alarm:clock

Wireless - Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Nokia Stays Busy. Buys Oz.com. Invests In Zvents

Montreal-based mobile messaging firm Oz Communications has been bought by Nokia for an undisclosed amount. Oz has raised $61M from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Fonds de Solidarite and VantagePoint Venture Partners. In April, Wellington Financial, via one of its VC funds, lent OZ $10M to expand product development. Under the deal, this will be repaid.

Oz claims 5.5M monthly paid users, It acquired this base through deals with carriers like Verizon as well as hand set makers.

Oz has a checkered past. Skuli Mogensen founded Oz as a VRML virtual world before swapping business models in 2002. In the refreshed mode, Oz built dynamic IM protocol conversion to proprietary IM protocols such as AOL and Yahoo Instant Messenger.

In its heyday, the young, backbeated Skuli managed nearly 100 people who built his virtual world out of San Francisco and Reykjavik and was funded by the likes of Intel and IBM, before that world flamed out. We attended one slick party at his SF HQ that was attended by the President and First Lady of Iceland.

At the same time, Nokia has also taken part in a $24M round in Zvents. AT&T took part as did others like digital map maker Navteq, Vantage Point Venture Partners Red Rock Ventures, and NetService Ventures, Zvents powers the events sections of 250 newspaper sites such as the San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe, Denver Post, and others by providing these publishers with the Zvents Media Platform.

Tyler Kovacs and CEO Ethan Stock founded Zvents to be the "local search engine for what to do." The company built reviews of nightlife and daylife happenings and then worked distribution over the past 4 years via partners and wireless carriers.

Yelp seems to have much better content but Zvents has proven adept at partnering. More direct competitors are Eventful and Going.com.

View - Oz Communications
View - zvents site