13 weeks 18 hours 43 min ago Azuki Systems unveils its latest technology Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) - Jim Ricotta and Cheng Wu aren’t household names, but among New England technology entrepreneurs, they are rock stars. Between them, they helped found five telecom and networking startups that later got acquired for more than $7 billion dollars by giants like Cisco, IBM and Lucent. Their new big idea involves the cellphone.

After months in secret startup in Acton, Massachusetts, their new company, Azuki Systems, gets formally launched next week. Its big innovation: a software platform called Media Mashup. It turns web content into phone-sized pieces and formats.

Then, catching the social networking craze, Azuki lets you share web-phone content with your Facebook or MySpace friends like you'd share something by computer.

Azuki also enables advertisers to put in ads relevant to stuff you've shown you like to buy.

Three billion people own cellphones, and 75 percent, it's estimated, can download web content.
Cellphone companies' expensive new TV-on-phone services haven't been a raging success yet.
But mobile entertainment is still a healthy $20 billion dollar market now, potentially tripling to $64 billion by 2012.

One reason Azuki's sure to create some buzz: the track record of Chairman Wu and CEO Ricotta. To quote the mutual fund warning, past results are no guarantees of future success.

But with lucrative startups behind them like Datapower and Sightpath, Arris, Acopia, and Arrowpoint, which fetched