Jambo bid part of broader e-content strategy for SilverBirch

On January 22, Toronto’s SilverBirch Inc. put forward a cash-and-stock deal to acquire Jambo Mobile Solutions Inc., a mobile marketing firm specializing in SMS, MMS and WAP-based marketing campaigns. It may sound like an odd play for a company known for creating multimedia mobile content, but it’s all part of a broader vision to grab more market share in all things mobile-related."With respect to Jambo, we see a very interesting opportunity to use wireless content with wireless marketing campaigns to communicate to and engage the end consumer," says SilverBirch CEO Derek van der Plaat. Toronto-based Jambo Mobile’s founding partners, Derek Colfer and Matthew Kim, will join SilverBirch once the deal is finalized. Thanks to Jambo Mobile’s roster of big-name clients such as Adidas AG, The Coca-Cola Co., Dell Inc., Buena Vista Entertainment, Pfizer Inc. and Sony Corp., it’s anticipated that the acquisition will have an immediately positive effect on SilverBirch’s financials.Customizing and creating content for corporate clientele – in short, advergaming – is already a big part of the output of SilverBirch’s game development subsidiary, SilverBirch Studios. The company has partnered with movie studios to produce mobile games based on titles such as Superman Returns, Constantine, and Crank. As well, SilverBirch also partners with mobile content e-tailers through its SilverBirch Mobile division, which van der Plaat refers to as "a wireless content enabler" providing ringtones, truetones, wallpapers and entertainment applications. A new website for SilverBirch Mobile is slated for launch this week."We facilitate mobile content storefronts for other people, so we’ve built something out for a partner here in Toronto called EyeRockDigital, and we’re working with a site called GreenTones where we’re making ringtones in the form of animal sounds," he says. In addition, SilverBirch is rolling out its own mobile content storefront, www.zookmobile.com, featuring its library of mobile media and content. The site, however, is aimed at customers of wireless carriers south of the border at present, since SilverBirch’s payment infrastructure is US-based.Van der Plaat sees enormous potential in J2ME-driven applications, and that fact is reflected in SilverBirch’s mPOWR technology, billed as "a mobile enablement platform" which can manage virtually all aspects of wireless content provisioning and delivery. "We have a database of over 1,300 phone types, and we know the memory capacity and configuration of all of those phones," van der Plaat explains. "So, if you want to send images, audio or video to a phone, our systems can detect the phone types and determine whether the phone can hold a certain amount of content, or whether the content should be streamed to the phone. And, the backend of that system can support either advertising or subscription-based pay services. So it’s a whole infrastructure around managing content on a wireless platform."He holds up some recent work for an unnamed client as an example of mPOWR in action. "For one of our clients we’ve developed what we call a mobizine, which is a mobile subscription-based content magazine that is actually a downloadable application," van der Plaat says. Using the mPOWR platform, the application can pull down content at regular intervals over the network and update the content of the mobizine. "It’s just a whole bunch of entertainment available in your phone that you can access like a magazine on a weekly basis."

Jambo bid part of broader e-content strategy for SilverBirch

Brief | February 7, 2007

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