Monday, January 1st, 2007 (01/1/07)


Washington Post: Soren Schafft & Qmobile Corporate Profile

Soren Schafft

Position: Chief executive, Qmobile, a mobile entertainment and production
company in Reston.

Career Highlights: General manager, Wireless Services trading as Singlepoint
(formerly Mobile Media North America); vice president, sales and marketing,
Singlepoint; vice president, products and operations, Singlepoint; founder,
Telenor Mobile Interactive (which became Mobile Media North America);
director, corporate and business development, Telenor; deputy director,
Pannon GSM Telecommunications; manager, projects and business processes,
Pannon GSM Telecommunications; management consultant, KPMG; and lecturer,
Karl Marx Economics University.

Age: 38

Education: BA, sociology, University of Maryland; MS, economics: European
studies, London School of Economics. Fluent in German and Hungarian.

Personal: Lives in Reston with wife, Annamaria; daughter, Emese, 8, and son,
Sam, 5.

How did you get to where you are?

When I started my career there was a recession in the United States. The
first thing I did was leave and headed for Budapest, Hungary, which was just
coming out of the "Iron Curtain" phase. They were a government and society
in transition, and it seemed like a much more interesting place to be. I
spent a year teaching, then I went to London and got my master's. And after
that I returned to Hungary. Western businesses were just starting to set up
in Hungary, the first of which was McDonald's. . . .

It was exciting to see all the businesses transform and the economy
transform. All of the major international consulting companies opened
offices in Hungary. So I joined KPMG and learned the basics of how to do
business with an economy in transition. Also, during this period, mobile
phones were the size of small suitcases, and there were two start-up
companies that were offering a new technology called GSM, which had handsets
similar to the size you see today. In Hungary, this was especially
interesting because people were on waiting lists for up to 30 years to get
land-line phones. They actually had parties to celebrate when they got their
phones. It was an unusual experience. So, I thought it was very exciting to
move over from consulting to mobile telecommunications to support a
challenged environment with a new technology.

I worked at a start-up GSM company for several years. . . . After about 10
years in Europe, I decided to return to the States and found it interesting
adjusting to a Western economy and working in English. I found the United
States to be bland and slow, and not as exciting and fast-paced as the time
I had spent in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe they were changing
everything -- from the Eastern bloc to a Western economy, to new accounting
principles with many new companies starting up and getting listed on the
newly formed Budapest stock exchange. A large amount of money flowed into
the country to support this development. Going from a very degraded state to
an advanced state in a few years was exciting.

Once in the United States, I saw that there was a gap between services that
had existed in Europe but had not yet entered the U.S. market. And so I
helped found a company that did just that. We worked with combining text
messages and television in 2002, and launched the first text-voting service
in U.S. history similar to "American Idol" and "Deal or No Deal" today. . .
. We went on to launch the first text-to-screen service connected to Ryan
Seacrest's New Year's Eve show in which some hundreds of thousands of people
participated, including 50 people who proposed marriage. . . . These types
of services initially generated several thousands of dollars, but this year
-- four years later -- we expect them to generate $1 billion.

The business that I had been in started to become much more technical and
stable and so I decided to jump from the pot into the fire and manage a very
innovative mobile entertainment company called Qmobile. And there's a number
of leading mobile entertainment companies out there today. But Qmobile was
the only one that has a very innovative distribution and production
strategy, which I think will lead to similar growth to all the other
companies I've been in.

-- Judith Mbuya

To schedule an interview with a Qmobile spokesperson contact Hugh Norton (ext. 124) or Megan Erhardt (ext. 136) at (703)-683-5004