LONDON -- In response to increasing demand from mobile operators for its Active Content Discovery system, Celltick Technologies has appointed Stephen Dunford as its new CEO.

Jeff Gordon, Chairman of Celltick’s board, said: “Today content discovery is one of the biggest problems mobile operators face, following the build-up of their huge content catalogues. The fact that so much is on offer, but very few users find it raises the need for a new promotion mechanism for the mobile space. Celltick’s Active Content Discovery system provides a clear and proven roadmap to turn mobile subscribers into regular data content users.

Consequently, the past year has seen strong growth for Celltick during which it established operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America and announced several new customers worldwide. We are scaling up to support the increasing demand from mobile operators. Stephen’s experience and expertise will enable us to further expand our sphere of operations both in geography and in the emerging 3G environment where operators really need to drive revenue from data services.”

Celltick has developed and pioneered the IdleScreen media concept. Its flagship product, LiveScreen, is an Active Content Discovery system that delivers a new kind of mobile experience. LiveScreen enables mobile operators to broadcast streams of free news headlines, sport reports, weather updates, music stories, gossip and games directly to the screens of mobile phones. These ‘content bites’ are designed to entertain and drive traffic to revenue-generating services. LiveScreen enables content to be both personalised and segmented according to a subscriber’s tastes and interests. Operators already using LiveScreen to send ‘content bites’ to over 23 million customers include VimpelCom in Russia, AIS in Thailand, Hutchison India, China Unicom, Orange Israel and MTN Networks in Sri Lanka.

Stephen Dunford brings vast operational and commercial experience, most recently as the CEO of Elata, a global leader of mobile content delivery software that was acquired by Qualcomm last August. Before that he was the CEO and co-founder of Alamein, a leading exponent of mobile workforce messaging. Prior to Alamein, Stephen Dunford founded and was CEO of X-Cel Communications, a market leader in service assurance and network modelling software. X-Cel was acquired by Nortel Networks in 1999.

As Celltick continues to grow its customer base and increase its global operations Stephen Dunford will be expanding the sales, operational and technical teams. He will also be integrating premium and advertising components into LiveScreen. This will enable mobile operators to sell messages to advertisers.

Stephen Dunford commented: "Operators are missing the opportunity to leverage handset screens as a media channel. LiveScreen, Celltick’s Content Discovery system, enables content to find the user instead of the other way round. The development of Vodafone’s Livecast, Motorola’s Screen3 and iMode’s iChannel show that major mobile brands and the industry in general recognise the huge value of the IdleScreen as a key channel for content discovery and promotion. I am absolutely convinced our services will be a mainstream phenomenon in the future.”

Celltick Technologies Ltd.