MalaysiaGIS.com

Source: The Star

So in 2004, the two Malaysians quit their respective jobs to form Billadam Associates Sdn Bhd – a mobile applications developer. What’s significant about Billadam Associates is that it isn’t just another homegrown technology company, but one that, despite its short history, has ventured into Britain and has since won a major contract with a British company.

In March, Billadam Europe successfully clinched a deal worth an estimated £50mil (RM335mil) with premier mapping company Geographers’ A-Z Co Ltd, to provide the map of London city on mobile phones. The two-year project would eventually cover other major cities in Britain.

"From the beginning, we’ve always had the vision of taking our business abroad. Business today is global and not confined merely to national borders," says Amir, who is the company’s chief executive officer.

"Business is now empowered by the Internet and is global in nature. As entrepreneurs, we can’t merely depend on the domestic market alone to grow our business," he says.

Billadam Associates is headquartered in Sun Microsystems Inc’s Jtrend centre in Cyberjaya and is run by Mohd Taufik, who is the chief operating officer of the company. Its overseas venture, Billadam Europe Ltd – incorporated in Britain in January – is based in London.

According to Amir, the company’s success is due in part to their philosophy, which is based on the notion that for any mobile content application to succeed, it must bring value to its user.

Armed with that thinking, Amir and Mohd Taufik set out to develop niche services in the rich media sector.

"We identified mapping and directory services as one key area to develop because we realised that this sector had not yet been fully tapped," he says.

Amir recounts that in June last year Billadam Associates began approaching Geographers’ A-Z Map, to see if it was interested in porting its street directory maps to a mobile format.

"We saw that the directory and mapping information would create a compelling application that most people would find useful. The trick, of course, is to make it available to the masses via the handphone," he says. According to Amir, Geographers’ A-Z was at first not very keen to embark on the project. "When we first approached the company, it was not that eager to work with us. But after much negotiations and a change in strategy, it finally came around," he says.

Amir says his company needed to prove to Geographers’ A-Z that it had a workable technology that would digitise and translate its maps into a user-friendly, feature-packed application that cellphone users would find useful.

"Once we demonstrated our proof-of-concept, they were sold," he says.

He says the revenue gained from the mobile mapping application and the intellectual property would be split between the two companies on an equal basis.

The company, he says, hopes to achieve a revenue of £571,000 (RM3.8mil) a month in its first year of operations.

Billadam Europe would also own the rights to promoting and marketing the maps – known as A-Z Mobile Version – to various mobile operators in Britain, he says.

"We are currently working to secure deals with a few mobile service providers in Britain to provide the London A-Z Mobile Version on their respective mobile portals," he sayss, declining to give specific details.

Amir says he is proud that a Malaysian technology company has been able to win such a big project, especially when all the R&D work for this project was done using the local talents at Billadams Associates.

"This is a really significant milestone for us and it proves that Malaysian businesses can make it abroad if we put our minds to it," he adds.