Ontela's guiding principles are:

• Making our clients and their customers happy by delivering valuable mobile phone experiences with genre-redefining ease of use and reliability.
• Doing what's right in all of our dealings with business partners, end users, and our local community.
• Hiring the very best people and treating them accordingly.

The story of Ontela:

Ontela, Inc. was founded in 2005 by Dan Shapiro, Charles Zapata, and Brian Schultz. When the first working prototype was built and they watched their camera phone pictures arriving on the PC, they saw the potential to help wireless and image services companies come together and make millions of people a bit happier, better connected and more productive with better mobile experiences.

Charles Zapata: Dan and I worked on the various pieces of the very first prototype - Dan wrote a spec, I wrote some code, some code was contracted - and I had gotten the pieces working finally, but we hadn't done a full integration pass. So I send mail to Dan and told him all the pieces were in place. Dan calls me back a little later. "Charles, it's working." "Yeah, I know. There's a bug about something, and there's this other problem…" "No, no, you don't understand. It's working and it's totally awesome. You have to see this working in person to understand how amazing this is." So he comes by the house and shows me (a Nokia 66-something series). And, wow, it is pretty cool. And then we show some Important People. People in the know. And it is confirmed: it's not just pretty cool. It is something special. And a little while later, Ontela was born.