Tigim:The mobile communications industry is arguably the most dynamic and innovative sector of the technology industry, with new handsets and services emerging all the time.
Mobile operators make money from the voice calls their subscribers make and the data services they use.
However, they make very little money, if any, from advertising to their customer base.
A new Irish software company intends to change all that. Tigim Research Labs (from the Irish word, tuigim, "I understand"), is to be formally incorporated as a company in January 2007.
Tigim's business premise is simple: by analysing the web-browsing behaviour of mobile users, it is possible to extract marketable data that can be sold on to operators/advertisers.
For example, if someone regularly visits pizza websites using their mobile, that information would be potentially useful to Domino's, which could send an advertisement to that mobile user, knowing that they like pizza.
"The mobile operators have all this information on customers but they don't use it, it's just dumped. Our software analyses the data and then passes that information to the advertiser or the mobile network.
"The advertiser then buys the space and presents the user with an ad," says Tigim founder Liam Connolly, who likens the concept to Google's sponsored links, whereby you search for a new car and get presented with car advertisements along with your search results.
A self-taught programmer, Liam Connolly's background is in the software industry. He worked as a product development manager with US software giant PeopleSoft in Silicon Valley in the 1990s before returning to Ireland in 2001 to set up a software firm, Piseog, with his brother, Aidan. Piseog developed a product which Connolly claims was a forerunner to Google's pioneering product indexing engine, Froogle. But he says Piseog was before its time and it did not survive the tech slump.
Undeterred, the brothers founded another, more successful, software firm, Idiro Technologies, which develops customer behaviour analysis tools.
Connolly says the idea for Tigim came out of a conversation he had with a colleague who was doing some work for a mobile operator.
The colleague observed that operators were not capitalising on the huge amount of information they had on the usage patterns of their customers.
This information was a goldmine - if only someone could come up with a tool for mining it.
While the Tigim idea is simple in theory, making it happen requires complex software programmes and algorithms.
This is why Liam Connolly's partner in the enterprise is Chen Yong, a mathematician with a PhD in probability theory from Trinity College Dublin. Connolly and Yong are developing a prototype of their product, which is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2007.
Connolly is meanwhile in discussions with a major mobile operator to trial the product on its network in order to prove the concept.
On the funding side, Connolly has put €50,000 of his own money into the venture to get it off the ground.
He hopes to get matching funding from Enterprise Ireland as well as bring external investors on board in the coming weeks.
He believes the company will need €250,000 in the first 18 months, followed by a bigger injection of funding as the business ramps up.
He projects year three revenues of €1.5 million off 25 customers.
Working from home, Connolly is scouting for office space. Should he win the Synergy Competition, he will get this free for a year at IT Tallaght.
"It would be a huge boost financially, but the proximity to the expertise of the college and the networking potential would also be invaluable," he says.
While Connolly's first business venture Piseog was ahead of its time, Tigim's timing might well be better. An estimated 16 per cent of mobile users are using their phones to browse the web and this percentage is expected to grow significantly over the coming years.
As it does so mobile operators will be looking at ways to unlock the huge advertising potential inherent in this market.
If all goes to plan, Tigim will hold the key.
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