Good acquires Intercasting for social networking
Good Technology today announced it will acquire social networking platform provider Intercasting Corporation, expanding its reach beyond smartphones and giving it access to tier-one carriers. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the two companies will target the enterprise, government and consumer markets through mobile operators and device manufacturers.
San Diego-based Intercasting already has partnerships in place with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and other tier-one operators, all of which use its Anthem social network aggregator. The platform draws from the app interfaces of Web-based social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Photobucket, and displays the various updates, comments, messages, friend requests and other information on a single screen. Consumers can use Anthem to access all these disparate services with native device functionality on feature phones. The company, founded in 2004, also offers its own mobile blogging and social networking app, called Rabble, in North America.
Good Technologies, on the other hand, has its roots in mobile email for enterprise smartphones. Motorola divested Good, its push services division since 2006, three months ago to synchronization company Visto Mobile, which planned to use the company to expand into the enterprise market. Good already offers its own social networking tool, Good for You, but the platform only works on Windows Mobile, Symbian and Java handsets. Today’s acquisition will help it reach Intercasting’s mobile operator customers, as well as expand into the hot space of mobile social networking. According to the companies, the newly formed company’s overall goal will be to provide open mobility solutions to a broader mobile market.
May 27th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Julie Ask, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, had this to say about the acquisition:
“Intercasting and Sean [Conahan, founder and CEO] have certainly been tremendous thought leaders in the area of social networking. They have experience with carriers and building carrier-grade solutions and that is a good thing. The vision that they have around social networking and how it will play out in phones is really spot on…I think mobile social networking is probably one of the hottest things happening on cell phones, outside of the iPhone, in the past year. And for a few years to come, I see the cell phone as the core component and something I view as being at the center of one’s social graph.”
Leave a Comment