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January 10, 2007
Doughty Hanson Funds Mobango Mobile Content Venture
Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures has invested €2M in Mobango, a UK based startup that runs WAP and web sites targeting mobilephone users who want to create, share, and store things like video clips, wallpapers and ringtones. The startup, which operates out of Milan, also offers some useful applications for creating, editing, and managing content for the phone.
It's all free if users download via Bluetooth or cables, but if they use the WAP site they don't pay Mobango, but they will have to have some kind of mobile data plan with their operator.
The company has a serial entrepreneur founder, Fabio Pezzotti, who sold his last Internet venture to Telecom Italia, which attracted Doughty. And no doubt, the acquisition of rival startup Zedgenet in Norway by discount telephony service provider IDT a couple of weeks ago validated the VCs decision.
According to Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who reviewed Zedgenet, the combination of social networking and mobile content are the "next big market".
But if everything is free, how does the startup, which employs 7, make money? The answer is ads and marketing relationships. But not just any ads. WAP page ad rates are about £16 cpm, according to its backers, and the a:c can tell you that this a is much higher than fixed Internet rates. But the VCs are counting on bigger sales that can be generated if Mobango can increase its user numbers to the point where it becomes attractive as a distribution channel for movie, music, and video game marketers looking to target certain demographics. Right now Mobango says it has 1.5M registered users.
Read- Zedgenet Acquired By IDT (mashable)
Posted on January 10, 2007 11:56 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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