Meet our Chief Executive Ralph Simon

Meet the super-conductor, who knows what’s coming next.

As pioneer & one of the founders of the modern mobile industry our founder Ralph Simon is popularly known as the 'father of the ringtone'. He is a curious creative mind on a relentless search around the world for the latest in mobile video innovation, new tech platforms, A.I.devices, creativity & digital start-ups.

Over the last two decades, he has been a prominent global mobile trailblazer & innovator, helping grow the world’s mobile entertainment, mobile content industry & mobile health platforms, & playing a central role in its impact & presence around the world. Today, mobile is the world’s key platform with over 8.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide – grown from 34m in 1993 to 9 billion in 2021.

Simon heads the London-based Mobilium Global Group, which provides high-level strategic counsel and guidance to brands, media companies and professional organizations across the entire mobile spectrum, from mobile handset makers and telco operators, to technology companies, media companies, healthcare organizations, movie studios and TV networks, global music and YouTube artists and TV personalities, ad agency groups, brands, and platform providers around the world.

Specifically, Simon guides & advises clients, cities & companies on innovative, practical ways to expand an individual or company or a country’s mobile social media presence through effective & productive mobile disruption, accurately targeted brand development & profile enhancement. With tailored high-level mobile & creative service expertise services he helps businesses achieve consistently good profitability, expand revenues, seed mobile profile attention, grow reputational trust, growth & impact. This includes the effective use, distribution & launch marketing of mobile apps, health & micro-education content, entertainment content, mobile music, mobile video games, mobile money, mobile social media, mobile media technology & latest digital SIM-card technology applications.

What Mobilium & Ralph Simon are known for
  • Frequent TED Conference & TEDx speaker in the USA, India, Europe, the Baltics, the Nordics, Africa & South America
  • Popular & distinguished Speaker, interviewer & moderator at major international innovation conferences & the Mobile World Congress
  • Developed the world’s 1st commercial music ring tone service outside of Korea & Japan
  • Produced the world’s biggest live, televised events ever (Live 8 with Bono & Sir Bob Geldof, Al Gore’s Live Earth – world’s 1st global eco multi-country TV event, TED’s ‘Pangea Day’, FIFA World Cup …)
  • Built Africa’s first-ever Mobile Health Delivery Network
  • One of the world’s Top 50 executives in mobile innovation
  • Distinguished music publisher who signed The Village People, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Joy Division, & many more
  • Co-founded world’s most successful independent music company Jive Records (Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake & more)
  • Created the 1st mobile content development company in the industry
Detailed Biography

Simon began his career co-founding the Zomba Group of music companies (including record label Jive Records)  in the 1970s, building it into the world’s leading independent music and music publishing company. In the early ’90s, he came to the USA & established a media company in Silicon Valley.  In the mid 90’s he was appointed Executive Vice President of Capitol Records and Blue Note Records in Hollywood and built Capitol Records & EMI’s emerging new media business into a successful and significant global enterprise that established new business models for the record and music publishing industry. He is known for discovering Will Smith and publishing YMCA.

In 1997, Simon correctly predicted that mobile phones would become the indispensable voice/social networking-and-music companion for consumers and their increasingly mobile lifestyles. He created a start-up called Yourmobile and persuaded US and UK music publishers to embrace this new mobile medium by granting what would become the very first ring tone rights. Yourmobile became the first commercial ring tone company in the Americas, Europe, UK, Australia, and Africa, and spurred a new and international mobile entertainment industry. By 2003, Vivendi Universal purchased Yourmobile, renaming it Moviso, where Simon remained as an advisor. Today, Simon is popularly known as the ‘Father of the Ring Tone.’

Between 2005 and 2009, Simon served as the mobile producer for three of the highest-profile, live global broadcast events in recent history. Live 8, Bono and Sir Bob Geldof’s nine-city global concert, brought mobile connectivity to nine capital cities and an international television audience of over 800,000,000 viewers. This enormous people-powered call-to-action resulted in the G8 countries reducing the debt of the world’s poorest nations. He was also the Mobile Producer of Al Gore’s Live Earth, the world’s first eco-centric global impact event that spanned 10 countries and brought the vital message and visibility of global climate change to a worldwide audience of over 500,000,000 television viewers and online participants. In 2009, Simon was the Mobile Producer for the TED.com’s Prize-winning project,  Pangea Day, a global multi-platform broadcast featuring short films from international filmmakers, from around the world. By integrating a mobile/SMS layer to all these worldwide events, Simon helped set the standard for integrating mobile technology as an essential element in global television and major global event broadcasting.

The influential trade publication Mobile Entertainment magazine named Simon as one of the world’s Top 50 Executives in Mobile Entertainment for 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010, and in 2007, he received its special award for Outstanding Contribution to the Global Mobile Entertainment Industry.

In early 2014 Mobilium Africa, its pan-Africa subsidiary launched the first comprehensive, pan-African and Africa-specific mobile health delivery network known as the Smart Health Hub. With one billion Africans and some 800 million African mobile subscribers, Africa has the deep potential for mobile device growth across all sectors playing a key role in the development of the global mobile industry. Mobilium Africa has worked with The Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria & the World Health Organisation (WHO), the official participants in Smart Health Consortium, as is SafePoint Single-Use Syringes, and the support of the World Health Organization Maternal & Newborn Health arm (PMCNH). Smart Health Hub is part of a wider range of mobile commerce, software and innovation that Mobilium has begun to bring to the entire African continent embodying mobile health, mobile wallet technology, mobile payment systems and new ways of using mobile gamification, mobile social messaging, mobile social music and mobile social lifestyle research into creating better lives for digital citizens everywhere.

Simon also works closely providing high-level mobile media and content guidance and counsel to global thought leaders, media companies, media properties, and creative artists to identify global mobile revenue opportunities and shape their mobile strategies worldwide. In addition, he works closely with the GSM Association, the global governing body of the international mobile phone industry. The GSMA organizes the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona -106,000 attendees and over 170 Ministerial delegations.

Internationally, Simon is known as a highly impactive and popular speaker and moderator on all aspects of mobile commerce, content & the creative digital industries. He has delivered keynote addresses at major international gatherings, including

  • the annual Music Matters/All That Matters/Digital Matters conferences (Singapore)
  • South Asian Mobile Conference (Colombo, Sri Lanka); Music Matters India (Mumbai)
  • Presidential Innovation Forum Conference (Moscow); Mobile World Congress (Barcelona)
  • Pioneers Tech Festival (Vienna)
  • TED Global (Oxford)
  • Connected Creativity (Cannes)
  • the World Copyright Summit (Brussels and Washington, D.C.)
  • Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) annual conference
  • The Kofi Annan Centre for ICT Excellence (Accra, Ghana)
  • MusExpo (Los Angeles)
  • the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance conference (San Diego)
  • Rutberg Wireless Influencers’ Conference  (Palos Verdes, California)
  • SXSW (Austin, Texas)
  • Brilliant Minds in Stockholm
  • SLUSH in Helsinki
  • The Eurasian Partnership in Yerevan, Armenia
  • DLD Tel Aviv & Munich
  • The African Leadership Network in Mauritius
  • Africa 4 Tech in Marrakech, Morocco
  • Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine in San Diego

and numerous other high-level speaking engagements around the world.

Currently, he serves on the boards of several companies, including Hungama Digital Media Entertainment (India’s major mobile Bollywood content producer), and The World Summit Awards and World Youth Summit Awards –  the United Nations and its Millennium Development Goals annual global mobile apps competition. Simon is a board advisor to the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (San Diego, California), the global leader in the fast-growing wireless connected health industry, and is Chairman Emeritus of the influential Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas, which he founded. The MEF is the global voice of the international mobile content industry.

He also serves on the Global Business Council for Education (GBC-Education) – the GBC came into being at the urging of the Rt Hon. Gordon Brown MP, former British Prime Minister, and now Special Education Envoy for the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the UK and a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences in the USA.