Article

Going international: A tale of two execs

KAL and InfoTouch are two companies with worldwide aspirations. When KAL's Steve Hensley and Info Touch's Hamed Shahbazi dropped by, Rick Redding got their stories.

March 24, 2002

It?'s not often that we get world travelers dropping in here at NetWorld Alliance?'s Kentucky

headquarters. That?'s why it was a treat to get a double dose of international presence during two days, right here in our old Kentucky home.

We?ve been making an effort to understand world markets lately, and our two visitors contributed much to our education.

In KAL?'s Steve Hensley and Info Touch?s Hamed Shahbazi, we couldn?t have asked for a pair more intent or more enthusiastic about the growing international market for kiosks.

Steve Hensley, KAL sales and marketing VP	Hamed Shahbazi, president of Info Touch

Steve, vice president of sales and marketing for KAL, drove a few hours down the road from Dayton, Ohio, where he?'s set up the Scottish company?'s U.S. presence. A former NCR executive, Hensley is heading up KAL?'s efforts to gain a foothold in the U.S. for its Kalignite software development platform and Web commerce client.

His efforts are aided by $3.5 million in funding KAL recently received from the Royal Bank of Scotland. He said he expects to use the money to hire a sales force here in the States.

KAL?'s international commitment was evident when Steve told us how KAL, which has operations in many countries, translated much of the information on its Web site into seven languages. Don?t look for that to happen at KIOSKmarketplace anytime soon, but at least we know someone who has done it.

Getting aboard KAL

Steve explained that after a dozen years in the ATM and kiosk trenches for NCR, it took a persuasive recruiting pitch from KAL president Aravinda Korala to convince him to take a chance with the software company.

Originally, his new bosses wanted him to set up shop in a more ?international? U.S. location, such as Atlanta or Chicago. Steve said he looked at office space in Chicago, but in the end family considerations trumped his desire to relocate. He figured it didn?t really matter where his base was, since he?d be traveling most of the time anyway.

Then someone at KAL?'s overseas headquarters said Cincinnati seemed a reasonable place for him to set up. ?They?ve got Skyline Chili there, don?t they??

Youth movement

The first question I asked Hamed Shahbazi, president of Info Touch Technologies, after he talked to us about his business plans, was the same one on the minds of an obviously impressed NetWorld management team.

?How old are you??

I knew that he?d already held the top leadership post at the kiosk company, which did $4.3 million in revenue in 2000, for four years. I had heard him talk of Info Touch?'s plans, mentioning playing in the same league as the America Onlines and Time Warners of the corporate world.

?26,? he said.

Hamed likes to speak about the future, about the impact public access to the Internet will have on businesses throughout the world. Info Touch has been involved in a number of exceedingly successful projects in Canada, where it employs about 60 people at its Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters. InfoTouch has launched a pilot project to install its Surfnet kiosk management software in kiosks it creates for Circle K convenience stores in the U.S.

But I wanted to know more about how a native Iranian grew up in Vancouver and became the president of a leading kiosk company at the tender age of 22.

Leaving war behind

It turns out that when Hamed was five, his parents left Iran for a vacation in Italy and never returned. He said war broke out while his family was on holiday, and his engineer father chose not to return. So Hamed enrolled briefly in an Italian school, and within a few years his father chose Vancouver as his family?'s new home.

Hamed eventually enrolled at the University of British Columbia and earned a degree in Applied Science and Civil Engineering. He said he developed business skills organizing a humanitarian project for UNICEF while in school. He also took a part-time job at a one-year-old company, Info Touch Systems, in 1994.

Three years later, he raised $250,000 in seed money to fund a new direction for the company, and took over as CEO of the newly-renamed Info Touch Technologies.

Adding ads

Today he?'s gaining converts to a business philosophy that says public Internet access is the next great thing. Advertising support plays a key role in that vision. This year he created an advertising agency, Clicks and Mortar Media Inc. (CMMI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Info Touch.

?We are marketing our business after the AOL philosophy,? he said. ?AOL had sales, Time Warner does content. AOL gets paid for distributing content by creating the access points. CMMI is the Time Warner component of our company. You can see the relevance to the kiosk industry.?

Going global

Steve and Hamed share an optimism about the future of their companies, and a view that there?'s a world of untapped resources on our planet. We?ll be watching to see their business plans unfold.

[Editor's note: Info Touch Technologies became Tio Networks in April 2006.]