Startup Aims for Easy Transfers of Web Snippets to Cell Phones
September 10, 2004
By MAY WONG
AP Technology Writer
PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) -- Have you ever gone online to get driving directions, only to leave the printout behind? Have you made movie plans, but forgot to jot down the show times? Or do you simply need an easy way to feed phone numbers to your cell phone?
A trio of entrepreneurs believe they have a solution.
With cell phones becoming more like computers and people carrying them wherever they go, the founders of Vazu Inc. have developed what they consider an easy way to transfer phone numbers and other data from PCs and the Internet onto handsets.
They quietly released their first product earlier this year for users to transfer contact information from desktop address books without any special cables or software. With little publicity, "Vazu Contacts" won rave reviews and garnered thousands of users in 40 countries.
But cell phones are becoming more of an anchor tool in daily life: part mobile phone, part personal digital assistant, part camera, part MP3 player -- and one day, with the arrival of mobile commerce applications, part wallet as well.
Vazu hopes to capitalize on that trend by creating a channel for folks who want to easily populate their phones with data.
So at this week's elite DEMOmobile tech show in San Diego, Vazu is launching more ambitious products designed to turn cell phones into even handier reservoirs of information.
Instead of just phone contacts, the new applications promise to deliver any snippet of information from a Web site to a mobile phone with ease, from street addresses to train schedules and driving directions.
"It's the power of the Web and connecting it to your phone," said Ramiro Calvo, Vazu's chief executive and co-founder. "And we've gone from personal addresses to searchable content to anything on the Web."
"Vazu Click" is a free, plug-in application for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser. It lets users highlight and send Web text to cell phones. It also automatically tags phone numbers on a Web page so users can send the number to their cell phones by simply clicking on the Vazu icon.
With "Vazu Seek," which is still in a "beta" test mode, users can go to the Vazu Web site, search phone directory listings and send the results to their handsets.
Later, the company aims to feed cell phones with song files and images.
"Contacts is the beachhead, and we're expanding to other digital content, breathing new life into the phone," Calvo said.
PocketThis Inc. and Xpherix Corp. have similar PC-to-phone technologies, but sell their services through wireless carriers. Vazu is targeting cell phone users directly, regardless of their mobile provider.
With "Vazu Contacts," users send an e-mail with an attachment containing address book information to an online Vazu account. From there, it is delivered to the cell phone via text messaging. Users can even send data directly to a friend's Vazu account or cell phone.
Because Vazu keeps a record of what users send, contacts can be transferred to a new handset with just a few keystrokes should an old one get lost or upgraded. No more thumbing in contacts one by one.
The service currently works with address books for Microsoft's Outlook, Apple Computer Inc.'s Mail and Novell Inc.'s Linux Evolution e-mail programs. All you need is a cell phone that supports text messaging -- and most phones do.
"It's cool," said James Cox, a British information technology consultant who recommended the service on his Web journal after trying it out. "I uploaded about two dozen phone numbers, and within a minute or so, they were all on my phone."
Cox had previously used Apple's iSync software to transfer some of his contact numbers, but complained it didn't work smoothly. He said he's looking forward to using Vazu when he upgrades to a new phone soon, something he does about once a year.
Vazu's products are free for now, though users still have to pay wireless carriers for text messages. The Palo Alto-based company may later charge either a subscription or usage fee, or possibly for premium services such as restoring archived data. Vazu is also exploring advertising and partnerships with Internet portals and wireless carriers.
The vision behind Vazu took shape about two years ago after Calvo, Soujanya Bhumkar and Ken Thom -- all Silicon Valley veteran managers -- started to meet weekly. After many nights of pizza, their hodgepodge of brainstorming ideas whittled down to the mobile phone application. The trio brought engineer Jay Geygan onto their founding team and set out to work.
The founders hope the name -- derived from the Spanish word "va" and the German word "zu," both of which roughly mean, "go to" -- will become a vernacular verb similar to "Google" and "TiVo."
"In the end," Bhumkar said, "we want people to say `Vazu me,' and it will mean, `send to my phone."'
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