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Gray Cell changes name to Unimobile

Our Bureau

BANGALORE, March 30

ONE of Bangalore's first start-ups, Gray Cell Inc, (it shifted headquarters to San Jose, California last year) has decided to capitalise on the brand name of its flagship product, Unimobile, and change its name to Unimobile.com.

Unimobile, launched in November 1999, is already in use in 110 different countries and has captured a good mindshare. It allows messages to be relayed instantly from the Internet to any wireless device (mobile phones, pagers, palmtops, desktops etc), irr espective of the device manufacturer, the carrier, anywhere in the world. Mr. Rajesh T.S. Reddy, founder and Chairman of the company called it ``completely protocol agnostic''. The software can be freely downloaded from the www.unimobile.com.

``The name has caught on (though it is called oonimobilay in Spain) and we wanted to leverage its popularity,'' said Mr. Vasudev Bhandarkar, the new CEO of Unimobile.com, who is also on the board of directors. The name change would help the company globa lise, and is expected to lead to greater marketshare, he added.

Gray Cell started off as a technology company in 1996 with its wireless-to-Internet technology and tied up with partners such as Motorola and British Telecom. In 1999, it entered the consumer arena with Unimobile, a consumer product for the global market which was launched globally in November 1999.

The company got the first round of venture capital funding

when it was still Gray Cell from Draper International, Walden and Mr. K.B. Chandrashekhar. In the last four years, it has made investments of $3 millions. The second round of funding has also been tied up and before April this year. The company expects t o see $15 millions coming in. According to Mr. Bhandarkar, the company's valuation has gone up from $5 millions to $35 millions in the last seven months.

The company plans partnerships with telecom carriers, device manufacturers, portals, and mobile apps. Besides messaging, the technology offers other possibilities, said Mr. Reddy. For instance, a portal could use the system to let the user know when a ma il has landed on his/her system.

The major revenues would come in from this, while some revenue expected to come in from the ad space on the company's Web site. Unimobile has yet to market the product intensively.

There are over 600 million text-enabled devices in the market today and the number is expected to touch 1 billion by 2001, said Mr. Reddy. Unimobile expects 2 billion text messages to go out per month.