Imagine watching live sport, music videos and two-hour movies from a standard 2.5G phone. In the five years since we formed ROK Group, we’ve invested $41m (£21m) of our money developing media and entertainment products for mass-market 2.5G phones. In Apri

I formed ROK in 2002 with my friend John Paul DeJoria, cofounder of John Paul Mitchell Systems hair care products, a self-made multimillionaire. We set up a research-and-development office in Wales and employed a team of IT professionals. Their remit was to invent the best multimedia platform for mobile phones, with the idea that you should be able to do everything from one device. We didn’t want to restrict our products to those telecos with a 3G offering.

After all, of the 2.5 billion people with mobile phones, only 180 million are on 3G. 3G represents a small segment of the overall market.

ROK now employs 150 people, we have filed 43 patent applications for new technologies – with three of these already granted – and we’ve launched three main products. The first is our streaming mobile television service, ROK TV. For a monthly fee, subscribers can view 22 channels, from Fox News to National Geographic. It’s available in nine countries and we have 250,000 subscribers. We also run a free-to-watch mobile TV service, called FreeBe TV.

Third, we’ve developed ROK Media Store, an iTunes-style portal for mobile phones, which we’re launching in June. You download the ROK Media Store on to your PC, then burn content – such as cartoons, games, music videos and films – on to your mobile memory card.

We only starting selling products last year, but we expect turnover to hit $25m – and to be in the black – by the end of 2007. We’re keen to grow, not just organically, but through acquisitions. We decided to go public to provide us with the capital we needed to expand. Listing in the US is expensive; it costs three times as much as in the UK because there’s a far greater emphasis on legal compliance and due diligence. However, high-tech companies tend to attract higher valuations in the US as well as a global market of retail and institutional investors.

In April, we raised $7m from a Swiss investment firm, in return for a ten per cent stake in the business, to help us fund the IPO. We were picky about who we chose. We wanted investors who were media-and tech-savvy. We then took ROK public via a reverse takeover of an already listed US-based company called CyberFund. Using a cash injection of $20m, we bought all the issued and outstanding shares in CyberFund, then renamed them ROK Entertainment Group, Inc. The advantage of working through CyberFund is that it took us less than 60 days to become a publicly trading corporation rather than the six to 12 months it would have taken via a traditional IPO. We are now listed on the OTC Bulletin Board and intend to qualify for Nasdaq in three to four months.

The global mobile TV market is worth $1.1bn, and is projected to grow to $30bn by 2011. We’re ideally placed to take advantage of that trend. Being a public company will give us far more credibility and the muscle to expand into a billion-dollar business.

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