EVER wanted to give your phone number to someone you met - a business contact, housing agent or even a date - but did not want them to keep calling you if the relationship soured? And what about worrying if they will pass your number to other people? In the past you had to change your number to stop unwanted contact. But GlobalRoam's new cMask service lets you give out a cMask number that others can call and SMS as if it were your real number.

If you want contact to cease you just delink the cMask number without having to change your real number. And only those you give your cMask number to can contact you. Anyone else who calls the cMask number from another line won't be able to reach you.

GlobalRoam, which is listed on PhilipCapital's OTC market, may be about to strike gold with the new service. This month it signed a preliminary pact with China Unicom New Space - a subsidiary of giant China Unicom - to launch the cMask service in four Chinese cities by the middle of next year. And dating online communities Eteract.com and SingaporeCupid.com started using cMask this year to let members chat on the phone without giving their real numbers.

GlobalRoam chief executive Clarence Tan (main head picture) says the technology is useful for many purposes. "You can give cMask numbers to business partners but if the deal turns bad you can easily break the link. And when people advertise to buy and sell things, they can give out their cMask number and deactivate it later."

GlobalRoam's second new service, gCross, lets mobile phone users call their friends' personal computers (PCs) to chat using a Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or instant messaging. This helps parties save money as PC users do not have to pay for calls received.

Older technology required a unique number to be bought for every PC, which could be expensive, Mr Tan says. "If there are two million VoIPusers, you need two million numbers." But gCross uses technology that helps the company save resources so only 200 numbers are needed for four million VoIP users.

Both services use SmartMap, a technology that GlobalRoam has filed a patent for. SmartMap was developed by professors at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and is based on mapping algorithms. "The professors provided the algorithms and we commercialised the technology by putting up applications," says Mr Tan, who has an MBA from NUS.

Strong belief

Fatte Telecom, the exclusive licensee of SmartMap, was bought by GlobalRoam for $3 million last year. Mr Tan, 40, set up GlobalRoam in 2001 with $250,000 after a previous IT start-up went under when the dotcom bubble burst. "We couldn't pull through because of funding issues, but I still believed in what I did," he says.

So he started GlobalRoam, which provided technology to tier two and three operators such as MediaRing and PhoenixComms, to provide hassle-free budget global roaming services. "When users go overseas and get a foreign SIM card our system forwards calls from Singapore to the card," he says. "Calls are charged at local rates and users only pay for call forwarding services."

GlobalRoam gets paid in different ways. Sometimes it shares profit with the operators, other times it sells the technology to operators for a fixed price.

The company, which raised $2.4 million on OTC last year, is not yet profitable. Revenue last year was $2.5 million. For the first half of this year it was $443,000. But Mr Tan says that with its new services, GlobalRoam is going for tier one operators like StarHub. And it will focus marketing efforts on China, which is a huge market.

Setting up the company was difficult, and Mr Tan did not draw an income in the first year. The start-up capital he forked out was used to pay engineers to develop software and buy equipment. "I even had to ask my girlfriend to buy me lunch," he says. They are now married. Later, he obtained funds from an angel investor and the government.

GlobalRoam scored its first contract with a tier one operator in April when StarHub's Advanced Multimedia Services chose it to co-develop services for voice communication across the mobile phone and PC.

Mr Tan says the company's profit margin for the two new services will "easily" be 70 per cent. "The operator provides the infrastructure and marketing. Our costs are only depreciation of equipment like software and servers as well as manpower."