LiveWire Mobile Answers Advertiser's Call
Ring. Ring. Ring.
That is the sound that's normally heard when making a call to a cell phone.
But Matthew Stecker, CEO of Littleton-based LiveWire Mobile Inc., believes those few seconds of waiting for someone to answer the phone is prime-time advertising space.
After all, the caller is captivated with a phone up to his or her ear waiting for someone to pick up.
But why would mobile users allow their phones to be used for advertising? Stecker said some people have strong affinity for and want to show off their pride in a product.
The real incentive, however, could be that cell phone users could get anywhere between 4 and 10 cents each time the advertisement is played. That can add up to a 10 or 20 percent discount on a cell phone bill.
And Stecker is hoping his business can cash in on the technology, too.
Turbulent Times
The last few months have been full of transition for LiveWire Mobile.
NMS Communications Corp., which use to be based in Framingham, split into two companies in December 2008 and sold half of its network hardware business to Dialogic Corp. The remaining portion of NMS turned into LiveWire Mobile Inc.
With the switch came restructuring throughout 2009. The company shed about $2 million in expenses, from personnel and real estate, to being taken off the Nasdaq exchange. Doing so made the company leaner and has prepared it for growth in 2010.
Stecker recently hired a Worcester Polytechnic Institute graduate and is looking to hire a handful of additional engineers this year.
"I'd say for the last year or so we're been playing defense, trying to get our house in order," said CFO Todd Donahue. "Now we have and we're ready to start playing offense."
The company's offensive strategy: Become a major player in the fast-growing world of mobile phone programming and technology.
Stecker said the company is in stable financial position. It reported a $1.5 million profit on $4.4 million in revenues during the fourth quarter of 2009. Those revenues were up 24 percent compared to a year earlier.
One of the company's main products is a music store that allows users on partnering carriers to access and download music. If the company released no new products it would continue seeing a stream of revenue from the service, Stecker said.
But the company is expanding its products in a few major areas.
First, the company hopes to have a digital rights management-free music application available for users soon. As opposed to the traditional model where music is downloaded in one place and cannot be transferred to another, the DRM-free service would allow users to download music to their phones then transfer it to computers or onto music players.
The second major initiative will be the ringback advertisements, which the company released commercially this week as a product named RingSpot.
National advertising firms, nonprofit organizations and even political campaigns could target the type of advertising space available in ringback tones, Stecker said.
Stecker hopes to expand upon LiveWire's partnerships with more than 30 cell phone providers around the world to increase the ring back advertising this year, including in time for advertisement spots to be ready for the political election cycle later this year.
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