Ben Lilienthal, 33, has been running Vapps since January 2003. The company provides VoIP conference calling features that allow up to 500 participants on calls through eBay’s Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and Vapps’ own HighSpeedConferencing.com service—just the thing for corporate press conferences.
He sold his first business, Nascent Technologies, a web-based email service, to CMGI in 1999 for $6 million. Then he was asked by Napster co-founder Sean Parker to help run the peer-to-peer music-sharing service, along with Napster developer Shawn Fanning.
Mr. Lilienthal may have anticipated the spate of copyright infringement lawsuits the original Napster would soon endure, and wisely declined. He decided that good old-fashioned conference calls would be a better market. Indeed, conference calling earns $3 billion to $4 billion worldwide per year in revenue, according to Duxbury, Massachusetts-based Wainhouse Research.
Hoboken, New Jersey-based Vapps is helping VoIP providers like Skype and Yahoo to appeal more to a broader business audience. “We’re becoming the wholesale clearinghouse for VoIP conference calling,” Mr. Lilienthal explains. “It’s a combination of our proprietary technology and our ability to integrate it into their environment.”
That gives Vapps an edge, even though some other companies are eyeing the conferencing market as well. “Where Vapps has been unique is that they’re the first ones to really target the voice-over-IP industry and come up with a broad, high-volume, low-cost service using different technology than other companies had been using for years,” says Andrew W. Davis, managing partner at Wainhouse Research. “Because of that, they were able to make inroads with services like Skype.”
The main competition is traditional phone companies such as Sprint Nextel and AT&T, as well as other web-based conferencing services such as ConferenceCalls.com.
Vapps, in fact, doesn’t have even 1 percent of the conference-calling volume yet, but by the first quarter of next year the company hopes to achieve at least that in North America. “There’s a lot of upside left, thank goodness,” Mr. Lilienthal says.—Michael Cohn