Here are 4 questions Nagesh Challa CEO and co-founder of Ecrio

Current status: Ecrio offers products for both mobile communications and commerce. The communications products – other than mobile Instant Messaging – are tailored for 3G networks. They include an IMS framework, along with applications for Push-to-Talk (PoC); VoIP; and VideoShare.For mobile commerce products, Ecrio has a patented way to transmit standard barcodes from a mobile handset directly into a standard point-of-sale laser scanner – with no additional hardware on either end. Ecrio also offer a customizable mobile platform for applications using Near Field Communications (NFC). We were attracted to that business by Visa, which hired us to create Visa’s mobile platform based on NFC.Ecrio has been in business since 1998 and is primarily venture backed – though recently our customers NTT DoCoMo and Visa both invested. We currently have 130 employees worldwide. The company holds many patents; CEO Nagesh Challa on his own holds 21 patents.

Can you tell us more about your service ?
As noted above – we primarily sell an IMS platform and applications such as VideoShare. Our biggest success has been the NTT DoCoMo network. In 2006, NTT DoCoMo shipped over 10 million handsets with Ecrio software – making it the biggest IMS deplaoyment anywhere.

What is your business model ?
The business is a per-handset royalty fee.

What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing ?
We continue to improve the IMS framework and various in-demand applications, such as VoIP VCC (Voice Call Continuity) and VideoShare. The commerce products are all relatively new – we are adding features including an improved user interface; server capabilities; additional handset support for MoBeam, the barcode software; and different “form factors” for MoBeam.

What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage ?
Users in Japan have readily adopted the push-to-talk application and seem ready to add new capabilities. Among those most in demand are VideoShare and Instant Messaging.