Irish firm in $20m deal with Sprint

IRISH SOFTWARE firm ChangingWorlds has won a major deal with leading US mobile operator Sprint, which industry sources suggest is worth over €20 million.

Vincent Ryan, vice-president of sales and marketing with ChangingWorlds, said the contract was "game-changing" but declined to be drawn on its exact value.

Sprint this week said the Dublin company's technology would form a central part of its new Sprint Web mobile internet service. ChangingWorlds' flagship product ClixSmart will be used to create an adaptive home page on the phone, which will change according to the owner's past usage. For example, if someone regularly accesses sports news from their phone, the sports headlines will be displayed on their home page.

Mr Ryan said the Dublin firm, which in 1999 was spun out of a research project in UCD led by Prof Barry Smyth, had been strategically focusing on the US following major customer wins in Europe and Asia.

"A key part of the puzzle for us is the US, because all of the world's biggest operators are there," said Mr Ryan.

In the early days of the mobile industry, the US lagged Europe and Asia in terms of sophistication and its adoption of new technologies. In recent years, however, it has been catching up fast, with the introduction of Apple's iPhone in particular driving awareness of mobile data and web services. "The iPhone has been the perfect marketing tool for the mobile internet," said Mr Ryan.

Sprint is the third-biggest mobile operator in the US, behind ATT and Verizon, with almost 53 million subscribers. The Sprint web service is now available on over 40 of its most popular phones, including the Motorola Razr 2, Palm Centro, LG Rumor and Samsung Upstage. In a statement released this week, the company said the service would be available "on virtually all" its web-capable phones "over the coming weeks".

As part of the introduction of the new service, Google has become the default search engine on Sprint. The US company said the addition of ChangingWorlds and Google would allow it to create "a next-generation mobile web-browsing experience".

ChangingWorlds was originally founded to apply Prof Smyth's research in the area of personalisation to web applications. Since the early years of this decade it has focused on applying its technology to mobiles.

It leveraged an early contract win with Vodafone's Irish subsidiary to supply its technology to the world's largest network operator in Australia, Egypt, Britain, Italy and Germany and other major markets.