Next August Prylos, a business with a staff of fifteen, will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. Prylos was jointly founded by two former Phonevalley employees, HEC graduate Caroline Noublanche who headed the Sales & Marketing team and EPITA graduate David Lacan who was the Technical Manager. The company develops software for mobile phones, some are for nomad corporate employees, the others for consumers. Heavyweights such as the SNCF (French railways), RATP (Paris mass transit authority), SFR or Neuf Cegetel (mobile phone operators) are among the "small" albeit fast-growing business's customers. Convenience services should eventually become the main business of the company that is already thinking of its international growth.
What does a traveling salesman, a sales and marketing executive, a delivery person, a messenger, a pollster and an appliance or vehicle repair person have in common? They all have a job which involves daily traveling. The companies employing them would like to have simple and low-cost tools for tracking the employees during their field work or for transmitting crucial information. What is the solution? The mobile phone, a tool whose capabilities are still far from having been fully exploited. But it needs embedded intelligence. "We saw the emergence of J2ME technology, the Java Mobile development language that offers games on mobile phones. That's how we came up with the idea of developing a professional range around this technology," summed up Caroline Noublanche.
Caroline and David were very intent on setting up a business, especially since David Lacan had earlier founded an Internet company. They embarked on the adventure in August 2003, winning a contest organized by Sun and Orange in the process, which just strengthened their conviction (if needed) that their project was technically feasible. "We managed to develop a consumer mobile application, viz. a scoring card for golf in about four days," recalled the Prylos CEO with a smile. They began by selling advice so they could "test the field" especially with the mobile operators they had begun to work with. The business cofounders quickly designed their first systems, namely for INRA that was looking for a system that would facilitate the declarations of veterinarians controlling livestock farms, for its epidemiology network. Little by little, they fine-tuned their project, and submitted a file to Paris Développement, a development facility with an incubator called Paris Innovation where the business was hosted for a year from September 2004.
Convenience Services - A Promising Field for Prylos
Now set up in the heart of Paris, Prylos has a staff of fifteen working out of a technical center, a project management center and a sales & marketing center. The business is positioned in two fields. One, it designs software for the nomad corporate employees. "We offer solutions for maintenance technicians who can send in information about their repairs while consulting their schedule. But we have also developed solutions for delivery-drivers, polling institute pollsters, and recently convenience services." Prylos also develops software on demand for publishers, an activity for which the teams work with numerous mobile telephony operators, major Internet movers or transport operators such as the RATP. "This pioneering activity enables us to work in phase lead on new functional features that then feed our corporate applications," explained Caroline Noublanche.
Prylos has now set a goal of growing. Within the next three years, the business whose 2008 goal is to earn a sales figure of about 1.4 million euros may have up to thirty employees and reach a sales figure of 5 to 6 million euros according to its creators. To do so, they still have a lot of work, especially in technological developments. "We are already working on taking our tool to consumers and linking up with the emerging contactless technology," explained the joint-stock company CEO who, like her partner, believes firmly in the upcoming emergence of convenience services. The only question about this field that, we repeat, may be Prylos' leading activity tomorrow, is the date and speed with which it will take off.
