Trolltech expands board amidst IPO rumors

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Sep. 12, 2005

Trolltech has appointed two mobile industry vets to its board of directors, leading Reuters to surmise the privately held company may be primping for an IPO. New Trolltech board members include Juha Christensen, formerly of Microsoft and Psion/Symbian, and Tod Nielsen, also a former senior manager at Microsoft.

According to Trolltech, Juha Christensen was an early employee at Psion who helped found the Symbian venture, before launching Microsoft's first mobile phone platforms as senior corporate VP. Christensen is currently CEO of Sonopia, a stealth-mode start-up whose name seems highly resonant with "Qtopia." Sonopia is focused on "enabling the micro-segmentation in the mobile industry," according to Trolltech.

Ted Nielsen, meanwhile, is a former VP of platforms and VP of developer relations at Microsoft. He previously served as chief marketing officer at BEA Systems, and CEO at software development company CrossGain, and currently serves as senior VP of technology marketing at Oracle.

In response to Trolltech's news of new board members, Reuters published a story citing "sources close to the company" confirming that the company is preparing for an IPO within the year. Reuters also said an official company spokesperson denied that the company is planning an IPO in the immediate future, however.

Trolltech makes developer tools, such as Qt, an API that allows conforming source code to be compiled on a variety of platforms. The company's "killer ap," though, is Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE), a software stack for mobile phones that has seen growing adoption among mobile phone vendors, especially in China, the world's largest mobile phone market.

The Reuters story notes that Trolltech's QPE stack targets the largest, mid-tier segment of the mobile phone industry, while offerings from Symbian and Microsoft target more esoteric, high-end niche markets within the mobile space, such as smartphones.

Trolltech isn't the only maker of Linux software stacks targeting the large, mid-market mobile phone sector. MontaVista, perennially the target of acquisition and IPO rumors, aims its Mobilinux stack, expected to reach general availability in September, squarely at the mid-tier feature-phone market as well.

Mobile phone sales are forecast at 780 million units in 2005, according to Reuters. With just $1.28 of software royalty per phone, that would represent a $1 billion embedded software opportunity.

Cellon International, which claims to be the "world's largest independent design house for mobile phones," used Trolltech's QPE -- and possibly MontaVista's Linux OS -- in a camcorder-phone design that became available uder the Philips brand in Europe earlier this month.

Trolltech president Chambe-Eng said, "Juha's broad perspective on the mobile industry will help guide our Qtopia embedded business, and Tod's ability to engage the developer community is an invaluable resource. We are extremely pleased to have executives of their caliber on the board as we meet new opportunities for development software in the exploding embedded Linux industry and the cross-platform software market."

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