AirMedia positions itself for a comeback

From...

by Mark Roberti

(IDG) -- Remember AirMedia? They're the guys who created NewsCatcher, a service in the mid-1990s that delivered news and entertainment to PCs via a wireless receiver. The concept never caught on and AirMedia vanished in early 1999. Last Monday, it relaunched as an electronic marketplace and hub for wireless content.

The idea is simple: Publishers can post their content online and specify a price. Content buyers and resellers can search an online catalog, call the content company to negotiate a deal, and then handle all the billing and payments on the marketplace. AirMedia gets a cut of each deal, usually about 15 percent.

The technology isn't quite so simple. Publishers can send content to the hub in an alphabet soup of formats, including text, HTML, XML and SMTP. AirMedia converts it into still more formats -- WAP, SMS, Palm, paging, Pocket PC and others -- and delivers it to cell phones, PDAs and other mobile devices.

AirMedia, which is based in New York, patented its hub technology a year ago and has marketplaces in operation in the U.S. and U.K. It plans to launch additional hubs in Germany, Italy, France and Spain later this year.

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AirMedia CEO Mark Bregman said the company learned from its push technology days that it's hard to predict what content customers want, how they want it delivered and how they want to pay for it. This time it isn't trying to.

"We decided, 'Let's not make those decisions,'" he said. "Let's be the enabler to let other entities try things out and offer different options. We'll create the infrastructure that lets other companies pick what content they want to use and figure out how they want to deliver and charge for it."

Investors breathed new life into AirMedia in mid-1999 when a new company, Wireless Internet, purchased its assets, including the AirMedia name. Wireless Internet, which operates as AirMedia, has raised $28.8 million from venture capital firms Citigroup Ventures and Verus International and from David Rose, AirMedia's original founder and current chairman.

Bregman joined AirMedia in August from IBM, where he was general manager of the Pervasive Computing Group. He said 50 content providers have signed up to offer content in 2,500 channels. The publishers include traditional content companies, such as ESPN, the Financial Times, and Nando Media, the online arm of the McClatchy Company.

But the goal is to sign up companies that may want to deliver content to employees or customers. For instance, an airline might want to deliver flight information to frequent fliers. AirMedia is negotiating with a large real estate agency in Europe that wants to send information on new houses that come on the market to their clients' cell phones. Even small nonprofits or individuals can post content.

"We're the business-to-business side of the business-to-consumer play," Bregman said. "We want to serve customers that want to distribute content and customers that want to resell or give away content to their customers."

AirMedia is betting that it will succeed because it is offering more than just the ability to aggregate content and distribute it to a variety of mobile devices in different formats; it's also offering the ability to conduct transactions and track and clear payments between all parties online.

Bregman said AirMedia's technology has been tested for more than two years and can deliver content to about 98 percent of carriers, operators and wireless resellers in North America and the U.K. This time around, the company's chances for success may not be quite so remote.

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AirMedia
Citigroup Inc.

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