Berggi started as a service wanting to charge you $9.99 a month to give your “dumb” phone e-mail and instant messaging capability. When we first looked at Berggi, a company, we were skeptical.
For a PR perspective it made things worse for itself by fudging some details about membership numbers when it launched.
Berggi says it warrants a second look: It has announced a three-year alliance with SINA, one of China’s biggest online content producers that is trying to move into mobile. The one-year-old Berggi has dropped the price tag on its service to zero, and says it has since grown to nearly two million registered users (again, we’re taking the company’s word on this, assuming it isn’t fudging). The company says it’s adding 15,000 registrations per day, and that 20 percent of the user base is logged-on to the service at all times.
If these figures are accurate, that’s good traction. But the next question is, how on earth does it plan to make money? It has built a strategy around localizing its service in multiple languages, and marketing it by advertising on websites. So it is paying money to advertise, but not bringing in any money for its free service. It plans to make money from advertising on its mobile service.
Co-founder and CEO, Babur Ozden says the deal with SINA, in which Berggi will power SINA’s mobile e-mail capabilities, could be its breakthrough moment. SINA’s online network reaches more 700 million unique visitors a day, but has not aggressively extended its reach into mobile. SINA is also the third largest e-mail provider in a country whose e-mail adoption rates are skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down.
Berggi claims that its technology reduces the cost of data necessary for e-mail from 300 Yuan a month to around 20, a big deal in a generally poor country. Babur says the goal of whole venture is to create a downloadable, feature-rich portal to all types of mobile content.
The company raised $9 million by selling a stake to Avanzit — a large Spanish telecom — and has offices in the U.S., Madrid and Beijing.

