Has this ever happened to you: you’re examining something, when suddenly a much larger object behind it swims into focus, giving you sudden moment of vertigo? I got that just now, while reading a press release about a new exclusive deal where O2 has handed over control of it’s ringtones business to a portal services provider called Momac. I began by wondering whether or not this was a good or bad thing for ringtones… but then I had a look at Momac.
Who are these guys?
Man, Momac have been all over. The company has been around for 10 years, which makes it a Grand Old Dame in the mobile industry. Momac is in the portal business – helping operators get their content to consumers as easily as possible. Earlier this month it launched mvolve, a cloud-hosted platform designed only for mobile operator use. It allow operators to really quickly put together “customer interfaces” for anything they want to sell via mobile portal, from wallpapers to applications.
And these guys are coming from a position of experience – Momac claims to power over 1,000 content portals, for clients including… actually, just click through to the client list here and have a look for yourself. It’s serious.
What’s the news?
Momac and O2 have been working together for 8 years now, but the launch of the mvolve platform seems to have bumped them to a higher level. O2 has given the company control over the ringtone page on it’s O2 Active portal. Momac is now responsible for the entire customer experience when they’re accessing ringtones through O2. The page powers downloads, provides recommendations and (importantly) can easily and regularly be updated with new content.
Glyn Povah, Head of Content at Telefónica O2 UK said “Momac launched the new site against tight timescales and we know that customers love the new download site on O2 Active”
What we think?
Dealing with operators can be a ponderous process. It takes them a long time to decide to do anything – but at launch mvolve had an operator partner in KPN (one of the biggest telecoms in The Netherlands), and it has bagged a big deal with O2 before the end of its first month. I’ll be interested to see where this is going. Obviously Momac has a huge amount of experience dealing with both operators and content portals, so the launch of this cloud-hosted interface provider could lead to some very cool launches.
