RE: RE: CPAI / R42 COMBO AS ONE16 Apr 2025 08:38
Ronjon spent over six years at Motorola, and served as a Vice President. He did a lot of work in Chinese, despite not speaking the language. He created a team to develop Chinese handwriting and speech recognition systems for phones as well as a predictive text system that could work with only a 9-key keypad – quite difficult since chinese has 20,000 characters.
Anticipating the migration of the internet to mobile phones, Ronjon decided to leave Motorola and start Cellmania, a company focused on expanding further mobile developments, including, in 1999 a mobile search engine and the first mobile app store. Unlike Lexicus, which was bootstrapped, Cellmania received its first investment from Motorola, and other venture firms, but struggled to find its way into profitability.
The company’s first valuation was at $6.5 million, the second at $100 million in 2002