Startup Casabi Inc. (formerly known as 2BeQ), which announced today it has secured $2.8 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield Fund and Vanguard Ventures, has a plan to Web-enable wireless home phones so service providers can deliver personalized, enhanced voice and other services over broadband connections.
“In a sense we’re doing for voice what Openwave did for mobile,” said David Weinstein, Casabi’s cofounder and vice president of marketing and business development. Weinstein founded a company bought by Openwave Systems Inc., which offers mobile data and messaging for leading wireless operators worldwide. “But with broadband, we’re in a much richer environment than Openwave ever was in the mobile world,” he added.
The solution includes Casabi software on the end-user device and within the network. The company is licensing its client software to consumer electronics makers to build into “smart,” broadband-enabled endpoints. Casabi also has network-based software that service providers can buy and manage themselves, or outsource from a Casabi service bureau. The service bureau option makes the solution more accessible to Tier 2 and smaller independent and competitive service providers.
Weinstein declined to provide details on service provider customers the company is working with, but indicated a major announcement was pending on that front.
There are various financial models for the outsourced option, which could include per-seat licensing and revenue sharing. “So we are very creative in how we are setting up these business relationships,” Weinstein said. And Casabi will deliver a “cookie-cutter package,” including a set group of services along with marketing support, in mid-2006 targeted at Tier 2 service providers.
The Casabi solution extends to the handset communications services that have traditionally been tethered to a PC such as users’ personal address books, said Weinstein, and because that information sits in the network rather than on the endpoint, the files can be of unlimited size.
It also can allow users to view and reply to e-mail or voice mail using an interface on the smart phone or other smart device running the Casabi client.
And service providers can use the Casabi solution to provide users with specialized content – such as local weather, traffic on their route to work, their personal calendar that day – displayed on the screen of the handset.
Service providers also could use the screen to reach customers with billing, emergency preparedness or promotional information. Weinstein said these content services are of great interest to cable companies, which could offer services such as pay-per-view previews on the handset.
The first iteration of the Casabi-enabled handsets will not include video, but Weinstein expects video-enabled 802.11 handsets to be available from Casabi partners starting in 2007.
Weinstein said the most exciting application of the Casabi solution is its ability to extend peer-to-peer functionality to the telephone handset. That will allow subscribers to use their phones to look at a buddy list and see who’s available, initiate peer-to-peer calls, and receive and respond to – via voice or text – instant messages. “Today you have to go to the PC for this, but the PC is not friendly for voice conversations, because you like to walk around when you talk,” said Weinstein.
Of course, these personalized services could help service providers drive new revenue, but Weinstein said the ILECs will likely offer these services for free at first because their goal is to keep customers from churning to the cablecos “because if they lose you, the odds of getting you back will be very low.”
Casabi is working with several handset providers to get them to standardize on this and expects devices by the first two manufactures to be available by the second quarter. Weinstein noted that while the requirement to buy a new phone or other smart device to get these services might seem like a gating factor, the cordless phone market in the United States. sees annual sales of 50 million devices, so the equipment churn rate already is very high.
Casabi Inc. www.2beq.com
Openwave Systems Inc. www.openwave.com/us/
