Thursday, July 29, 2010

Closing down Fun Text operations




The Mobispine board of directors has today announced the decision of closing down the Fun Text service and the Image Semantics Limited subsidiary in UK.


After over a year of offering the Fun Text solution to our customers, the Mobispine team has decided to close down its Fun Text operations. The decision to do so has been tremendously difficult, but we’ve come to realize that now is the best time for this to happen.

First, we’ve struggled with making our Fun Text business financially viable.

Secondly, without the revenue to keep a great team full-time, we’ve not had the chance to lately develop the solution as we originally wanted. In addition, the nature of the market is changing rapidly moving from mobile web to apps for iPhone and Android phones and we believe you need to invest in these areas to stay as a leading player in the mobile content space.

Thirdly, we have seen that the sales cycle is still kind of long (quarters) and the mobile operator customers we have approached are expecting to get Fun Text on a revenue share basis, i.e. not much up-front money to us.
At the end of the day the cost was too high too keep the product alive and we did not see any profitable future in the foreseeable future.

It was a tough decision but now we look forward and we will stay even more focused in providing our leading messaging solutions to mobile operators. We have very exciting offerings in the areas of:
- Desktop messaging
- Enterprise messaging
- Enhanced mobile broadband messaging
- Management of SMS services

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments or contact us privately.

Joakim Hilj

CEO, Mobispine AB
Firstname.lastname AT mobispine.com