Text toons the Keen new thing

Leley Keen, founder of the defunct computer games firm Inner Workings, has resurfaced with a new venture that will allow consumers to send cartoon greetings cards and messages via mobile phones.

The high-profile Scottish entrepreneur, who famously battled Microsoft in court to protect her previous company’s intellectual property, has quietly spent the past three years developing the backbone technology for the Glasgow company mixipix.

The project has attracted both the money and the strategic support of Kevin Bradshaw, the former chief executive of Edinburgh mobile entertainment firm Digital Bridges, and career banker Andrew Betchley.

In June, Keen soft-launched the web portal mixipix.net, where users can manipulate a number of animated characters to create party invitations, love notes and other messages to text to their mates’ mobile phones. That will be expanded to include Hallowe’en and Christmas cards this autumn. The service is compatible with the 17 million colour-screen, WAP-enabled phones now operating in Britain. But 50-year-old Keen said the website was primarily a showcase to achieve a wider goal of distributing the technology and services to other companies.

She explained: “We know, in order to sell this to other people, that we have to show how it works. It has made a significant difference to people’s perception.”

Mixipix is in negotiations with a number of mobile phone operators and in preliminary discussions with a major greetings card manu-facturer. Essentially the company would help these clients create their own websites and characters and use mixipix’s platform technology, which takes the hassle out of providing content to the mobile phone market.

Keen explained: “It’s a very fragmented market. All the mobile handsets have different memories and configurations. That makes it very difficult for content providers.

“To create a wallpaper, for instance, you might need 30 different versions of the same product to match all the mobile phones. Our technology is automatically able to detect the type of phone and connect to it.”

The company has also developed a prototype of an animation editor that from next year will allow users to create the cartoon messages on their mobiles.

Keen said the business model for mixipix had in many ways been born out of her experience with Inner Workings.

At its peak, Inner Workings became the second company to list on the Alternative Invest ment Market, its value rising to £21 million in 1998. The firm had six games in development, but little to show the City in terms of publishing contracts, when it went bust in 1999.

“During the first year out, I wrote the Inner Workings story to understand what happened,” Keen recalled. “It’s about 196,000 words. It sits on my hard drive like a ticking time bomb. It’s a very valuable but incredibly painful experience to go through.”

While Inner Workings was too dependent on the stock market, and then later the whims of publishers, for money to keep afloat, Keen said mixipix has been brought into being on “very mean, lean budgets”. The product has essentially been developed now, and the company can start reaping the rewards of its labours as it becomes a distributor to clients.

Bradshaw, who is currently working at mobile games developer Kayak Interactive in the US, said he immediately saw the potential of mixipix when he met Keen two years ago.

He explained: “Regarding market potential – one word – huge. Consider the fact that around one billion text messages are sent every day across the world. Consider just 1% of that number taking up use of a cartoon messaging service, even once a month, and you are looking at multi-million dollar turnover for a company like mixipix.”

Bradshaw added: “The beauty of where we are now is that the technology allows us to create and roll out many and varied services at a low up-front cost, sharing in revenue growth with our customers.

“It’s a great model, and I know it works, as Digital Bridges is now on course to be generating in the order of $20m this year alone, and its model and place in the market is very similar to that of mixipix, although the actual media content is a bit different.”

Julia Fields 08 August 2004 Sunday Herald