Off line

Telecommunications Americas, March, 2005 by Ted McKenna

Growing up in Iceland, Skuli Mogensen benefited from the kind of freedom kids have when they live someplace with little crime and few strangers. He and his friends could be outdoors from morning until night and not be held back by parents worried about where they were or what they were up to.

"The country itself is very big, but it's only got 300,000 people living there, so the feeling is really that of a small village. I think it's the only phone book in the world sorted by first name," says Mogensen, who in 1990 founded OZ Communications, a provider of instant messaging software, while he was still studying philosophy at the University of Iceland.

Based in Montreal, Canada, OZ began as a developer of high-end, three-dimensional graphics but moved into the instant messaging market in the late 1990s, when Mogensen and his colleagues--to whose dedication he credits the company's survival during the telecom downturn--identified the growing mobile messaging trend.

Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia are typically on the cutting edge in adopting new technologies, and while the trends there may have helped inspire OZ on its current path, Mogensen says the company, like many others, overestimated how quickly networks and technology would develop. "Until very recently, mobile phones have had very limited capabilities for displaying rich graphics or multithreaded texts," he says.

Is your company named after "The Wizard of Oz"?

We're wizards! Actually, we thought the name was great until we watched the movie and realized he wasn't really a wizard, was he?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

That's right. Just the man behind the curtain.

But it came from the movie. We thought it had magic to it.

How many instant messages do you send every day?

Oof .... I have a very heavily populated buddy list. All 100 employees of the company are on. I would say anywhere from 50 to 500.

Do you ever just turn it off, if you have to get work done?

Sure. I will do that. I will set myself to "busy" occasionally. But usually I try to keep myself available to my friends and colleagues. I think, like with most technologies or communications methods, people understand not to abuse it.

So you haven't developed carpal tunnel syndrome?

Fortunately, I'm still stuck at my desk most of the day, so when I say 50 to 500, the bulk of those are still on the desktop. So I'm free of those symptoms so far.

Growing up, were you the kind of person who would take things apart to see how they worked?

Not really. I was much too reckless. I would take things apart but I wouldn't put them back together. So while I might be very curious, I would move on to the next thing. Fortunately, we have a great team here that is much more qualified than me to put things back together.

Do your philosophy studies help you in the business world?

Actually, I think they apply to everything in life. Most significantly they've taught me to ask relevant questions in all circumstances, to really understand and force people to think critically and logically.

Meaning sometimes people get caught up in unnecessary details?

Yes, and forget that while they have a certain viewpoint, they should never underestimate external factors. Having gone through the challenges of 2001 to 2003, when the whole telecom melt-down occurred, I think a lot of smart people spent a lot of time and money building solutions that were not necessarily wrong, but the timing was wrong. There were factors outside everybody's control: The networks weren't ready, and the phones weren't ready.