Web-based trading company, gsmExchange.com has been commissioned by Vodafone to develop a business-to-business platform that enhances the purchase and distribution of their mobile handsets worldwide. gsmExchange.com is headquartered in NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre at University College Dublin.

Essam Bishara, Managing Director, gsmExchange.com

Vodafone has expressed a need for an intra-company-platform that would help them gain a competitive edge. The platform will ensure that Vodafone operating companies encountering unexpected high demands for particular handsets will have an internal exchange or channel to turn to when sourcing stock to meet these demands. In turn, Vodafone operating companies that find themselves over-stocked will use the platform to promote their stock to other Vodafone operating companies worldwide.

The internet-based platform is called the ‘Vodafone Spot Market Trading Platform’. It operates very much like a ‘Commodity Stock Exchange’, where offers and requests are matched up, and buyer and seller can agree on the terms, and conclude their transactions, quickly and efficiently online and within hours.

According to Essam Bishara, Managing Director, gsmExchange.com, “We have hit a key milestone in our development and we have had the challenging task of creating a platform that was both easy to use and intuitive, that would also integrate with the existing gsmExchange.com platform to provide a market data feed. He added, “Furthermore, a distributor can quite easily integrate their systems with the platform, ensuring that all their offers and price lists are automatically updated for Vodafone operating companies’ benefit.”

The platform is already servicing selected Vodafone operating companies and the plan is to rollout the service during 2008 across the Vodafone family.

gsmExchange.com is the brain child of Managing Director Essam Bishara, who in the late 1990s, recognised the need to link industry players, e.g. network operators, distributors, retail chains to form a ‘stock exchange’ for mobile handsets. Today, gsmExhange.com has achieved industry leadership with over 20,000 members worldwide and approximately 500,000 handsets per day being placed on the site.

The gsmExchange.com platform serves the industry wholesale and retail channels on a global scale, supplying them with a valuable network with which to trade. Furthermore, the volume of data thus generated gives their clients a unique look into the workings and trends of the wholesale mobile handset market.

ENDS

6 February 2008

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e-mail: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, tel: (01) 716 3712.

Editors Notes

gsmExchange.com is a global online trading platform for the GSM & telecommunication industry which brings together network operators, manufacturers, trading companies, distributors, wholesalers and retail chains from around the world. gsmExchange.com was founded by Essam Bishara.

NovaUCD is University College Dublin’s €11 million Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre. NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research and for the development of co-operation with industry and business. NovaUCD as a purpose-built centre also nurtures new technology and knowledge-intensive enterprises. NovaUCD has over 40 incubation units, including bio-incubation units, and provides innovators and entrepreneurs with the necessary support and knowledge to take their ideas from proof of principle to commercial success. Twenty-three knowledge-intensive companies are currently located in NovaUCD. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.