Gumiyo, a Woodland Hills-based mobile content service provider, will go live this month with a new service aimed at helping small businesses and service providers go mobile. Gumiyo CEO Shuki Lehavi, 38, said beta testing will begin this month on MySiteAnywhere.com, a cloud-hosted service aimed at helping professionals and small businesses build a website in minutes and make that website available on multiple devices such as smartphones, wireless tablets, or desktop PCs. “You save costs, because instead of employing a person, we can automatically generate (your website) on the cloud,” Lehavi said. Lehavi, who holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, will showcase the MySiteAnywhere service this month at the two-day Israel Conference at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles. The conference is designed to foster business between the U.S. and Israel and features CEOs, presidents, and founders of significant businesses that were founded in Israel, have R&D operations in Israel, do business in Israel, or represent investors in Israeli companies. Gumiyo is recognized as a global industry leader in the field of mobile, cross-device solutions with major corporate clients and small business clients in the publishing, automotive, real estate and retail industries. Company officials say Gumiyo’s mobile platform powers more than 27,000 websites, including the mobile site for the Los Angeles Times and mobile websites for publisher BUZZMEDIA’s, including their celebrity news website Celebuzz.com and the official websites for reality stars Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian. Its applications and messaging programs reach more than 150,000 small businesses. The company was founded in 2006 by Lehavi and Richard Abronson, who serves as vice president of marketing and enterprise sales, and funded with private funding from angel investors. Early investors on the company’s board of directors include Abronson’s father, serial entrepreneur and founder of two technology companies Charles J. Abronson, and Yuri Pikover, a co-founder of Calabasas-based Xylan Corp., which provides high-bandwidth switching technology for local area networks. Lehavi declined to disclose revenues, but said Gumiyo has been able to double top line growth for the past three years and turned profitable in 2010. “The majority of our revenue mix is from subscription revenue,” he said, adding that the company is using profits to fund expansion. The company, which employs 21 in Woodland Hills, is in growth mode and plans to hire another nine employees to its engineering and sales operations by the end of the year, Lehavi said. “Our solution in real estate, automotive and with media publishers has been mainly to focus on the need to drive information down to consumers,” Lehavi said. For example, he said, an automotive customer used the service to create a targeted advertising campaign for car dealerships where consumers received text messages on their mobile phones about specific vehicles. The Tribune Co. has used Gumiyo’s service for four years, said Andy Vogel, senior vice president of digital and mobile. “One of their solutions that we monetize the most is the SMS side of the equation,” Vogel said. “We can roll out one solution to hundreds of auto dealers across the country. We’ve sold hundreds over the past four years.” With MySiteAnywhere, users also receive a domain name, an SMS keyword, and a QR or “quick response” code that allows them to encode company information or marketing messages that can be read by mobile devices using a QR code app. Users pay a subscription fee of $14.99 a month. Lehavi said beta testing on MySiteAnywhere will launch with several partners, who combined will reach more than 50,000 small- to mid-sized businesses. The service is expected to be widely available beginning in June.
Woodland Hills Firm Launches New Mobile Service
