MERGING MOBILE: Motricity looks to InfoSpace to complete mobile plans

Motricity Inc. sees more than just a mobile search engine in InfoSpace’s mobile business. It sees a kind of wrecking ball.
The Durham, N.C.-based mobile content company is putting the finishing touches on its $185 million acquisition of InfoSpace’s mobile operations, which was announced last month. The deal, which signals InfoSpace’s exit from wireless, marks an aggressive move by Motricity to tie its mobile content business to search.
The acquisition expands Motricity’s customer base to include 11 of the 13 largest carriers in North America, including the four tier-one U.S. operators. Carl Icahn, who participated in a Series H round of financing for Motricity in February, provided an undisclosed “significant” sum to help secure the deal.
Motricity hopes to use InfoSpace’s mobile search technology as a way for consumers to access a wide variety of content-from traditional premium offerings like ringtones to an ocean of Internet-based content.
“(Mobile) has really grown up as silos-it kind of had to grow up that way-of portals, messaging, games, all these little different kinds of businesses,” said Brendan Benzing, InfoSpace’s VP of product and marketing. Benzing and more than 200 InfoSpace colleagues will work for Motricity out of Bellevue, Wash., where InfoSpace is headquartered.
“We’ve often thought of search as one of these unifying experiences . the search box has become what the c-prompt used to be,” Benzing said, paraphrasing noted search expert John Battelle. “We think in mobile, search will become the starting point for all types of media. . It helps the carriers be able to make sure that the content explosion taking place in mobile is being managed.”
InfoSpace specializes in meta-search, which queries multiple search engines in an effort to return the most complete results. The technology is at the heart of InfoSpace’s mCore offering, a recently upgraded mobile Web platform that integrates carriers’ advertising networks. Virgin Mobile U.K. has seen a 50% increase in daily mobile search page views per user since adopting mCore several months ago, InfoSpace claims, and the platform accounts for 60% of mobile search traffic on the carrier.
Motricity-which has had its share of growing pains in the turbulent mobile content space-will have its hands full integrating the two businesses. But the company hopes InfoSpace’s search technology can help it ramp up its content operations as it spurs traffic on the overall wireless Web.
“How do we begin to create much more contextual experiences?” Benzing asked. “How do we help bring some of those things together? That’s the kind of thing we can work on together.”