless you’re Rick Hennessey.
The chief executive officer of Seattle-based startup Cequint Inc., Hennessey thinks he has a winner in City ID. In addition to the phone number, the program displays city and state information based on the area code and prefix of incoming callers.
City ID initially was available only on certain smart phones from a handful of direct-to-consumer sites for a $15 download fee. Hennessey said the conversion rates-the percentage of consumers who bought the application after a free trial-jumped from 25 percent to 48 percent when Cequint lowered the price to $12.
“When I heard that, it was extremely compelling,” said Hennessey, who last year stepped down as the head of Dwango Wireless, a content provider that recently closed its doors. “In our wireless business before, if I had a 5 percent (conversion rate), that would be a huge success.”
Cequint is slated to announce its first carrier deal later this summer, and the operator plans to market City ID at $2 to $3 per month. The company has snared $1.5 million in venture capital, a sum Hennessey said “will be all the money we need to be profitable.”
But Cequint faces some substantial hurdles. Mobile phones already have caller ID, of course, although phones typically display only the incoming number unless the calling party is listed in the receiving phone’s contacts. (Some Sprint Nextel Corp. handsets identify the state of an incoming call, however.) And location-specific prefixes-which can identify a number based on which specific geographic location it was assigned to-are becoming a thing of the past as local number portability becomes more common among fixed-line users.
The software itself may present a problem for Hennessey as well. The application must be pre-enabled on mass-market phones, requiring manufacturers to include an Application Programming Interface as part of their handset specifications.
Regardless, though, Hennessey said City ID’s elementary appeal stands out amid all the eye-catching-and complicated-offerings coming to the wireless market.
“We really believe that City ID is a service that helps the carrier regain that lost revenue they once had,” he said. “The percentage rates of people who’ve tried it and (subsequently) purchased it are very large. … The more I’m around it, the more excited I get.”
