SinglePoint is selling its aggregation infrastructure business to Ericsson and jumping full swing into the SMS mobile advertising space. Plus, SinglePoint has a new CEO running the place.
Aggregation is an area in which Ericsson executives have said they wanted to expand, and gaining ownership of SinglePoint's operator connection agreements bolsters its reach in the United States. Ericsson already operates similar operations in 28 countries. Terms of the sale were not released.
SinglePoint's new CEO is no stranger to the company. Gowri Shankar joined the company nine years ago, when it was known as Wireless Services Corp. Before that, he was part of the team at Sprint PCS that brought PCS spectrum to market and helped lay the foundation for Sprint PCS' enterprise sales strategy.
Outgoing SinglePoint president and CEO Rich Begert will continue to act as an adviser and board member. Begert played a role during the rollout of the first wireless data network in the United States – back when it was CDPD – and AT&T's Digital One rate, a game-changing offer that eliminated domestic roaming charges. He joined McCaw Cellular Communications in 1986.
SinglePoint is betting on the mobile ad space at a time when the likes of Google and Apple are making acquisitions of mobile ad firms AdMob and Quattro Wireless, respectively. But Shankar says those big-name companies are concentrated on display ads whereas SinglePoint is SMS-centric.
A couple things going for the SMS ad market: SMS is ubiquitous in its reach – you don't need a smartphone to text – and it continues to offer advertisers an easy way to engage customers.
SinglePoint is focused on publishers and advertisers. Advertisers can match up ads with publishers' content by going online using SinglePoint's Web-based system. The system works in such a way that advertisers can measure what's happening and change out ads to get different results.
"I think we came to the conclusion the aggregation business is a global scale ... Ericsson has the right set of assets to really make that happen while we saw the mobile advertising space as a growing part in the value chain and to us, we felt we needed to focus on that piece," Shankar says. Going forward, the company is interested in global expansion, and it can accomplish that in part by tapping into Ericsson's aggregated systems.
SinglePoint is based in Bellevue, Wash., with sales and support personnel in New York and Los Angeles. It's unknown how many SinglePoint employees in the aggregation unit will be affected by Ericsson taking over.
SinglePoint has done SMS campaigns for the likes of Deal or No Deal, the MTV Movie Awards, the Oscars, Project Runway, the 2008 Olympics and the Obama for President campaign. The company says that over the past three years, it has enabled more than 80 percent of interactive TV transactions initiated by text messaging. Last year, the company expanded to include the SMS advertising services.