It was my absolute pleasure to lead such a massively talented group of Engineers to build our mobile social networking platform. What a ride we shared!

From stealth mode, through private beta to market launch, then the crucial pivot from a direct-to-consumer model to one aimed at mobile operators and handset manufacturers, resulting in our acquisition by Myriad Group and the scaling of our delivery capability, and then achieving customer validation by selling our technology to mobile operators in over a dozen countries, with revenues estimated at USD 80 – 100 million.

But all good things must come to an end. It’s been around 12 months since the acquisition, and I have decided to move on to The Next Challenge…

I’m co-founding a business to commercialize and export some exciting intellectual property coming out of NICTA (National Information and Communications Technology Australia) that we believe will solve a big problem in the global mobile industry.

My partners in this new venture are Max Ott and David McKeague at NICTA. It’s great to be doing this with NICTA, the largest organization in Australia dedicated to ICT research, and the birthplace of Open Kernel Labs, which recently announced the deployment of its software in over one billion mobile handsets worldwide.

We are in stealth mode, so I am unable to share many details at this time. However, for now, the tag cloud includes: mobile, geo, social, big data, psychology, and machine learning.

I’ll be leading Engineering and Product, and I expect to be back & forth between Sydney and the Bay Area for the next several months as we progress through the initial stages of customer development and product development.

Stay tuned for more details.

Exciting news: Xumii has been acquired by Myriad Group (SIX:MYRN). We are now part of Europe’s largest mobile technology business with software in more than 2 billion phones.

This is great for Xumii as it means we can take our mobile social networking platform to the next level. And it’s a great win for Australian mobile technology.

Here’s the press release and some of the blogosphere coverage: GigaOM and TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

We examined some emerging mobile social technologies, and how they can enable new forms of story-telling. And we shared my personal journey into a Star Trek Alternate Reality Game which has so far involved me sending pictures of sheep to strangers in Paris, and which explains my recent cryptic Twitter and Facebook status updates. Well some of them anyway.

The slide deck is embedded below, and contains all the links for those of you who asked.

[Update 3 June 2009] OMG! I was chosen as one of the five finalists in the game. Here’s a video of Leonard Nimoy putting my name into the hat to pick the winner.

Massive thanks to everyone involved in this ARG, it was a fantastic journey. LL&P!

We’re going to DEMOfall ’08, how exciting! Stand 61.

Xumii is unveiled today at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View. “Take all your contacts from your social networks with you — on your phone!”

Here’s Jennifer on stage:

Today we launched Xumii in private beta.

Xumii is an open mobile social messaging platform. More soon..!

Here begins my uiActive journey. Stay tuned…