Christmas card for me from IMOCOS (15.12.2000).
WAPJAG – The Jag for WAP!
One of our very active companions in the early stages of the mobile market was the IMOCOS International Mobile Content Service AG in Osnabrück, Germany. At first the company was founded in December 1999 as WAPJAG.COM AG. I can’t find the source anymore, but I think the company was owned by the management (50%), some private investors (40%) and the VC company eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners AG (10%). IMOCOS provided a mobile site building and mobile search engine under the brand wapjag, but for some time now the domains like wapjag.com or mobilejag.com are not connected to the service anymore. Back in 2001 they claimed to have over 40 search engines in 18 languages and with over a million categories in their system, by then to have collected more than 95% of WAP sites worldwide.
But even if they made a great job stimulating the mobile market with first mobile data services, they get teased by the press, e.g. ManagerMagazin, 1/2001, pp. 88-93, Christian Rickens, „Gründer ohne Netz: Rund um das mobile Internet ist eine bunte Gründerszene entstanden. Alle hoffen auf das große Geld – doch nur wenige werden durchkommen“. The article starts like this: „Christian Ihmels is not online. His is clicking energetically on his Nokia phone, but he just can’t get connection to the mobile internet. Things like that are annoying. It’s particularly painful at the booth while you are trying to show your products to the visitors“. More mischief at boocompany „Schrei aus der Gruft: IMOCOS – Mobile Content Leiche gefleddert!„. Where are the credits for their forward-looking work?
I never met Christian Ihmels (CEO), but we had the opportunity to get to know Andreas Stecher (at that time Business Development Manager) and Ulrich Becker (at that time Head of Portal) at CeBIT in 2001. And my teammate Thomas had contact to Stephan Kasten (at that time Business Development Manager). Best wishes for your next projects and I hope to see you dudes again someday :o)
Hey Maciej,
thanks for that recap. Well written. Yea those where the times when it all began, The Mobile Internet. We traveled the world and educated everyone how cool it would be if we all would have connected personal mobile devices. These than could do e-mail, surf the web and you can play games on them and all that out of home.
No Facebook, no Twitter, no WhatsApp, no Instagram, but we all had the vision! 🙂
All the best,
Andreas