Biography

Ralph Simon is acknowledged as one of the founders of the modern mobile entertainment industry. Over the last 15 years, he has been a prominent global mobile trailblazer and innovator, helping grow the mobile entertainment and content industry, and playing a central role in its impact and presence worldwide.

Currently, he serves on the boards of several companies, including Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, India’s major mobile content producer, and also mobile games maker Tunewiki.com. This summer, he will combine his passion for football (soccer) and mobile to produce the mobile entertainment component of FIFA’s 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Simon heads the London-based Mobilium International Advisory Group, which provides high-level strategic advice and guidance to mobile handset makers, telco operators, technology companies, media companies, movie studio & TV networks, global music artists, ad agency groups, brands, and platform providers around the world. Specifically, Simon recommends unique, practical ways to expand a company’s mobile business and achieve profitability by growing revenues and maximizing impact from the use and distribution of mobile entertainment content, mobile music, messaging, mobile media technology and applications.

As founder and Chairman Emeritus of the influential Mobile Entertainment Forum - Americas (MEF), the global voice of the international mobile entertainment industry – he works to raise industry standards and identify mobile revenue opportunities. Simon acts as a high-level advisor to a variety of entertainment and technology companies that understand the importance of producing cross-platform mobile entertainment content to reach the over 4.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide.

He has been instrumental in pioneering the emerging field of Mobilology (previously known as Mociology), which examines the effects of mobile phone usage on psychology/behavior, sociology/community, culture, arts & entertainment, and the economy. In 2006, Simon established the world’s first professorial Chair in Mociology at the DaVinci Institute for Technology Management in Johannesburg, South Africa, and today he supports an international endeavor to secure Mobilology as a bona fide field of academic study.

Prior to his leadership in the mobile entertainment industry, Simon co-founded the Zomba Group of music companies (and record label Jive Records) in London in the 1970s, building it into the music industry’s leading independent music company. In the early '90s, he came to the US as Executive Vice President of Capitol Records and Blue Note Records in Hollywood and started EMI Music’s global New Media division.

Simon correctly predicted in 1997 that mobile phones would become the indispensable voice/social networking-and-music companion for consumers and their increasingly mobile lifestyles. He persuaded US music publishers to embrace this new mobile medium by granting the very first ring tone rights. This spurred a whole new mobile entertainment industry internationally, and Simon was dubbed ‘Father of the Ring Tone.’ That same year, he started the first ring tone company in the Americas, Europe, UK, Australia and Africa called Yourmobile. In 2003, Vivendi Universal purchased the company and renamed it Moviso, and it was the leading mobile entertainment content aggregator in the USA for many years.

Between 2005-2008, Simon produced the mobile portion of the three highest profile concerts in recent global TV history (prior to the HopeforHaitiNow telethon in January 2010): Live 8; Al Gore’s Live Earth; and the TED Conference organization’s Pangea Day. By integrating a mobile/SMS layer to all these events and capturing a new market using its preferred technology, Simon influenced the production of all future broadcast fundraisers.

For Live 8, he worked with the Live Aid organization, Sir Bob Geldof and Bono, to bring mobile connectivity to 12 countries simultaneously, delivering a television audience of over 700m viewers. Simon successfully enlisted massive cross-platform participation in Al Gore’s Live Earth global event, which spanned 10 countries and reached a global TV audience of over 300m viewers. That accomplishment led to his engagement as mobile producer for the 2007 TED Conference’s Prize-winning project – Pangea Day – a global telecast in 2008 featuring short films from filmmakers all over the world.

The influential trade publication Mobile Entertainment magazine has named him three times (2005, 2006, 2008) as one of the world’s Top 50 Executives in Mobile Entertainment, and in 2007, he received its special award for Outstanding Contribution to the Global Mobile Entertainment Industry.

Simon works closely with the GSM Association, the global governing body of the mobile phone industry, providing expert advice on the future of mobile use and mobile entertainment. He also has served for the past three years on the Visionary Committee for MIDEMNet/MIDEM, the international record industry’s annual convention that helps shape the global music industry’s best practices for use of intellectual property and music. He also works with media companies and artists to help shape their mobile strategies worldwide. One such example is RIM/BlackBerry’s partnership with his client, Irish rock band U2, during their current world tour, which he conceived.

Simon is an internationally popular speaker on mobile and mobile entertainment. Over the past year, he has delivered keynote addresses at the important Music Matters conference in Hong Kong; the Canadian government’s Canada 3.0 conference; Music Matters India in Mumbai; and, the World Copyright Summit in Washington, D.C.

At the GSM/Mobile World Congress in Barcelona/2010, Simon hosted and moderated the special Mobile Entertainment Summit. Other notable speaking engagements have included the GSM/Asia Congress (China); the India Telecoms conference (New Delhi); and major mobile conferences in the USA, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Spain, South Africa and the UK.

Ralph Simon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, where his “Future of Media” lecture series is popular, and he is a member of the Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences in the USA. He is affiliated with the Mobile Life Sciences Forum in California, which is driving the early progress of the emerging mobile health industry.

March 2010