Infy-incubated OnMobile pares US operations

Infosys-incubated OnMobile Systems, a provider of services for mobile subscribers, has scaled down its operations in the US, where it is headquartered and has shifted all its development work to India because of poor telecom conditions in North America and Europe.

Out of the 15 developers who were working in its US office, five have returned to India while the rest have left the organisation.

The company currently has 30 employees, including 20 developers. A year ago, OnMobile had 50 developers.

Infosys Technologies has around 20 per cent stake in OnMobile which was earlier called OnScan.

GSM Capital and H&Q, who are its existing investors, have 50 per cent stake, and the rest belong to the employees in the form of stock options.

"We have moved all our development activities to India and have retained a small sales team in the US," OnMobile Systems chief technology officer J Chandramouli said.

A company official had told Business Standard in December 2001 that the market for its product was huge with around 650 million wireless users worldwide and with the US making voice dialing mandatory in mobile phones.

The company was also planning to set up sales offices worldwide and offer value-adds on the existing platform.

OnMobile received a fresh round of funding worth $3 million from existing investors three months ago.

Apart from this round, OnMobile had received $12 million in its first round of funding in 2000.

The company had earlier said it expected $25 million funding during January-March 2002, but after the operations were gradually scaled down, OnMobile decided to seek less funding and delayed getting another round of funding.

OnMobile provides mobile subscribers various services such as voice-activated dialing e-mails, location recognition, stock quotes, weather news and sports reports. OnMobile's main customers are mobile operators.

Chandramouli said because of the exponential growth of telecom in India, the company had decided to focus on India and expand to other markets.

Hence, OnMobile has strengthened its sales and marketing efforts in the country.

OnMobile has also expanded its product portfolio to include customer service and enterprises.

Chandramouli said the new strategy had already started yielding results with the company closing a major deal with AirTel to roll out services in various telecom circles including Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

He said AirTel is the second customer after Orange in Mumbai. He said the company's speech-based ring tones application has met with huge success.

He said the company was in talks with several other players too. "We are in advanced discussions with some large enterprises and carriers here and abroad, for their customer care requirements," Chandramouli said.

OnMobile has tied up with companies such as the US-based Nuance for speech-recognition technology, Belgium-based L&H for text-to-speech technology, France-based Webraska for geo-coded information technology and the US-based NMS for key hardware which integrates the call.