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Buying over the internet is familiar enough, but Dominic White meets an entrepreneur who enables customers to purchase big items via nothing grander than a second generation mobile phone

Reporo
www.reporo.com

Mobile phones have many uses. You can phone a friend, take snaps, send texts, download ringtones, buy screen savers - the list goes on. But buying a £1,800 cooker over the mobile internet is not perhaps a use that springs immediately to mind.

However, that is precisely what one of Richard Watney’s customers did recently. Shopping in a kitchen appliance store, the customer opened up Watney’s mobile portal Reporo on their handset.
  

Richard Watney of Reporo

The customer compared the shop price with that offered on the mobile phone version of the Curry’s Digital website, hosted by Reporo. Curry’s was cheaper. Within minutes, the customer had bought a brand new cooker for next day delivery, using Reporo’s secure ‘’mobile wallet” electronic payment platform. Watney reckons one customer has even bought a £2,000 laptop.

Reporo is a free piece of software, which can be downloaded from www.reporo.com or popular mobile software download sites such as www.getjar.com, which hosts 16,500 different applications. Once users have Reporo on their phones, they can send free texts and picture messages and use Microsoft’s Instant Messenger over the mobile internet.

As with the free internet calls service Skype, it works by connecting users with other people who have Reporo. As well as texting and chatting, Watney wants to make Reporo “a one-stop-shop for the mobile life” of young “techy types” everywhere, whether they are checking their auctions on eBay, getting the latest sports results from the BBC, reading the NME on their mobile, or ordering a pizza from Domino’s with a few clicks.

It is a small but fast-moving company in a world of giants. Reporo has been going in its current form for less than three years but has already attracted 350,000 users in 40 countries around the globe.

Reporo generates revenues by serving advertisements across the service and is forecasting revenues of £1.5m (like, $3 mln.) this year and topping £10m (almost $20 mln.) next year as it reaches critical mass. The company says it will break even towards the end of this year.

Mobile portals such as Vodafone Live! and Orange World may be much bigger in their respective territories but Reporo is bidding to circumvent the networks.

A Reporo user’s mobile network provider will charge them for internet connections but Watney says these charges are a fraction of the normal costs you could pay for messaging, texting and using the portal’s other services.

Watney, 42, has persuaded Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s biggest mobile phone retailer, to buy a white-label, ie unbranded, version of Reporo, which it rebrands as “My Mobile Life”.

It’s audacious stuff for a company with just 14 employees that started life with £200,000 of funding from the Trade and Industry Department. But then the Bristol Polytechnic computer sciences graduate has spent a career starting up businesses that use disruptive technologies to take on the giants of the industry.

He says: “I’ve been doing since this sort of stuff since I was 24.” So what is his top tip for entrepreneurs that are seeking to become giant-killers in the technology arena?

“The first thing about starting these sorts of businesses is to have ‘the big idea’,” he says. Watney had it. He expands. “It’s a case of either spotting a gap in the market, or using a new piece of technology to beat the incumbents or the big players at their own game.

“With Reporo, the disruptive technology was this alternative way to communicate via the internet on mobile phones.”

The big networks’ mobile portals tend to use the technology standard known as WAP, which allows content owners to squeeze a version of their fixed line website on a handset’s tiny screen and make the site navigable with a mobile keypad. Critics say WAP constrains the ways in which data can be accessed and manipulated.

Reporo believes it has found a way around that by using the common standards of the fixed line internet which it says makes its browsing experience more akin to using a computer at home.

The second disruptive piece of technology Watney has harnessed is Java. It is a language that allows a programmer to write a software application or website once, and make it interoperable on lots of different devices.

“Java also allows you to control the phone’s camera, make better use of the keyboard and makes the user experience more like using a computer,” he explains. ‘’In 2004, we realised that with the combination of the web suddenly being accessible by a mobile, and with the emergence of Java on mobiles, there must be an opportunity to build a big company using those two disruptive pieces of technology.”
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The opportunity he spied was to tap into young people’s latent demand for viewing and buying goods and services while on the move. If it worked for ringtones and wallpapers, why couldn’t it work for larger more expensive items, he thought. Watney built Reporo’s business entirely around on-screen advertising revenues.

He figured that, if he could supply companies with an audience of instant messagers and surfers, advertisers would surely pay to have their brand appear as a small icon at the bottom of the screen. Reporo’s technology also offers retailers the instant gratification of a sale. If a user clicks on the advertisement, they are guided straight through to the retailer’s mobile website, hosted by Reporo, which allows them to buy there and then using Reporo’s mobile wallet technology.

Users can easily create wallets either directly on the phone or via the Reporo website by entering their credit card details into a secure area. The details are then stored on Reporo’s servers.

From then on, all users need to do is choose which credit card they want to pay with and enter a four digit code to confirm the purchase. Reporo says it is the only mobile software company that has achieved security accreditation from Visa and Mastercard.

At the beginning of 2005, CD WOW!, 0800 flowers and Blackwell’s the book shop signed up, and since then the list of clients has kept growing.

Client testimonies on the Reporo website look encouraging. “We expect the Reporo service to be really successful amongst our primary target of students, as they are major spenders on mobile calls and services already and are more likely to embrace the speed and convenience of shopping on their phones,” says Richard Turner, business development director of Blackwell’s.

David Price, director of Flowers Direct, writes: “We have been interested in a mobile sales channel for some time, but we found that the initial WAP services were unreliable and slow.

“We have been extremely impressed with Reporo as it is fast, easy and consumer-friendly. The mobile wallet in Reporo has unlocked the mobile channel and we expect 20 per cent of our sales to be via mobile phone in the next five years.”

Hilary Andrews, director of Mankind, the male grooming products company, says: ‘’The majority of our customers are timepressed, affluent men who want to buy grooming products quickly and discreetly. “Providing these customers with the ability to shop with Mankind using their mobile phones means they can now buy any of our products whenever they need to with the minimum of fuss, whether they are travelling, at home, or out with friends or at work.”

Whereas such companies as Vodafone and T-Mobile have been struggling to persuade consumers to buy third generation phones and help payback the billions they splurged on licences, Reporo works perfectly well on the defiantly more popular second generation phones.

“The other issue with handsets is there are lots of different operating systems,” explains Watney. “So we build and test hundreds of handsets and make sure all of our software works on them. We have 50 different types of software, and so when you download Reporo to your handset, we send a version specific to that handset.

“It is a competitive barrier to entry because the software itself is quite sophisticated.”

A barrier to entry perhaps, but he admits that Reporo’s walled garden approach - akin to that of America Online in the 1990s - may not be sustainable in the long term as mobile surfers demand the freedom the fixed line web offers. A recent Reporo development, however, includes a browser that will allow users to access many other mobile sites such as Google. The current offering is ‘’right for the market at the moment,” he says. But the longer term challenge, as for any business competing with rivals moving at internet speed, is to make it right for the market of the future.

Filed under: Success stories - online biz