Truphone appoints veteran Tom Carter as president of Truphone’s operations in North and South America. His appointment, together with demonstrations of Truphone's service on Windows Mobile devices at VON, are key preparations as Truphone readies itself to push further into the market in the Americas.

With a career spanning more than 20 years, Carter brings both vision and experience to Truphone. In the past he has founded and funded startups and has led sales, marketing and business-development teams in Asia, Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In recent years, he has turned his attention to the area of fixed-mobile convergence, co-founding BridgePort Networks.

With BridgePort Networks, Carter personally funded the initial development team and then took an active operating role in the company. He participated in securing two rounds of funding that raised more than $35 million in venture capital. As a senior vice president for BridgePort, he led the company’s international expansion by establishing offices in London, Toronto, Tokyo and Hong Kong. This came on the heels of his successes at Adaptive Broadband (formerly California Microwave). There he transformed the company’s sales strategy by establishing channel and OEM programs that augmented their existing efforts.

He was also a co-founder of Mobile, a venture-backed application service provider for wireless carriers and Internet content providers, which was sold to SOFTWARE.COM (now Openwave) for $350 million.

During the mid-1990s, while at Tandem Computers (now COMPAQ), Carter was instrumental in pioneering the first off-switch “home location register” (HLR) application for mobile-subscriber authorization—now deployed in 20 countries across 73 carriers. This development was enabled by a strategic alliance with development funding from Rogers AT&T and McCaw Cellular (now AT&T) that was secured by Carter and his Tandem telecom team.

Carter, 46, holds a bachelor’s degree (with honors) in business administration and commerce (finance and marketing major) from the University of Alberta, Canada. He holds a U.S. patent as co-author of a design for a mobile-over-Internet network technology.