Siruna

Your website on any mobile device

Because the major telecom players are increasingly promoting mobile Internet and due to the rising sales of all types of SmartPhones, mobile Internet now seems to have really taken off. Business consequently have to consider how they can make a ‘mobile’ difference. IBBT spin-off Siruna offers them the possibility of developing mobile websites and applications themselves.

What?

Siruna offers business, web designers, web and software developers a full online service where they can develop a mobile version of a website or a mobile application in a simple and user-friendly way – without any programming knowledge – which is usable on iPhones, SmartPhones, PDA’s, ….

“When we talk about websites, I think of the purely informative in the first place,” says Frank Gielen, CEO of Siruna. “Mobile applications go one step further: for instance think of mobile payments, mobile learning and mobile commerce.”

How?

In addition Siruna also offers professional services on mobile technology, strategy, design and user-friendliness. Siruna also developed Osmobi. Osmobi is a platform that allows users of the familiar open source content management systems Joomla! and Drupal to make a mobile version of a website ready. The next step is converting e-shops into m-shops, which also make internet shops available on the mobile.

Siruna technology is called an application gateway. This is an application that makes it possible to deliver online content and applications on any browser or any device.

Who?

Siruna originated from a project at Ghent University in which students following a course in 2006 were given the assignment of developing a prototype of a mobile website for the Gentse Feesten. This project, in which twelve students threw together the mobile prototype over one semester, drew the attention of the telecommunications provider BASE, which asked the students to develop a similar mobile site for the summer festivals sponsored by BASE. The experience gained was later combined with the results of the IBBT research group on Multichannel Content Distribution Platforms. All this know-how was finally bundled together in an IBBT incubation project, from which the company Siruna was established in 2007, which now employs 17 people.

The next steps?

“In the initial phase Siruna aimed at a very wide market and in addition to Europe had representation in the USA, Asia and Dubai, where the solution was offered via a partner network. That partner model proved very successful in Belgium and the Netherlands, but less so in other countries,” explains Frank Gielen. “For that reason we decided to offer our solution as an online service and to focus entirely on Europe and the United States.”

Siruna currently already has an extensive group of users but would like to see that user base expand by the end of 2010 to 100,000 users. The aim is also to convince two to eight percent of those users to pay for a premium product. “That is the major challenge for all online service providers at the moment” says Frank Gielen. “Developing functionality that offers so much added value that people are prepared to pay for it. Convincing two percent of your users seems fairly simple, to reach eight percent you already have to offer a streamlined and strong application.”