Mobile man

ICE PEOPLE: Micheal Mak

Micheal Mak

If you use your mobile phone to send messages, chat and play games, read on. If Micheal Mak, CEO of Startcorp.com, has his way, you'll be able to book your air tickets by using your mobile phone, check out the timings of movies at theatres in your area and even send a bank draft.

Mak is an evangelist for mobile applications. He is convinced that mobile phones are the key to the future because while the internet suffers from the limitations of bandwidth and speed, a mobile phone can be used anywhere, anytime.

His company, Startcorp.com, has offices in in India, Malaysia, US, Singapore and UK. That means he has to travel constantly. Often he does not have the time to book tickets. So what does he do? Book them over his mobile phone, of course.

"The paper work that most enterprises indulge in costs $800 billion annually. That's especially true in the aviation and transport industry where tickets are printed on expensive paper. With wireless ticketing, the costs would be minimal or nothing at all," explains Mak.

Mak swears that the mobile phone has immense potential in the retail, banking and travel industries. He is working with telecom companies like the Bharti group, Sing Tel and Opus to popularise the use of wireless ticketing.

Mak has notched up many firsts in his life. In 1997, inspired by Hotmail, Mak started the first free email service in Australia and his company quickly became number one in two years. Mak would have happily continued in the internet industry but for the dotcom bust of 2001.

Says Mak: " After Nasdaq crashed, our company was almost broke. I spent a year thinking about what I could try my skills at. It occurred to me that enterprise applications would be the next big thing."

And so Mak started something that had been unheard of - the world's first thin client instant messaging application, which attracted more than a million active users worldwide.

According to Mak, the success of this application lay in the fact that one need not download it but could use it for communication purposes. In 2002, he re-engineered the internet-based messaging platform into the Enterprise SMS platform.

"SMS as a means for enterprise work was novel even for companies that were technology savvy. Convincing them was the hardest part," he says.

His first clients were Australian airlines and banks and included companies like Jetstar Airways, St George Bank, Australia Post, Boral, Sensis and Suncorp Metway.

Mak is now working on his latest mobile application "� the mobile wallet. The wallet has a chip that is unique to the user and will be useful for all kinds of transactions. Call Mak the mobile man.