CALL SIGNS

E-business: mVisible

Posted on Wed, Feb. 28, 2007

Digg del.icio.us AIM reprint print email

By JIM WYSS

jwyss@miamiherald.com

• Unlocking Web opportunities

As the CEO of mVisible, a Deerfield Beach company that lets users create mobile-phone content, Scott Kinnear has helped midwife a strange array of ring-tone hits.

There's Rell, the Alabama hip-hop artist, who repeatedly screams "Hey your phone is ringing." There's a slice from the movie Dumb and Dumber where Jim Carrey screeches "the most annoying sound in the world." And then there's the Orca whale song posted by the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona. It has been downloaded almost 4,000 times.

Anyone who has spent any time in close quarters knows the ring-tone market is exploding. Industry revenue is expected to hit $417 million this year nationally and more than $5 billion globally.

But even as major-mobile phone companies, music labels and content aggregators cash in, many independent producers don't have the muscle to broker a record deal and get in on the ring-tone circuit.

"If you have a favorite independent band and request that they send you a ring-tone, you'll probably find they have no way of doing that," Kinnear said. Formatting audio into content that can be recognized across dozens of different phone brands and models is tricky, he said.

Enter mVisible. The company's heart is its Myxer website, which allows users to convert audio or image clips into mobile content and then distribute their work using MyxerTag icons that they can embed in their websites.

Since launching in 2005, Myxer.com has attracted some 350,000 registered users and about 30,000 MyxerTags have been deployed across the Web.

Reading through the roster of a day's downloads, Kinnear notes that the clip by Rell, titled Ay Yo Phone, was downloaded 179 times.

"Our biggest hits are downloaded over 200 times a day, which doesn't sound like a lot, but we have almost 40,000 pieces of content on the site," Kinnear said. The site delivers about 25,000 clips a day.

The system lets artists charge a fee for their work, but most -- like Rell -- are giving it away.

For mVisible, profits will come from selling ads on its site and a cut of ring-tone sales. Down the road, as corporations embrace the idea of sending ads to mobile phones, mVisible hopes to be a conduit.

"When we deliver content, we have a piece of real estate on that mobile phone," Kinnear said.

If the company's trajectory follows its business plan, it will start turning a profit in 2008.

But the company is facing stiff competition, including other websites that offer similar fare.

Even so, mVisible has believers. New World Angels, the Boca Raton investment group, put $3.2 million into the company, and mVisible has been getting résumés from experienced executives -- both good signs for a start-up.

If mVisible is green, its team is not.

Kinnear, mVisible founder Myk Willis and the company's vice presdient of engineering Bill Madden are all former Citrix executives. At Citrix, Kinnear oversaw 500 employees at dozens of offices. Now he's working with about 16 people in a two-bedroom house in Deerfield Beach. "We are definitely working on a shoestring," said Kinnear. But that's the way Citrix started also.

Whether they can recreate a Citrix-style hit, remains to be seen.