ENTERPRISE MOBILITY

Meet the Pocket Internet Provider
By Rakesh Raman

In July this year, Nokia recognized Joikusoft’s JoikuSpot as one of the most innovative mobile software products in the world. It was, in fact, a reward for the company’s belief that you can carry a Wi-Fi hotspot in your pocket; it can be mobile with your handset. In just a year of its inception, it’s already a profitable venture. The man behind Finland-based Joikusoft’s success is Tom Ojala, chairman of the Board of Joikusoft, who is supported by his colleagues as founders. Let’s meet Tom to know more about his voyage in the cutthroat mobile world.

Tom is an old player in the global mobile game. He had a 10-year-long stint with Nokia and as director of marketing at Nokia USA, he was responsible for promoting Nokia’s global developer community, Forum Nokia. Also, as the CEO of Symmetria Software, he manages the business of building and operating branded online sales shops like the Nokia Software Market.

The Birth
Joikusoft is a young company, founded in July 2007. It was formed by a team of young entrepreneurs who had closely seen the tech markets while working for some of the leading international telecom companies, handset makers, and IT companies. Lasse Mäki, the CEO of Joikusoft, for example, worked for 7 years with Finland-based Telia Sonera. Timo Saraketo, EVP of Sales spent 15 years with large corporations including Nokia and IBM. Likewise CTO Jouni Salmi managed large IT and software development projects for 10 years.

But what are they selling? The company’s flagship offer is JoikuSpot mobile software, which turns mobile phones to Wi-Fi hotspots, sharing phones’ 3G Internet connection with external Wi-Fi devices such as laptops, iPods, EeePCs, Internet Tablets, and digital cameras. Plus, it’s operating JoikuShop, an online shop for mobile software and Joiku community for free mobile software distribution. Its MapSpot mapping engine is a hotspot location mapping service for operators. The company also offers social media distribution platform for building branded online webstores. A good thing about Joikusoft is that it preferred to stand on its own feet right from day one and didn’t look for any external financial succour.

When the market was abuzz with solutions such as PCSuite, Bluetooth, and USB dongles for establishing mobile Internet connectivity, Tom and his friends thought differently to work on Wi-Fi hotspot for mobile phones. It was their belief that their offer will be much easier for consumers to use than the alternatives in the market. That led to the formation of Joikusoft.

In the Market
Tom informs that Joikusoft was the first company in the world to offer mobile Wi-Fi hotspot software solution for Nokia phones in February 2008. But what encouraged them to play with this idea? “We saw the market opportunity including huge installed base of S60 devices with exponential growth, rapid emergence of all kinds of Wi-Fi gadgets, Wi-Fi as the de facto access method for web access, and the demand-supply gap,” says Tom.

Market was going toward physical USB dongle direction, when Joikusoft decided to offer easier Internet access, which won’t need any physical device. And its solution is just based on software. The company sees more market potential in software-based mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, as the USB dongle business is commoditizing rapidly and it’s harder for operators to differentiate and make money with it.

“Practically, we don’t have any competition at the moment, as our solution is unique,” Tom is confident. “Wi-Fi can provide speed, ease of use, and cost efficiency. And since no additional subscriptions are needed, you can enjoy Internet everywhere because your phone is always with you.”

Earlier, it was difficult for the company to create its solutions around the Symbian environment, but its R&D team did it. And like any young company that wants to conserve costs, Joikusoft too started promoting its product mainly through the “viral” route and by building a Joiku community. Today, the company says, thousands of bloggers are writing about JoikuSpot and many are downloading the software.

What’s Ahead?
The company will introduce new edition of JoikuSpot every 3 months with value-added features and broader device support. It’ll also offer tailor-made Wi-Fi hotspot solutions through operators. The business evolution will also include Wi-Fi hotspots via whitelabel operator offerings by bundling Wi-Fi hotspots into operators high-speed fixed 3G mobile data plan packages. “Our aim is to become the largest vendor of Wi-Fi hotspots through our own sales, and through whitelabel distribution of operators and handset manufacturers,” says Tom.

Though Joikusoft has a highly acceptable solution for the consumers, its market performance is dependent on many external factors. For example, the battery life of mobile devices is a major irritant and the 3G Quality of Service (QoS) and international data roaming rates can also pose some challenges. Today, there are extreme opportunities for the company because of growing base of S60 phones and Wi-Fi gadgets. But still it’s worried that increasing competition will commoditize the business leading to drop in the unit licence price.

Now, Joikusoft is a big and rapidly growing mobile hotspot provider with over 200,000 users that it attracted in just couple of months after the launch of JoikuSpot. Its vision for the future is to provide Internet access everywhere, and it’s chasing its dream to put mobile Internet in people’s pockets irrespective of their location on the planet.