Futiro has its designs on top end of internet phone market

With their 'Bang & Olufsen' feel, the Galway company's slickly designed, black VoIP handsets are intended to target the affluent Skype audience, writes Karlin Lillington

With a slogan like "Do more than talk, make a statement", Galway handset company Futiro has pinpointed the exact market it is going after with its silky black voice over internet protocol (VoIP) handsets.

"I knew we couldn't tackle the market if we went with a standard design, high-volume, low-standard handset," says Anthony McGough, managing director of Futiro (www.futiro.com). "There's a lot of product out there, but no one has gone at it from a design point of view."

The result is three VoIP handsets with what McGough calls a "Bang & Olufsen feel" that are designed to work with Skype VoIP software.

The cordless Luna, Terra and Solo models - the first two are desktop handsets and the third, a laptop handset - definitely don't look like anything else on the market, sleek black half-moon phones that would look good on any executive desktop.

"We basically went after the Skype market who might want to upgrade their phones," he says.

That's what Gough and business partner Bob McDonald, who are out in Las Vegas this week at the huge Consumer Electronics Show (CES), will be hoping that plenty of potential partners and sales leads will be thinking as they visit their stand.

After the first day of the show, Gough was already pleased with the response to the phones. Not only had he spoken to potential several US distributors, but linked up with some eager Scandinavians and a UK lead. One woman in Manhattan with a single store that features high-end products was also interested in carrying the handsets.

Gough says he hopes to come away from CES with 100-150 potential sales leads that might produce a dozen deals.

The phones are an example of how determination and a few good working partnerships can get an idea off the ground and into production. The phones are the result of a collaboration between Futiro and Dublin product design company Design Partners, who do a lot of design work for companies like Logitech and are very familiar with technology product design.

Because the key designer on the project from Design Partners is from Galway, even if based in Dublin, McGough cheerfully refers to the phones as a Galwegian achievement.

The fact that they actually exist, and come in very understated, trendy black packaging, is due to another West coast partnership, with Enniscrone-based Global Products Source (GPSchina.ie), which outsources manufacturing to exact specifications to China.

"We couldn't have done it without GPS," he says. "To go to China ourselves to source partners and so on would have been impossible. GPS already has those partnerships and can do everything from prototypes to manufacturing the final product in Shenzhen."

McGough notes that the Government and Enterprise Ireland talk a lot about how Irish companies should increasingly focus on research and development (R&D) as manufacturing goes elsewhere, and feels that Futiro and its partnerships with Design Partners and GPS is a example of how that can be done, even on a small scale.

"All of our research and development was done in Ireland, and the manufacturing and packing were done in China."

McGough has bootstrapped Futiro into existence. He runs an information technology services company, AMC Partners, in Galway and knows Design Partners in Dublin from managing their IT systems.

That formed the working relationship for him to take an idea he'd had about a high-end, design-driven VoIP handset to Design Partners, and set the idea for Futiro in motion.

He could draw upon the team at his services company for some of the office-oriented tasks and also for preparing manuals and doing his usability testing. The full team at Design Partners was involved with creating the phones, "on a sweat equity basis", he laughs.

McGough has funded the company, which he describes as a "loose partnership", through personal funds and some small investors.

He and McDonald showed the phones at the Toys 4 Big Boys event at the RDS in Dublin before Christmas, mainly in order to get experience with working on a stand, he says, something neither of them had done at a trade show before.

That gave them some valuable experience for staffing their stall at CES, where some 140,000 people will visit the show floor during this week. He said that after the first day, they were already astonished at the size and activity at the show and admitted it left little time or energy for Las Vegas nightlife afterwards, apart from grabbing a quick meal and trying a few dollar slot machines.

So far, the phones are all Windows only, with full Skype integration, but the software for a Mac-compatible phone is ready and they are working with their chipset manufacturer to get the necessary Mac driver.

As for Futiro's future, McGough says that they already have three more products being readied in the phone area and plans for two more.

Three of those are the next generation of their phones. The other two? Maybe we'll find out at next year's CES.