SYDNEY, Australia – 7 Feb 2005 – Australian Distributed Incubators, a technology incubator funded by the federal government’s BITS program, has recently made an investment in Sydney-based mobile commerce start-up, Start Corporation. ADI is owned by Business Strategies International, a private consulting and advisory house for high-growth early to mid-stage companies backed by Melbourne’s Liberman family.
Start Corporation is a leading provider of mobile commerce technology. Its software products enable large enterprises to offer consumers the ability to transact using SMS. Its breadth of mobility products spans across a number of vertical industries including aviation, banking, call-centres, ticketing, retail and public services. In Australia it serves Jetstar Airways, St George Bank, Suncorp Metway, Sensis, Australia Post, Village Roadshow and more than 60 other industry customers.
In particular, Start’s N-Code™ mobile ticketing technology is a revolutionary breakthrough in mobile commerce technologies. N-Code™ is a patent-pending encoding, scanning and decoding technology that enables any ticketing or card provider to transmit information that is otherwise stored in barcodes and magnetic stripes, wirelessly down to cellular devices. An “N-Code” is a series of alphanumeric characters, and unlike its graphical counterparts in the market, it is device and carrier independent. This means that it will reliably support more than 1.7 billion sms-enabled devices worldwide, including GSM, CDMA, 3G and i-Mode devices, PDAs and Blackberrys.
“We are very pleased to have received funding support that will allow us to rapidly commercialise our recent technological breakthrough with N-Code,” said Michael Mak, CEO and Co-founder of START Corporation. “There are abundant research studies that show a strong market demand for mobile ticketing technologies. To date there just hasn’t been any products in the market that does the job. After 2 years of R&D, we believe N-Code now does.”
“The demand for mobile commerce applications is going to reach a tipping point over the next couple of years. We strongly believe that Start has the technology, breadth of product, and robustness of business model to become a serious player in the world stage,” said Ivan Kaye, Managing Director of BSI. “Mobile phone penetration and SMS adoption is reaching saturation in nearly all world markets except for North America, and even in North America, signs are showing that it will catch up within 12 to 18 months. Now is the perfect time for a business like Start to cement a market position on a global basis.”
Prior to mobile technologies, Start Corporation was once a high-profile player in the Australian online market. According to BRW, Start’s own email and instant messaging portal, www.start.com.au with more than 800,000 registered members, was ranked the most trafficked website in Australia during October 1999. That led to a $5m investment by NASDAQ-listed Looksmart Limited December 1999, and eventually a buyback of the controlling interest by the founders back from Looksmart during March 2002 to refocus on mobile technologies.
Contact:
Michael Mak
CEO
START Corporation
+61 2 9954 4411
mak@startcorp.com
Ivan Kaye
Managing Director
Business Strategies International
+61 2 9212 5505
www.bsi.com.au
ikaye@bsi.com.au