Ex-Merrill banker can take your website mobile in minutes

“Absolutely. Everyday at least 10 times I think, ‘Damn! Why did I quit my job?’ We’re working out of our apartments now, but at the end of the day, I’m happy that I’m doing something for myself.”

This is 31-year-old Sharat Potharaju’s response to my question on whether he regrets losing the affluent lifestyle that came with his job as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America Merrill Lynch) in the US. He quit that over two summers back to return to India with his friend of 20 years, fellow Hyderabadi and contemporary from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, Ravi Pratap M, to found MobileMotion Technologies in Bangalore.

The start-up’s product MobStac helps publishers, including professional and amateur bloggers and news organisations, and even companies, create mobile versions of their websites in a matter of minutes unless they require extensive tweaking.

This is the drill: you go to mobstac.com and enter the URL of your portal and within a few blinks, a mobile-friendly version is ready. You can opt for the basic package for which you are not charged, but MobileMotion will take a share of the ad revenues generated on the MobStac-powered site. And if you’re a blogger, with an enviable following, you can pick the $19-a-month plan and keep all of the ad bounty. You can customise the mobile version, too.

“There is a lot of mobile plug-ins which let you create a mobile version of your website. If you just want your content to be available on a mobile phone, you should use them. But the challenge is humongous. There is quite a bit of diversity in terms of platforms like Android or Symbian, browsers and form factors like screen size. That’s where we come in,” says Potharaju. The company uses dynamic content adaptation to deliver multiple versions of the website for different handsets.

Mobstac.com prides itself on its DIY (do it yourself) ethos. There is no interpersonal interaction between MobileMotion and its clients and everything happens on mobstac.com except in case of big publishers. MobileMotion is working with a national English daily. “In this case, some hand-holding is needed. But we still deliver much faster than a traditional development shop. For instance, if DNA wants a mobile version of its site with minimum customisation, we can do it in a few hours,” claims Potharaju.

MobStac’s users number about 4,600 in 44 countries, including 20 in Iran and a newspaper in Somalia. “But, in a year, we could grow as much as 100 times. India, US and Indonesia are our biggest markets,” he says.

According to a recent survey by BuzzCity, India, among the world’s top ten markets, witnessed a 233% surge in 2010 in mobile internet ads riding on the back of cheaper data rates and affordable handsets. 3G, which is presently being tested by Indian telecom service providers, is tipped to be a game-changer for mobile internet usage. India has 81.16 crore mobile users, according to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. It’s these numbers MobileMotion hopes to cash in on.

Potharaju is loath to divulge its financials. The company, which was initially funded by angel investors, also from IIT-M, has recently brought some venture capitalists on board. “We will announce it in a month,” he says.

I-banking and technology aside, Potharaju has a proclivity to politics and activism. After he returned from the US with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign still fresh in his mind, he worked for a brief while with Bangalore-based non-governmental organisation Janaagraha on its ‘Jaago Re!’ voter mobilisation drive with Tata Tea.

Potharaju has just this to say on his experience: “We bitch a lot about our country but it’s incredible to see so many people making it work.”