London, UK, 11th September 2008 - Masabi, the secure mobile applications developer, today announced the appointment of Fred Metzgen as CEO. Metzgen brings more than 30 years of leadership experience in the IT and telecommunications industries such as CEO of France Telecom Network Services, International Business Development Director at BT and European Sales Manager at IBM.
Masabi's recent successes in mobile ticketing will be reinforced by Metzgen's experience as CEO at OmniTicket Network, the leading provider of turn-key ticketing and access control solutions, where he helped to stabilize the company and raise additional capital. The move is designed to further strengthen Masabi's management, drive growth and secure expansion capital as it rolls out commercial mobile ticketing services in the coming months.
Masabi designs and builds secure applications for mobile phones. The company is the leading developer of transactional software for the constrained environments of today's mass market mobile handsets. It also has world leading experts in the fields of mobile usability and security across all devices.
"Mobile ticketing is growing in popularity, particularly in the railway industry," said Ben Whitaker, COO Masabi. "We have invested a significant amount of time and resources in developing, testing and piloting a number of ground breaking mobile ticketing and payment systems, and now have the channel partners in place for large scale public roll-outs in the coming months. Fred brings a wealth of experience and knowledge that will ensure we fulfil our commercial potential and we're excited to have him on board."
"This is a great market opportunity for mobile transactions. After successful pilots that have proven the technology, we will see the first widespread deployments," said Fred Metzgen. "Masabi is undoubtedly one of the leading mobile software providers in the market and I'm very excited to be joining the company at such an interesting time in its development".
Metzgen began his career with an American Investment Bank before joining IBM, where he held a variety of technical and marketing position. He holds an MBA in Marketing from Seattle Pacific University. Metzgen is a member of the UK Institute of Directors since 1988.
About Masabi
Masabi is a secure mobile applications developer based in the UK. Its EncryptME system is the only mobile Java security library in the world to be validated by BT and certified by NIST, the US Government's security standards body. In line with the latest web security standards EncryptME provides end-to-end 1024bit RSA and 256bit AES for all mobile communications by SMS, GPRS, NFC and local data storage on all Java-enabled handsets to protect all data sent over public networks or residing on stolen phones.
The company's expertise in secure, usable mobile applications which run on even the lowest specification phone handsets is currently being used in a range of mobile commerce, ticketing, casino and financial applications. Masabi is owned by its directors, won the IET Security Award in 2007, was a runner up In "True Mobile Start-Up" category at Mobile Innovation Global Awards and was selected as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Europe
Media Contacts for Masabi
Oliver Chapman
Temono - Telecoms PR
oliver.chapman@temono.com
+44 (0)7713404571