POCKET PORTAL Date:   Monday , August 31, 2009 Pocket Portal is an enterprise mobile VAS company, whose products and services cater to the B2B marketplace. These services can be used on mobile phones to enhance the productivity and efficiency of the corporate workforce. The voice or data based technology offered by Pocket Portal works on SMS, GPRS, and USSD platforms. Products and services: * Email2SMS: This service enables the user to send and receive mails on any handset using any operator, without the need for GPRS. The company calls this SMS based technology as the ‘poor man’s Blackberry’ in which corporate mails can be mapped to the user phone using SMS technology. * CRM on Mobile: By using this service, enterprises can fetch or upload data on their CRM servers using the applications on the handset. * Education on Mobile: This innovative service is ideal for coaching institutes that train students to face competitive exams. Objective type questions for IIT, JEE, PMT, IAS, and Ban PO exams can be practiced on the mobile. A mobile user can also learn English words, phrases, sentences, and pronunciation through the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology. * Voice SMS: Through this service a user can send a text SMS in any language and the recipient receives a voice call conveying the message. HEADQUARTERS: Noida, India PRINCIPALS: Saumendra Mohanty (Sam), CEO; Sam has over 20 years of experience in the fields of telecom and IT. He started his career at Wipro, followed by Hughes VSAT operations in India where he was Director, Marketing, before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey in 2001 by founding Hotwire, India’s first Internet over Ethernet broadband services for retail, which was subsequently acquired by Tata Communications in 2006. In 2003, Sam started Packet Shaper Technologies, a telecom software company. Srivastav and Bhagat have been with Sam from the early days of their career at Hotwire. Sumit Srivastava, CTO; Lalit Bhagat, Financial Controller. HEAD COUNT: 35 (including 25 core developers) CUSTOMERS: Airtel, Aircel, BSNL, Nokia Siemens Networks, National Open School, Vishal Mega Mart, Coca Cola, Samsonite, Peter England, Big Bazaar, and Titan, to name a few. COMPETITORS: One97, ValueFirst, Netcore, NetXcel , ACL Wireless, and Cellnext. FOUNDED: 2007 EARLY INVESTORS: Private investors in the UK and Singapore. WEBSITE: www.pocketportal.net BUSINESS MODEL & KEY DIFFERENTIATOR Pocket Portal uses ‘pay as you use’ model in which the user pays only for the number of transactions made, without any capital expenditures. The key differentiator is that the company adopted the same model (‘pay per click’ or ‘transaction driven’) to sell its enterprise applications on mobile, which enables its customers to do away with the Capex. The company believes that this as an innovation it has brought into the enterprise VAS space and they will have the first mover advantage, even if someone tries to imitate the model. ROAD AHEAD: Pocket Portal plans to launch two new services in the coming months. The first launch will be ‘SMS on GPRS’, in which an SMS can be sent through GPRS mobile phone and the recipient receives the same as a normal text message. The company also plans to launch a mobile payment service through which users can make payments by using the SMS, GPRS, IVR, or USSD platforms.