Barry O'Neill has come a long way since the ill-fated attempt to launch Telecom Éireann's Rondomondo, writes Áine Coffey.
'So were you at Woodstock too?" asks Barry O'Neill. This isn't the first, or 100th, time he has batted off jokes about the infamous launch party for Rondomondo, the then Telecom Éireann's digital publishing division.
That was a fine do back in July 1999. The catch was that few of the attending hordes had a notion what it was about; some thought it was the launch of the hotel bar.
O'Neill was chief executive of ill-fated Rondomondo, which fell victim in 2001 to the privatised axe of new Eircom chief financial officer, Peter Lynch. Fast forward and O'Neill has burst from the ashes, this month selling Upstart Games to China's Sun 3C Media for €11.5 million.
O'Neill co-founded Upstart with John Dennehy, founder of Irish dotcom legend Zartis. In a similarly perfect tale of its time, Dennehy and his co-founders sold Zartis to American Breakaway Solutions for €23 million, about a third of it in cash. Breakaway's share price plummeted soon afterwards.
Dennehy travelled the world and O'Neill took most of 2001 off to mind his now five-year-old daughter, he spoke at dotcom survivor conferences, considered consulting, then started working full-time on Upstart in January 2003.
Now his base is a white eyrie in Dublin's Temple Bar, replete with games and gizmos including remote control sumo warriors (good fun). It is not all larking about though. O'Neill stresses the difference between the current buzz about mobile phone content including games and the hype that surrounded internet companies.
Back then, every tiddler thought "the fabled advertising dollar" would keep it afloat but people are spending "real money" now, he says. "The mobile operators have payment gateways and consumers don't get content unless they pay."
Upstart turned over €2 million last year and was bought at similar multiples to other deals in the consolidating mobile gaming world. O'Neill won't make projections because Sun 3C Media is Aim-listed, but insists the potential is enormous. "Analysts' reports range from predicting a $5 billion games market to a $15 billion market by 2010," he says.
Originally, O'Neill and Dennehy's plan was to license games in Japan - which, with South Korea, are the world's most sophisticated gaming markets - and distribute them to western mobile operators. The hitch was that the games didn't suit western phones, so the company developed a platform to reconfigure them.
Upstart raised nearly €500,000 in BES funding, got a couple of hundred thousand from Enterprise Ireland, expanded and began distributing games and developing its own. It has plenty of blue-chip customers: last year, it developed Disney's Nemo's Aquarium for the mobile.
Upstart opened a New York office to test games on US networks and bought its Japanese partner's small mobile applications development business. "Japan requires 3ps - patience, presence and perseverance," O'Neill says, recalling that Upstart's first contract took him eight months and five visits to land.
Despite O'Neill's laid-back air and history of artsy activities, his roots are as a salesman. He joined Horizon from school and sold Mackintoshes before finding a niche "at the border of creativity and technology".
He taught fine art students at the National College of Art and Design to apply technology in their practice. And, before being hired by Telecom Éireann to help build content for Cablelink and Eircell, he ran training at Temple Bar's Arthouse multimedia centre.
"We ran Fás courses and put 120 people into full-time employment," he says. "We ran the first internet training courses."
O'Neill got a mixed reaction at the State-owned behemoth that was Telecom Éireann.
"I was met with some resistance in the early days," he says. "I was in a meeting and was introduced to one guy who looked like he had been sitting there for 45 years and he said [ he puts the voice on], 'the only content Eircom needs is the speaking clock'. I was thinking, 'oh dear, how do I deal with this'."
It's a different world now and O'Neill's plans include expanding further into mobile content. Hack-and-slash addicts favour televisions or consoles but casual gamers, many of them women, are prime targets for mobile operators. "We built Vodafone Sudoku and it generated significantly more than some of the hard-core titles we have had."
His plans include hitting China's 420 million mobile phone users with the magazine of Upstart's new key shareholder Yang Lan, China's Oprah Winfrey. Her internet magazine attracts more than 50 million readers.
Closer to home, he is amused at plans to relaunch Muse, the musical magazine which was once one of Rondomondo's brands. "I hear Eircom is hiring a new head of content," he says, laughing.
He still defends Rondomondo, stressing that no creditors were stiffed and that staff were offered voluntary redundancy. He believed enough to seek backing for a management buy-out. That proved a non-runner as every moneybags in town was busy weeping over shredded shares.
Rondomondo, like many of its generation, was just ahead of its time, O'Neill claims. Yes, the launch party was "left out there on its own". Products had been pulled; things weren't ready, but when the division closed it was just 1½ years into a five-year business plan.
"Had Eircom had the balls to continue with that, they would probably have a very good business with a very good subscriber base," he says.
Still, at least the launch was an epochal event - and given that the new chief operating officer of Sun 3C Media is still only a cheerful 34, he'll probably pop up at a few more.
