CommerceTel Corporation (OTCBB: MFON), an award-winning provider of proprietary mobile marketing technologies and solutions, announced today that it has acquired Mobivity (http://www.mobivity.com/). This marks CommerceTel’s second acquisition in less than 30 days.

“We continue to execute on our strategy of acquiring and integrating complementary mobile marketing businesses. We plan to provide enterprises, brands and agencies with a high quality one stop shop of technologies,” said Dennis Becker, CEO. “Our first two acquisitions, TxtStation (closed April 1) and Mobivity, are expected to increase our revenues by over 150%. In addition, this allows us to cross sell CommerceTel’s technology to Mobivity’s and Txtstation’s existing client base.”

More than 20 million mobile engagements have been facilitated via the Mobivity SMS solution. CommerceTel plans to enhance the feature set of the solution by adding its award-winning technology so that Mobivity clients can expand their mobile marketing strategy. CommerceTel’s lower cost network operating infrastructure is also expected to streamline Mobivity’s operating systems and make for a more competitive and profitable service. With thousands of unique visitors seeking mobile marketing services online, the combination of CommerceTel’s technology and Mobivity’s easy-to-use platform is expected to greatly increase the two companies’ combined customer base.

“We believe in CommerceTel’s vision and are pleased with the opportunity to be a part of a bigger play in growing the mobile marketing industry,” said Greg Harris, CEO of Mobivity. “Combining our business with CommerceTel’s resources and technology makes us a more competitive player in this rapidly growing space.”

The terms of the transaction are more fully described by CommerceTel in a report on Form 8-K previously filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

For more information, please visit http://www.commercetel.com.

About CommerceTel

CommerceTel is an award-winning provider of proprietary mobile marketing technologies and the inventor of C4, a unique, enterprise-grade platform empowering brands to engage mobile consumers via multiple channels. The only system of its kind, C4 is a cloud-based solution providing broad mobile communications and extensive CRM features. It is integrated with multiple tier-one PSTN/ IP carriers and micropayment processing facilities as well as with carrier premium SMS billing systems. Customers include CNN, Disney, Sony Pictures, AT&T, Verizon, USA Network, numerous professional sports franchises, the Golf Channel, and NBC Universal.

Safe Harbor

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the “Act”). Statements including words such as “seek,” “intend,” “believe,” “plan,” “estimate,” “expect,” “anticipate” and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Act. Some or all of the events or results anticipated by these forward-looking statements may not occur. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include the impact of intense competition, the continuation or worsening of current economic conditions and the condition of the domestic and global credit and capital markets as well as the Risk Factors disclosed in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 27, 2010. Further information on CommerceTel’s risk factors is contained in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. CommerceTel does not undertake any duty nor does it intend to update the results of these forward-looking statements.

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eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) today announced it has acquired Critical Path Software, a leading mobile application developer that has worked with eBay for more than two years to help deliver popular mobile apps such as the eBay for iPhone® app, and StubHub, eBay Classifieds and Shopping.com iPhone applications. Critical Path Software’s proven mobile development capabilities will play an integral role in enabling eBay to accelerate improvements to the mobile experience for customers globally. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

 

“We’re very serious about innovating in mobile commerce, and this acquisition underscores our commitment to bringing the very best and brightest in the field to eBay,” said Mark Carges, chief technology officer and senior vice president, global products, eBay Marketplaces. “Integrating the Critical Path Software team into eBay will be a big win for mobile shoppers around the world; combined with the talent on our team today, we can make shopping and selling anywhere, anytime, for almost anything, even better.”

The race for mobile marketplace revenue generation is on. Back in June 2010, eBay acquired Red Laser for its barcode scanning technology. Their strategy and plan for the acquisitions has to be creating mobile commerce applications for retailers and e-tailers and dominate the space. Currently eBay is forecasting over $1.5B in sales through mobile commerce in 2010.

Read the full article here

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Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) surpassed analyst expectations with hefty BlackBerry shipments and profits in its most recent quarter, results that–at least for now–serve to counter worries over the company’s strategic position in the smartphone market.

Perhaps RIM’s most notable quarterly figure was 14.2 million–the number of BlackBerrys the company shipped during the period, a figure that grew 40 percent over the same quarter last year. (RIM said it expects to ship 14.5 to 15 million BlackBerry units in its next quarter.) RIM’s BlackBerry shipment numbers likely are a particular point of pride for the company; (NASDAQ:AAPL) Apple CEO Steve Jobs called out RIM during Apple’s third quarter earnings conference call, noting that Apple shipped 14.1 million iPhones and therefore surpassed the 12.1 million BlackBerrys RIM sold in its second quarter. With BlackBerry shipments of 14.2 million in its most recent quarter, RIM managed to pass Apple’s iPhone 4-powered high point.

Well, this was a bit unexpected. With Android going strong and RIM outpacing Apple this quarter, what’s next?

Read the article here.

In other RIM news, they’re in talks to acquire social profile aggregator Gist:

Gist–named one of the Top Mobile Applications of 2010 by FierceMobileContent–automatically aggregates professional contacts from across inboxes, address books, social media websites and related sources to build rich business profiles, sans invitations or friend requests. From there, Gist culls information from more than 60,000 news sources and over 20 million blogs as well as Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds to keep all network profiles up to date, enabling users to more effectively stay on top of their contacts’ movements up and down the corporate ladder.

This makes complete sense. RIM’s core market is the enterprise, so having this type of information integrated into your Blackberry is a perfect fit, but it also fits well with the personal users who are avid social media addicts.

Read the article here.

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Great blog post on Moco News by Tricia Duryee –

How A Company Recovers After Pissing Off Steve Jobs

We found out today how a company regains its composure after infuriating Apple’s Steve Jobs: Concede as quickly as possible.

That’s what Flurry is doing after its high-profile stunt earlier this year led to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) changing the terms of its iPhone developer agreement and prompted Jobs to blame Flurry during his appearance at the D8 conference on Tuesday.

Ok, so they admit they were wrong and are making some changes.

Flurry said that well before the D8 conference, it was working on complying with the issues raised, and has since been taking steps to address them with the help of its 30,000 customers. Specifically in regards to “device data,” Flurry said it is updating their service to be in compliance and will no longer collect the data. All-in-all, it’s trying to fall in line as quickly as possible. “Regarding sharing some specific aggregated usage statistics, to which Apple is opposed, we will comply with their wishes. Our goal continues to be to add value to the developer ecosystem and be a strong partner to platform providers,” Farago said.

That’s all nice and wonderful, but does it really change much? Steve Jobs made it clear (but is it clear?):

His exact words are: “The use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.”

Flurry also says it will not share device data. But is this enough? Will Apple change it’s policy “BANNING THIRD PARTY ANALYTICS”? I guess we will have to see when the next developer license agreement is drafted.

So I have 2 questions.

1. How will Flurry make money?? Raising capital is not the same as generating income. I had assumed all along they were selling the aggregate data and generating some income from that.
2. Will apple let developers track device info themselves? I assume so. Developers need to know so they can tailor the apps and their capabilities depending on which device it is running on. I assume this will be even more true as the next gen is released.

So for now we will leave the device reporting in AppClix since we are not considered a third party if we do not host the analytics app or the data. As always, the developer is responsible for complying with their aggreement with Apple. If the agreement changes, we will release an update that complies.

Oh and I love this graphic on Flurry’s home page. It’s part of their “Privacy First” initiative. I’ll leave that one alone.

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What’s going on over there?

This morning I went to check the stats of some of our apps, and found that Flurry’s reporting appears to be down. First I got an error from their load balancer, and now it just says “Loading…”

As a competitor, this makes me smile, but as a customer I would start getting extremely concerned.

The Flurry, Pinch Media transition does not appear to be going well at all. While Pinch has had the bulk of the issues, it appears the Flurry platform is suffering as well.

When I went over to Pinch Media’s reporting to check on a few apps we have with them, I found that they are now 8 days behind in aggregating our data.

Why are we not hearing more about this? If Flurry and Pinch are the biggest players in this arena, then why is there not more public outrage from customers? Are they providing service to the big guys, and letting the smaller ones suffer?

One of the things we have been working on is giving existing Pinch Media users the ability to pull the data from their API into AppClix. This would allow them to continue using Pinch to collect the data, while reporting it with combined sales data from AppClix.

But what’s the point if the data is 8 days old? While it’s one thing to have a confusing reporting interface, it’s a whole other issue when the data is stale. They recently said they expected to catch up over the weekend of April 9th, but it looks like it didn’t happen.

We’d love to hear from some Flurry and Pinch Media customers about their current experiences. Is it worth it for us to continue the API integration? We are trying to find a way to provide an alternate, more comprehensive interface to Flurry and Pinch users, but at this point they are better off moving the whole data collection over to us as well.

Since we don’t plan to sell aggregate data, it makes no difference to us if users stay with “the big boys”, and use us to combine analytics with sales data. In fact we prefer it. Let them deal with the traffic and aggregation.

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It is definitely interesting timing that Apple’s change of their developer agreement banning some app analytics, comes as we announce the beta release of the AppClix Enterprise Server.

One of the things that makes many developers uncomfortable is compiling dependencies into their apps that they have no control over. Many also don’t want their data aggregated and shared with the world. On top of that, they want control of their infrastructure, and to be responsible for any downtime that might occur.

With that in mind, we created a version of AppClix that can be installed by the developer on their own servers. Our Enterprise platform consists of a small network of servers that interact with each other to create a full analytics collection and reporting solution.

We also offer “CloudClix” which is a dedicated solution hosted on the Amazon EC2 virtual cloud. There will be a more detailed post on this shortly.

With the recent changes in Apples Developer Agreement, we are going to put together a small single server solution as well to accommodate smaller developers who do not need the full scalability of the Enterprise version.

We are also creating a 14 day free trial license. If you are interested, please contact us.

Here are a few reasons (from our web site) why a number of developers are looking for their own solution:

No Third-Party dependency compiled into Your Application

I don’t know about you, but I got a little uncomfortable when I submitted an app with a library to a third-party service that may not be around tomorrow compiled into it.

Does anyone remember AppLoop?

For those of you who don’t know, AppLoop was one of the first analytics platforms and they closed their doors. Imagine compiling code into your applications for a service that no longer exists!

Now, we don’t plan on going out of business, but it is nice to have that piece of mind knowing that you won’t need to issue updates for all your applications if we did.

You are in control.

You never have to worry about not being in control of your hardware and network. Possible unforeseen downtime of the AppClix hosted platform would have no affect on your services.

Your data resides in your own dedicated database and is not subject to our aggregation and public summary reporting that we might offer as a product or service. Your data is owned and controlled by you and only you.

You have complete control over your traffic and aggregation. You choose how often to summarize the data, and how to configure the AppClix service.

Unlimited Scalability

You can scale your network at any time to meet your needs. If your traffic grows to the point where you need more power, you can simply purchase an additional “collection server” license for a small fee.

Private Label Dashboard

The user dashboard can be branded as you see fit. Your logo and graphics can be used to match your company’s look and feel.

While you can’t start an application analytics company, you can provide AppClix services to your customers as a value added service. Create logins and accounts just as we do, within your AppClix platform.

Personal API Access

Create your own front-end or integrate AppClix into your existing applications or customer dashboards.

You have complete access to the AppClix API. The same API we use to provide data to our Dashboard.

No Ongoing Monthly Costs

You are not incurring monthly costs. You own the license and can use it for as long as possible for a single license fee!

Updates and Upgrades

Minor updates and upgrades are included for the first year, and available for a small annual support fee after that. Take advantage of new features as we release them.

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A few weeks ago I was contacted by Agam Shah who writes for PC World. He was putting together a post about the anticipation as Apple began taking orders. It’s a great article. Give it a read.

As a follow-up he sent me an email asking 3 questions. As I was answering, I thought it would make a great post so here goes.

The three questions are:

1. How do you see the iPad as a game changer in the computing space?
2. Will the device live up to its hype, or that remains to be seen.?
3. How do you see yourself using it.

iPad as a game changer

I do believe this device is going to change the face of mobile computing. Many of us who are Star Trek fans (which is most techies…), a reminded of the handheld tablet used for many years by the crew. I imagine that from that tablet, Captain Picard could run the whole ship if he needed to.

The iPad has that potential. Let’s look at this from the consumer and business perspectives.

Take my wife (please…)

She has an iBook. What does she use it for? Every night she sits in bed and does any one, or all of these 6 things:

• Read and respond to email
• Connect with friends on Facebook
• Play  Scramble (Boggle clone)
• Upload her photos from camera
• Listens to, and/or purchases music from iTunes
• General Web Surfing (looking to spend money somehow of course)

Does she need a laptop? Does she EVER use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc? The answer is NO.

And the other thing she does is read books. ‘nough said?

So tell me that the iPad is not the absolute ultimate device for the every day mom. Tell me she can’t completely replace her laptop with this device.

In fact, she would be more inclined to use it if there were apps available at the press of an icon that could help her do the things she needs to do every day.

That goes for Grandma, Grandpa, and every other living human being on the planet. A huge percentage of laptop users won’t need one anymore.

How many of us carry around a Netbook and/or an eBook reader? You know what I use my netbook for? To remote desktop into my office computer in case of an emergency or if I need to get something done quickly. I use NONE of it’s computing power. Do I need another computer that I have to keep in sync? No, it’s just a window into my real computer.

As for my Kindle, say bye, bye! Do I need a black and white, hard to read, cumbersome book reader anymore? Don’t think so! I can now read books and PDFs in the correct format on the go. If I want to read something later, I print as PDF and email to myself.

And the apps that will appear for the iPad will be unbelievable. I am sure of it. They will be function specific and will serve a single purpose well.

So on to the enterprise.

Imagine this device being used by doctors in a hospital, or in their office. Imagine it being used by restaurants to take orders, or by retail associates to look up prices,etc.., by coaches on the field, by teachers in class.

The possibilities are endless. No one wants to boot a laptop to look up a price. Doctors aren’t carrying laptops into patient’s rooms.

The networking capability, size, touch screen and portability of this device place it way ahead of anything else available. And no one will catch it.

Will it live up to its Hype?

Oh yea.. Maybe not right away since the media and others want to bash it for no apparent reason. But as the apps appear and we see how it takes over portable computing, we will look back and mark April 3rd, 2010 as the beginning of something special. That I am sure of.

Bash away, but this is not just a big iPhone. And even if it was, the iPhone was, and still remains a game changer that has blown through the hype it generated.

So how will I use it?

Besides the standard email, web surf, eBook reader, video player, etc… I have a number of things I believe will dominate my use.

1. First of course is using it for developing iPad apps and AppClix our mobile analytics service.
2. As I mentioned above, I plan to use it as a remote terminal to my desktop computer and our servers. Quick, easy access when needed. In, out, done.
3. It will be a window into the health and status of my company’s infrastructure. A single glance will show me servers, status, what’s up, what’s down, what’s getting strained, etc… It will also be used to see where we stand as a business at any given moment. Revenue, Click-through rates, conversions, sales reports, contact manager, etc.. All this without booting a laptop. Just pick it up, click icon and there it is.
4. Things I haven’t though of  yet. – You can be sure that there will be a hundred uses I have not even thought of yet.

As a consumer, I will use it to play games, surf the web, communicate with friends, watch movies, read books, listen to music, etc.. I don’t see myself ever booting my netbook again.

And when the 3g wireless version comes out… The game becomes a blowout.

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Well it looks like the iPads left Hong Kong at 4:23 am on April 2nd, and arrived in Anchorage, Alaska 7 hours earlier at 9:13pm on April 1st.

I assume those are local times…

Maybe this thing really will show up on Saturday.

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Many of us who have started web based service businesses in the last 4 or 5 years have modeled themselves from the company 37 Signals. They are an excellent example of a successful web business that bootstrapped their way to success.

For those of you that don’t know them, they are an extremely small company that has millions in revenue from a few excellent web based products. Take a look at Basecamp and Highrise. We use them both.

When I first built Mobivity, our Mobile Marketing and SMS platform, I had to keep asking myself “what would the guys at 37 Signals do?” Repeating that line over and over played a large role in or success.

They have recently release their second book. The first one was a free online one called Getting Real.

I’ve already been through a bit of their new one called Rework, and I am very impressed. Not only with their book, but also with the fact that we already do much of what they are talking about. It validates our strategy and makes me even more confident we are on the right track.

One of my favorite excerpts is the one about “picking a fight” with the competition.

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do
that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally
to your side. Being the anti- ______ is a great way to differentiate
yourself and attract followers.

For example, Dunkin’ Donuts likes to position itself
as the anti- Starbucks. Its ads mock Starbucks for
using “Fritalian” terms instead of small, medium, and
large. Another Dunkin’ campaign is centered on a taste
test in which it beat Starbucks. There’s even a site
called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors can
send e- cards with statements like “Friends don’t let
friends drink Starbucks.”

This is something I have always thought was a great strategy (as you can see from this previous post…). When you have a better product, then let the world know! When the competition screws up (like Pinch Media’s 10 day data refresh lag time), let the world know!

I am about to do just such a post on the Mobivity Blog about Clickatell who just got shut down by every U.S. carrier and have sent their customers calling us in droves. We MUST take this opportunity to let the industry know what makes us different, and why these things would never happen to us.

If any of our readers have their own business, or plan to start one, then this book is a must read. Visit the Rework site and read the free preview they have available.

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Well the situation has officially spiraled out of control. There isn’t a filter anywhere that can ensure that I receive the messages I want, and not the garbage I get.

Maybe it’s the holiday season, but we now receive over 400 spam emails a day among to our info, sales and support email addresses. Personally, I receive about 300 to mine.

There really is only one solution that works, and that is the one that requires the sender to verify they are a real person the first time they email.

So as of this morning, we have installed Spam Arrest on my personal email, as well as the general company email addressess. We pre-loaded a whitelist of customers and contacts, but that’s only a start.

Let me publicly apologize to anyone who has not received a response from me, or from one of our general email addresses. I have missed too many emails lately because of this, and it ends here….

And to those of you that get annoyed when you have to type in those funny numbers the first time you email someone, understand that it’s the only way to ensure that every email from that point on will get read and responded to.

Whoever comes up with a 100% accurate, automated way to rid the world of spam should have their face carved in a mountain…..

(no I’m not kidding….)

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