Case Studies
Issue No. 32 - December/January
It pays to keep tabs on teens
Keeping track of teenagers is a challenge at best but Adelaide IT innovator MGM Wireless is giving parents powerful help.
messageyou Schools by MGM Wireless automates high school attendance rolls and sends a text message to parents whose children have not checked in and rapid, international uptake has made MGM one of SA’s fastest growing companies.
The web-based mobile phone system is the product of a team led by serial communications entrepreneur Mark Fortunatow.
Mark describes his history as “working with startups and merging companies”.
The MGM Wireless venture is his fourth, following Linx Computer Systems (developer and marketer of financial software), Timekeeping Australia (workforce management systems) and Netline Technologies (voice-based mobile wireless solutions).
Along with chair and CEO Mark, who joined in 2003, Mark Hurd (EO) and Richard Sciano, a non-executive director, make up the MGM board.
“The company was founded in the belief that there would be a significant business opportunity to deliver data over mobile phones,” Mark says.
Innovation has been the key to success in all Mark’s ventures and MGM is no exception.
“The key is to identify a new consumer behaviour, trends that relate to communications,” he says.
“It’s very challenging technically, but more so is to develop the right business model to enable uptake in new markets.”
Sensing an opportunity in the education sector, MGM initially partnered with five Adelaide area high schools as test beds but it quickly became apparent that schools had specialised requirements that the company’s existing product suite could not satisfy.
The management team opted to design and purpose-build a solution. After nine months to proof of concept, two years of development and a $1.5 million investment, messageyou™Schools is now in use in Australia and New Zealand and is set for release in the “acid test...
