Sonopia, an affinity-based MVNO service founded by Juha Christensen and launched just a year ago, is closing down, reports Tapio Anttila on his blog, who himself was a former senior exec at Sonopia. Christensen was one of the founders of Symbian, and was previously the head of Macromedia's mobile efforts. Thus continues the blackhole of deceased MVNO services in U.S.
Sonopia's service allowed organizations or individuals to launch branded mobile services easily, through its online service, and then split the revenues generated as a result. It had early customers such as National Wildlife Federation (NWF Mobile); Long Island Ducks, a minor-league baseball team (Liducks Mobile); Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK), the national leadership honor society (Odk Mobile) and others. It was running the service on top of Verizon Wireless' (NYSE: VZ) network.
According to the post, Sonopia laid off all of its U.S. workers at the end of March, and "reached an amicable resolution with existing marketing partners to transition subscribers it had acquired." The company had raised a total of $21.5 million from ComVentures (now Velocity Interactive Group), Sevin Rosen Funds and Cardinal Venture Capital.
As to why it failed, Tapio analyzes it well: "Critics warned that the approach was too 'involving' and too ambitious, offering targeted services and campaigns for segmented groups would often suffice and be less risky for the partner organization which often lacked skills in running even a marketing program, let alone a mobile service."
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Posted
Apr 08 2008, 12:59 AM
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