Make And Save Your OwnSkin

OwnSkin.com is a website that allows users to customize their mobile phones by making their own mobile phone content such as themes (also known as skins) and wallpapers. The online theme creator makes it easy for users to create their own themes in just three simple steps, and then save, tag, share or download these themes. And the price of doing this? Free.

OwnSkin was founded by Chin Kwek Loong and Low Hsin Yee under their Singapore-based company Dalrus Pte Ltd. The company first started selling mobile content, but decided to give content away for free after the market declined, which led to the creation of OwnSkin.

“The tool(s) provided by the phone manufacturer(s) in the past was too cumbersome. We plan to simplify it, ” says co-founder Kwek Loong. “In the beginning, we targeted Symbian phones from Nokia, but soon moved to feature phones from Sony Ericsson,” shares Kwek Loong. The company later expanded to cover Windows Mobile phones and Blackberry.

Most recently, OwnSkin is exploring Android phones and Apple’s iPhone. Its latest release is the OwnSkin LiveWallpaper Creator for Android, which allows users to have full control over how the home screens of their Android phone to look, including creating their own live wallpapers, how the clock, compass, calendars and battery indicators to look. “In future, the user would even be able to pull information from the Internet to their home screen,” adds Kwek Loong. Here’s how the OwnSkin LiveWallpaper Creator works:

Staying Free

Aside from advertising, it’s difficult to imagine how OwnSkin generates enough revenue to sustain itself by offering such tools and contents free to users. But the site has so far managed to garner 15 million registered users on our site, who have created more than 25 million different kinds of content using its tools – definitely a sizable audience.

OwnSkin is 99-percent self-funded.