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Heeding the Call: NINJA Looking Beyond Games to New Era of Lifestyle Applications

September, 2005
Los Angeles Business Journal

Jeff Capdeville remembers when a cell phone was just a device for having mobile conversations. Now he is staking his future on making the cell phone a fisherman s best friend, an exercise junkie's conscience and even a spiritual anchor.

Capdeville's company, NINJA Mobile Inc., is tapping a fast-growing niche in the wireless world: lifestyle applications.

Last year, the three-year-old Torrance company introduced surfers to real-time mobile beach information--complete with streaming video of surf scenes. It's about to roll out other applications. "I'm not bullish on games so much," said Capdeville. "I think (cell phones) will be a lifestyle device."

Surfline Mobile LE, which has an estimated 2,500 paid users, was developed by NINJA and Surfline Inc., an Orange County sports media company that created the original Surfline for home computers.

"What NINJA is doing is really something that needs to be done, which is really uniquely taking advantage of the portability of the mobile phone as a lifestyle device," said Ira Brodsky, president of St. Louis-based Datacomm Research Co.

The Surfline product is the only lifestyle application NINJA currently has on the market, but three others are in various stages of development: one that allows exercise fanatics to track calories, another that will give fishing conditions and a third that will allow searches of the King James Bible.

Old Friends

Capdeville and Kiyoto Hirai started up NINJA in 2002 after working together at the L.A. office of TIS Inc., a Japanese software developer and systems integrator.

Hirai, who had worked as a software developer in his native Japan , saw the market for cell phone applications boom in that country and teamed with Capdeville to tap what they anticipated would be a growing U.S. market.

In its original incarnation, NINJA was solely financed by Hirai and Capdeville, who together put in $750,000 and worked on ring tones, cell-based games and screensavers. Last year, they received a minority investment from a group of Japanese investors as the portfolio of mobile applications was expanded.

The business is run unusually, with Capdeville commuting between homes in Florida and Redondo Beach and Hirai splitting his time between California and Japan . There is a staff of about 16, most of them software developers. Contractors work on specific projects.

NINJA's applications can be directly downloaded onto Verizon subscribers, or via computer for TMobile, Cingular or Sprint subscribers. NINJA gets 60 percent of the monthly subscription fee while the mobile carrier gets the rest. The company, which recorded $500,000 in revenues in 2004, expects to generate almost...

Several analysts said NINJA has leapfrogged ahead of many wireless content developers who are still profiting from ring tones and video games--many of them adapted for cell phones from desktop computers.

"This could really be the next big thing," said Andrew Seybold, president of the wireless consultancy Outlook 4 Mobility Inc. in Santa Barbara and talking about the space in general. "But the issue is, there is absolutely no market research on where we're going in wireless."