chase franklin

Fresh from his company's latest acquisition — this one of Austrian content delivery software provider ucp morgen — Qpass CEO Chase Franklin talked with Wireless Review about the wireless content explosion.

On projections that mobile transactions will double every quarter: If anything, that pace is quickening. In October, for the first time, we saw $20 million in transaction volume through the various deployments of our customers. At the end of December that number grew to $32 million, and in January it looks like it will be more than $40 million. Our customers are on about a half-billion dollar run rate now if you project January [numbers] out for 12 months. We expect them to be on a $1 billion run rate at the end of 2005. And that's only in North America, which is the best-kept secret in data services. The Europeans like to think they are the biggest on the block, but there is a surprising amount of activity here — and we only see about half the market.

On what is driving the explosion: We are seeing very interesting things happening in the product mix. While the number of products and the value of those products keep increasing, the percentage of ringtones has declined to about 65% of all products. Java applications, on the other hand, have increased from almost being immeasurable at the beginning of 2004 to almost 25% of the product mix. That ties directly to the proliferation of Java-enabled handsets in the marketplace. And messaging — there has absolutely been an unexpected explosion in the level of premium SMS messaging.

On the ucp morgen acquisition: We sell software to wireless operators today — and all network operators in the future — to allow them to extend their back offices and adapt them to engage new service development. And that means new data services. Ucp morgen has a sophisticated software product that addresses the front office, if you will. It manages all the activities related to the shopping, merchandising and fulfillment part of the business. And we are very appreciative of the customer relationships they have in Europe.