Airwide not messaging but sexy new solutions promises Jay Seaton CMO

by: Bena Roberts Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

So I have to say, I had a marvellous chat with Airwide Solutions today at Mobile Marketing Forum. The dashing man at the top was Jay Seaton and I started the interview with a huge question.

I said, “Jay. Is messaging dead? What is life like as a messaging company? Or are you using advertising as a way forward?”. What followed was an impressive strong account of the company. In fact we spoke for nearly an hour. In this time, the questions just got tougher for Jay, but what I felt is that I finally understood what Airwide did.

I had passed Airwide off as a boring messaging company. I decided that staff (not me) could review them and I would sit back and take the juicy companies. So, really; when I bumped into Jay - I only thought we would take a few minutes.

Jay gave me an impressive account of the whole Airwide solution. This includes, mobile security.

Yes - I promise you - mobile security. The core remains mobile messaging - but offering data storage, data collection and saving capabilities was also an important, yet silent part of the business.

On top of that, I said that I spoke to Ericsson earlier on and the company said that it provided the Blyk infrastructure and I said said to them, “I thought that that was Airwide?” The response was that Airwide was a tiny blimp on the radar and I asked Jay if that was true.

He explained in detail that Airwide served only the messaging infrastructure to Blyk and Ericsson did the network. So I said, so what do you actually do?

He went into detail on interactive messaging with consumer and advertisers. Basically, instead of static SMS messages - creative messages such as what colour do you prefer (choice); which lipstick suits you? (choice); What is your skin type (click on picture to vote). This would engage consumers.

He also said, Airwide had the ability to make every SMS look like email by adding information such as share, forward, reply, respond and save to the message. I thought that was really interesting too.

But the core service was now also inserting advertising into messaging -enhancing the SMS with links and or also offering parental control to the receiver of SMS.

OK. I could go on now with a he said and she said about this - but I am not going to. Airwide in short is sexier than a messaging company. Two years ago the company had critical talks about the market and have become leaner offering packages off the shelf to cater for operator’s needs.