The aftermath of last year's terrorist attacks left the travel industry mired in financial crisis, not to mention the other sectors that cater to business and leisure travelers. To Blake Swensrud, the entrepreneur who launched International Mobile Communications' Worldcell service, which resells GSM service to U.S. travelers going overseas, the sharp decline in international travel that followed the terrorist attacks might have seemed an overwhelming setback.

“For my core business, [Sept. 11, 2001] was a big blow,” said Swensrud, IMC's chairman and CEO. “International travel basically halted for a month.” However, as he has before in his career, Swensrud looked for opportunity amid the chaos, and he subsequently beefed up Worldcell's offerings to include new disaster-oriented services.

The company created an SMS-based service called Worldlink that sends alerts to Worldcell users about ongoing changes in travel restrictions and airport security around the world.

Having seen how communications broke down after the attacks disabled a Verizon Communications central office, IMC also created BeCon, a backup service based on a mini-mobile switch that can be tied into an enterprise's PBX.

Keeping his cool and thinking creatively during a crisis actually helped Swensrud enhance his company's revenue potential. And it wasn't the first time that happened.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, then 27-year-old Swensrud was one of many who, amid the cheers and chaos, smelled a business opportunity. For the previous five years, he had been working with a U.S. government agency assessing foreign telecom infrastructures and their related impact on political, economic and security levels.

“I did a lot of work on the effect telecom development could have on nations with totalitarian governments,” he said. In fact, while acting as research director for the International Communications Policy Project, the enterprising Swensrud co-authored a book, “Gorbachev's Information Revolution: Controlling Glasnost in a New Electronic Era.”

With communism on the apparent verge of collapse, Swensrud didn't waste time. He launched a newsletter, the Eastern European Telecom Report, that detailed what former Eastern Bloc countries could do to their telecom infrastructures to succeed after 1990.

The newsletter immediately found a loyal, paying subscriber base, but using his knowledge and experience to advise developing countries was just as important to Swensrud. “I wanted to do well by doing good,” he said.

Swensrud spent years traveling around the region and developing three more newsletters, and even worked closely with the ministers of communications in several countries to help them craft telecom legislation.

“[By 1995] I had become a global road warrior, but I also felt out of touch,” Swensrud said.

From his perch overseas, Swensrud saw how ignorant U.S. companies were to the business opportunities in Eastern Europe: “Only a few people at Langley [The C.I.A. headquarters] knew the extent of how these emerging markets were developing back then. Meanwhile, telecom vendors from Europe were rushing into those countries and U.S. vendors were losing out.”

He saw the opportunity for global cellular roaming to keep international businesspeople connected, but differing standards between North America and Europe made it difficult.

Swensrud's immediate solution was to launch a company, IMC, to re-sell GSM phones and roaming agreements from foreign carriers to business travelers and tourists prior to their international journeys. These were customers the foreign carriers otherwise wouldn't reach, so it wasn't difficult for Swensrud to convince a few large carriers that IMC should be their primary U.S. distribution channel.

Maybe that had something to do with how confident Swensrud was in his target customer profile. “I was the profile. All I had to do was find more people like me,” he said. Rather than acknowledging the different carriers behind the phones and roaming agreements, IMC created a single, easy-to-remember brand, Worldcell, and began marketing the service through travel agencies and advertisements in in-flight magazines.

Swensrud also knew that several federal government agencies had employees who traveled frequently to foreign locales and would be prime candidates for large, ongoing service contracts.

Over the last six years, IMC has become the top supplier of wireless phones overseas for federal government workers, and also has extended its resale of roaming agreements to service providers in more than 80 countries. Still, the company sometimes has tough negotiations with foreign service providers because it doesn't have its own network and no leverage to guarantee rapid service activation and fulfillment for its users. But that is about to change.

IMC has constructed a small mobile network in Iceland consisting of a switch and base station. The network is inconsequential in terms of local coverage, but the network facilities give IMC the power to activate service and control service features for its users. Swensrud said the company also will use the Iceland network as a roaming service bureau to promote true global roaming between U.S. and international carrier networks. “We'll use the service bureau to do translation between the IS-41 and GSM standards,” he said. The Iceland network inaugurated commercial service last month, and Swensrud said its first global roaming agreement with a U.S. carrier will be announced this fall.

Swensrud knows not every enterprise business will be interested in Worldcell services unless it has a great need for international travel, but he thinks the new features reflect the core intentions he has kept in mind since he started his newsletter business.

“The mission is akin to what I was doing in my first business — trying to encourage international telecom development for the future.”