On Our Radar Screen

Enfour Inc. www.enfour.com
The little software house that could! Tokyo-based Enfour, a developer of Asian language input methods, localized software, and all things to do with the viscera of handheld computing, has scored a couple of behind-the-scenes successes. Its UniFEP series of Unicode-based multilingual input editors was first commercialized on Apple's Newton back in '94, and more recent versions have been ported to EPOC (a Windows CE version is in the works); Enfour is also the Psion distributor in Japan. While you may not be too concerned with how a handheld computer displays Asian text on a screen or formats data onto a printout, Sony, for one, certainly is. In April the global electronics giant launched a new version of its Palm OS PDA, the CLIE, that uses Enfour Media Laboratory's TypeBank screen fonts (a version of the fonts is also available to help PC- and Mac-based developers emulate i-mode phone display screens). CEO Richard Northcott is a passionate, outspoken proponent of common-sense software development -- a requirement, we suppose, for success in the otherwise mundane field of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) fonts, double-byte text handling, printer control languages, and multilingual dictionaries. The Microsofts, Apples, and other big names of the software industry get the glory, but it's little guys like Enfour that make it all work.

ImaHima Inc www.imahima.com
Founded in 1999 by ex-Goldman Sachs analyst Neeraj Jhanji, ImaHima ("Are you free now?") is a socializing and scheduling service enabling mobile customers to locate and contact friends, schedule parties and events, meet new people, and find information and activities based on their current location via mobile phone (the service is now accessible from PC as well). Jhanji was one of the first foreigners to approach DoCoMo about setting up a social networking and meeting service for i-mode, but he was shown the door when it became apparent that ImaHima could also be used by ax-murderers and the like to meet up with unsuspecting victims (i-mode's handlers were hypercautious about safety and security in the service's earlier days). Undeterred, Jhanji went ahead and launched as an unofficial site, which quickly racked up users in the low tens of thousands based on word-of-mouth marketing. Since then, Jhanji has found a way to make the service acceptable to the nannies over at i-mode and has launched Version 2.0, which features more sophisticated personalization tools and a searchable directory, as an official i-mode site. ImaHima is now on all the Japanese mobile Webs, and is looking at expanding into Europe in WAP and SMS versions, spurred in part by some capital kicked in from AOL; the venture claims 250,000-plus users and more than 1 million page views daily. Next time an Indian national in Tokyo who doesn't speak much Japanese offers you a low-paying job in a startup that has no revenue and no marketing, say "Yes" -- like ImaHima, that venture may be going somewhere.