More From Sky @ Helio

Helio's headquarters -- Helio House, a they call it -- has a hip quotient that befits the company's branding: airy spaces, cement floors, and CEO Sky Dayton working at a stand-up desk. Helio is trying to cut a unique path in the cell phone business -- basically, a premium brand that is always a few steps ahead of technology offered by the mass-market cell phone makers and carriers. It only ha 100,000 subscribers so far, but serial entrepreneur Dayton still says it's "the fastest-growing business I've ever been involved in."

So, Dayton says, Helio helped develop its new Ocean phone so the form factor and internal software worked with Helio's services and the Internet in whole new ways. He cites the Ocean's GPS YouTube tagging. If you use the Ocean to shoot a video, the phone's GPS figures out where you are and tags the location to the video file. With one click, you can send the video from your phone right into YouTube -- which doesn't yet offer a way to organize videos by geography. (Flickr does allow photos to be tagged with geographical places, and video sites are expected to follow that trend.) At some point, people will be able to sort YouTube for all videos shot near a certain address, for instance. "We're ahead of that development," Dayton says.

I asked Dayton about features popular in Korea that might come to the US, since Korea's SK Telecom is Helio's partner. He didn't want to talk about pending services, but noted that people in Korea increasingly use their cell phones to pay for things in stores. The phones carry credit or debit card information. That might take a while in the US because the infrastructure -- such as readers at cash registers -- and standards are not in place yet.

Sky Dayton, CEO, Helio with Chloe Sevigny-Los Angeles, May 3, 2006
Credit: Mark Sullivan/WireImage.com