I always wanted to do this blog .. so here goes ..

A marketing / branding person once asked me: Who did your PR and branding?

At first I thought that she was after some work from our company .. and since I had done the futuretext branding and logo myselves, I thought .. maybe she is criticising how it looks ..

But no ..

She went on to say .. It was fantastic name for a publishing company focussed on emerging technologies ..

This made me happy ofcourse ..

But should I have been happy?

The real story is far less flattering .. and here it is ..

I started with mobile messaging applications around 2000. SMS was the rage .. but MMS was emerging ..

So, originally .. I wanted to start a company based on messaging .. and beliveved .. and hold your breath for this .. ‘The future of ‘text’ is MMS’

So, that was the idea behind ‘futuretext’

Real marketing people like my good friend Russell Buckley(Now MD Europe of Admob) were wiser .. and warned that MMS was (is!) a dog .. It is never going anywhere ..

But I was convinced otherwise .. and bet my business on it so to speak!
(In fairness, I thought MMS may become a transport mechanism – like WAP .. and that’s why I thought it may always have a future)

Anyway .. the rest as they say is history ..
I entered publishing .. and futuretext was an ideal name for a publishing company by happy coincidence ...

So, what does this all tell you?
a) I am no branding / marketing person
b) Sometimes you can f**k up badly .. but still get lucky
c) And the future of text is ‘futuretext’ :)

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Ajit Jaokar is the CEO of a London based publishing company futuretext focussing on mobility and Digital convergence. Ajit Jaokar also chairs Oxford University's next generation mobile applications panel and is working extensively with mobile web 2.0 i.e. the impact of web 2.0 on mobility and digital convergence. His book Mobile web 2.0 will be released in June 2006. He currently plays an advisory role to a number of mobile start-ups in the UK and Scandinavia and works with the governments and trade missions of a number of countries including South Korea, Ireland and the Faroe Islands. He is also a member of the Web 2.0 Working Group.

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