Just a few months after Visto acquired Good Technology and kept the Good name, the company has acquired another. This time, it’s social networking expertise provider Intercasting Corporation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Intercasting has deals with the major nationwide U.S. carriers, providing technology that allows consumers to communicate with the social networks of their choice via a mobile device. The expectation is the newly combined company will be more active in approaching device OEMs, which themselves are pursing social networking solutions in earnest.
Good Technology traditionally was focused on the enterprise market, but the combination with Visto gave it more expertise in the consumer/prosumer market, which is where Intercasting’s strength lies. Good provides its e-mail and other products through carrier distribution as a white-label solution.
Good started adding social networking to its repertoire and quickly found the need to address breadth of device coverage and the need to support various types of devices beyond smartphones, explained John Herrema, chief marketing officer at Good.
Good executives say they recognize that business users also have a set of personal communications services they regularly use, and with companies using social networking as part of their business, the lines are increasingly blurred between business and personal applications.
Intercasting CEO and founder Shawn Conahan said talks with Good CEO Brian Bogosian started over a year ago, but the timing wasn’t right. Now, Conahan and Intercasting President and co-founder Derrick Oien will join the combined company as senior vice presidents, and Conahan expects to continue staying involved day to day, especially in the consumer experience realm.
The Anthem brand, which Intercasting has been using to denote its product, will be going away as the technology gets rolled into the Good platform.
Anthem aggregates social networks by acting as a technological “rosetta stone” of sorts. Anthem also solves the problem of writing for thousands of different mobile devices by providing a way of using off-the-shelf Web development tools.
“We’re more excited about the future,” Conahan said, noting that the term social networking has been ill-defined, but most can agree that it refers to access to third-party communication services that consumers want, capturing everything from Twitter to e-mail and instant messaging.
A lot of OEMs and carriers are integrating social networking into devices. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, INQ won the GSMA’s Best Mobile Handset award. The company’s first handset was built specifically with social networking at the forefront.