SMS-based search company 4INFO launched an ad-serving offering that places marketing pitches in text messages.AdHaven, as the service is dubbed, is designed to enable mobile operators, content publishers and SMS aggregators to deliver text ads from anywhere in the world. The offering includes ad...
VeriSign Inc. continued to streamline its business by jettisoning part of its European mobile messaging division.The Mountain View, Calif.-based company had established a mobile foothold in Europe with the 2006 acquisition of Austria's 3united Mobile Solutions AG for $65.5 million. But VeriSign said it...
VeriSign Inc. announced plans to acquire Certicom Inc. just days after Research In Motion Ltd. dropped its takeover bid of the Canadian software developer.VeriSign will pay either $40 million net of Certicom's existing cash and short-term marketable securities or a flat $73 million, the...
Industry insiders say Barack Obama's inauguration today is likely to spark record-high SMS usage among U.S. mobile consumers. But the event may also serve as a kind of coming-out party for SMS as an interactive communications channel in the United States.VeriSign Inc. saw a...
Text messaging aggregators such as mBlox, OpenMarket and VeriSign Inc. have built lucrative businesses by serving as middlemen between carriers and companies (or political candidates) looking to send text messages to massive numbers of mobile users.That's exactly what Isaias Sudit wants to do with...
Move over YouTube. MySpace lovers can now access video from the social-networking monster on their handsets. MySpace, along with video technology vendor RipCode, announced that MySpace mobile users can view all MySpace video content on compatible phones."Video is a natural next step for us...
Sprint Nextel Corp. is teaming with VeriSign Inc. to enable subscribers to send photos and videos from their phones to popular social media sites.The offering uses VeriSign's Xoomerang platform to allow users to upload images from more than 30 Sprint phones to MySpace, Photobucket...
Two weeks after swallowing the rest of the Crazy Frog, News Corp. is reorganizing its mobile business.Rupert Murdoch's media giant this week will unveil Fox Mobile Group, a three-pronged operation created to leverage its immense portfolio, content-creation capabilities and distribution channels. The company also...
The following list ranks U.S. wireless industry CEOs by total compensation for the 2007 fiscal year.
The ranking includes executives at public U.S. companies listed on the RCR Wireless News Stock Watch. Salary and total compensation figures were derived from annual proxy statements filed with...
VeriSign Inc. finally left the mobile content space, unloading its stake in Jamba to News Corp. for $200 million.A pioneer in the early days of ringtones and other mobile goodies, Jamba was picked up by VeriSign for $273 million in June 2004. But the...
Federal courts on opposite sides of the country came to different conclusions in billing litigation against Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, while the number of antitrust class-action texting lawsuits against the nation's top mobile-phone operators has skyrocketed to more than a dozen.While the various...
Editor's Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We've collected a group of the industry's leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.Another CTIA show has come and gone. There was plenty of talk of new applications...
Nearly three million mobile users received Barack Obama's SMS about his new running mate, but many of those who signed up may have gotten the text late - or not at all - according to new figures from Keynote Systems.The mobile and Internet test...
Triple-tapping continues to explode, according to new figures from VeriSign Inc.The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it delivered 95.4 billion inter-carrier text messages in the first half of 2008, establishing a new record for text messaging activity during the period. VeriSign also reported a...
The following list includes ratings changes and financial information for wireless companies announced this week by investment-banking and financial-services firms.Carrier--Standard & Poor's withdrew its corporate credit rating on Total Access Communication, the second-largest cellular provider in Thailand, at the company's request. Prior to the...
UrbanWorld Wireless added new distribution partners for both its on-deck and off-deck offerings. The Los Angeles-based content provider inked a deal to offer its UDub!MNews from the deck of Boost Mobile, a division of Sprint Nextel Corp. The offering, which is available to Boost's...
A class-action lawsuit filed against Alltel Corp. accuses the regional mobile-phone carrier of adding unauthorized charges on subscribers' monthly bills.The suit focuses on the relationships between Alltel and third-party mobile content providers and billing aggregators such as m-Qube Inc., a unit of VeriSign Inc."Alltel...
It seems there's no shortage of players looking to help carriers compile all the customer information that can be gleaned from their networks. But it appears network operators are still at a loss at what to do with the stuff.VeriSign Inc. last week spun...
AT&T Inc. appointed John Donovan as its CTO, replacing Chris Rice, who becomes executive VP of the telecom giants Shared Services division.Donovan, who will be based in San Antonio, is charged with overseeing the company's global technology direction, including product development, network and engineering...
Just two years after shelling out $30 million for CallVision Inc., VeriSign Inc. is spinning off its telecom-analytics business.The company said it is selling its Self-care and Analytics business unit back to its original management team, which founded CallVision 12 years ago. The move...
The explosive success networks are having with text voting on TV shows comes with a level of responsibility that they and others in the value chain are trying to bear."Now the viewer or participant has to be able to trust the show," said Suhail...
i luv uNorth American cellphone users were expected to send 2.2 billion mobile messages, including short message service messages and multimedia messaging service messages, on Valentine's Day, according to VeriSign Inc. The company said Valentine's Day typically is the busiest day of the year...
You may have never heard of it, but Google Inc. is behind it. So are AOL, Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo Inc. With that kind of support, OpenID may soon be coming to mobile in a big way.Designed as a standardized platform for online authentication,...
Jamba said it will be the first digital retailer to offer music unencumbered by digital rights management (DRM) software under a deal with record label EMI.A joint venture between News Corp. and VeriSign Inc., Jamba said it will distribute an undisclosed number of DRM-free...
