Arlene Harris

Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chief Strategy Officer

GreatCall

Arlene Harris, GreatCall Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors, has more than 35 years experience as an entrepreneur, board member, and investor in a number of successful companies in wireless related businesses. Often referred to as the “First Lady of Wireless,” Harris won industry-wide acclaim in May 2007 when she became the first female inductee into the Wireless Hall of Fame, a joint effort of RCR Wireless News, Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) and the Enterprise Wireless Association (formerly the Industrial Telecommunications Association).

Arlene founded GreatCall and launched Jitterbug in 2006 in partnership with Samsung to create a simple and personalized cell phone experience. The Jitterbug phone and service has earned top honors as a finalist in Yahoo’s Last Gadget Standing competition at CES 2007 and was named to the New York Times 10 Best Brilliant Ideas of 2006 (as judged by David Pogue) as well as Reader’s Digest Top 100 Products. Under her guidance, GreatCall won the Wireless Industry’s coveted Andrew Seybold Choice Award for “Best New Company” at CTIA in 2007.

Prior to GreatCall, Arlene founded SOS Wireless Communication to commercialize low usage, safety-oriented cellular phone service. 4000+ SOS customers are now customers of GreatCall.   While incubating the concept, SOS’s services and manufacturing participants included several companies involved in communication such as Western Wireless, US West, PacTel Mobile/AirTouch later Verizon, Alltel, Hughes Electronics, Rockwell and IBM.

In 1986, Arlene started Subscriber Computing (SCI), a California-based billing and customer services software company. SCI designed most of the systems used by large messaging and other communications companies worldwide including British Telecom, Motorola, PageMart, PageNet and Metromedia. SCI also, at Arlene’s direction, built the first cellular switch provisioning systems used to activate cellular customer accounts.  In addition, she invented and founded a company to develop (in partnership with SCI, Motorola and Oki) the world’s first complete customer specific cellular management systems to provide services to credit card-activated cellular phones, for which she has two patents. This was the first niche cellular reseller (now known as a MVNO) in history. The business opportunity was licensed to GTE, now Verizon, in 1988. SCI was sold to Corsair in 1997 and then became part of Lightbridge (LTBG).

In 1983, Arlene joined cellular technology pioneer Marty Cooper to found Cellular Business Systems, Inc., which became the largest independent billing and customer service systems builder in the emerging cellular industry. CBSI was sold to Cincinnati Bell (NKA Convergys) in 1986.

Before CBSI, Arlene helped lead her family’s Los Angeles-based business, ICS (now USA Mobility), which was the largest paging company in a single area of the world before it was sold to Metromedia in 1983.

Besides investing and advising several young companies, and service on several boards over the years, Ms. Harris holds several issued and has current patent filings related to wireless communications. She has served on several committees of the FCC and TIA, and PCIA. She received the PCIA Foundation’s Year 2000 distinguished Chairman's award and is a Fellow in the Radio Club of America.