Azuki Systems unveils mobile media services platform

After almost a year and a half operating in stealth mode under the name Peermeta, Azuki Systems emerged today with a new name, new platform and new plans for enabling interactive mobile media services on mobile handsets. The startup’s MashMedia platform will provide operators and content publishers the toolkit to offer personalized and interactive rich-media services to their customers.

The platform is designed to allow content publishers and mobile operators to quickly build new mobile content-driven services that rely on interactivity and targeting in contextual media, social networking environments and service monetization. Initially, Azuki’s will target content publishers interested in capitalizing on the burgeoning mobile market, including WheelsTV – MashMedia’s first Beta customer, also announced today.

WheelsTV provides original programming and user-generated content for the automotive industry and is using MashMedia to reach mobile consumers through interactive advertisements and content. Through the Azuki platform, WheelsTV takes information garnered from a user-submitted profile to target ads to the particular subscriber using video, audio, photos and RSS feeds mixed into the user interface. Customers can view the content and comment on it to friends in their contact book or other social networks, including Facebook. Longer content can also be divided into smaller chunks to appeal to users who tend to only “snack” on content in short bursts.

“We are the first to introduce a new critical layer, which is why we believe it is not just taking the video you have on the desktop and making it available or transcoding it down,” said co-founder John Tremblay. “It is a different user paradigm. It is more snackable. It avoids clutter as well. It is very, very important to repurpose for mobile specifically, and the usability we’ve introduced around the reference apps is very important to leverage the Media Mashup engine to decompose media to its lowest form then wind that around user interests and the ways they want to interact with it.”

Tremblay’s co-founder was serial entrepreneur Cheng Wu, who has previously established three companies, ArrowPoint, Arris Networks and Acopia – all of which were acquired for millions, or billions in the case of ArrowPoint – by Cisco Systems, Cascade Communications and F5 Networks, respectively. Azuki president and CEO Jim Ricotta is also no stranger to startups, having led SightPath and DataPower to acquisition by Cisco and IBM, respectively. He said this diversity in backgrounds has equipped the company for success in a market where most competitors offer only point solutions.

While the market is still new today, competitors, as well as potential partners, may be quick to spring up for Azuki. According to Juniper Research, the market for mobile media services is expected to grow from $20 billion last year to $64 billion in 2012. It may not be a smooth road to success, however. The billion-dollar potential market is still being tested by many roadblocks, according to Yankee Group’s Brian Kotylar.

“There are still so many barriers to success in terms of simple things like bandwidth and user interface and getting developer communities behind products,” Kotylar said. “It is a lot like the Internet was in ’93 and ‘94. No one doubts the potential, although they may not understand where the ceiling is, but no one has figured out exactly what to do with it yet.”

That being said, Kotylar believes Azuki’s mobile platform could be a clever way to help content providers create revenue essentially out of thin air by taking sunk costs from products they already have and turning them into potential profit centers. And if the mobile media services market does turn out to mimic the Internet’s rise to success, then Ricotta is confident Azuki is poised to be the Netscape Navigator of mobile.

“We think we are just about at an inflection point here, with 3 billion mobile handsets out there in the world, fully half of them – 1.6 billion – have a browser on the phone,” Ricotta said. “It reminds me of Netscape Navigator, when it hit that tipping point back in 1995, when the way to get on the Internet and deliver a service became delivered to the browser rather than using a proprietary application like Protege or CompuServe or AOL. The mobile landscape is very much like the pre-Netscape environment of the Internet. Everything is delivered with a downloaded J2ME or BREW app, but we think the browser is about to break things open just like it did on the Internet.”

Ricotta did not indicate if the company’s ultimate goal is to go the way of his other startup ventures and get acquired by a bigger name. For now, he said, Azuki is just focused on getting the product out and growing its customer base and revenue stream. “Generally when you do that, things work out,” Ricotta said.

Customer trials will begin this summer, with expanded trials starting in the fall. The platform will be made available as a turnkey offering or as the enabling middleware to complement existing mobile services such as WAP portals, with its Web-based/SOA API.