Sonopia, an affinity-based MVNO service founded by Juha Christensen, is launching today. Christensen is one of the founders of Symbian, and was previously the head of Macromedia’s mobile efforts.
The new company allows organizations or individuals to launch branded mobile services easily, through its online service, and then split the revenues generated as a result. It has been in development for more than two years, out of Menlo Park, CA and Kyiv, Ukraine (where most of the technical operations are based). It uses Verizon Wireless’ network for its MVNO service.
I spoke to Juha last week on the phone (while he was changing planes at Vienna airport, on the way to Kyiv), and the resulting audio interview is below. Investors in his company include leading venture capital firms ComVentures and Sevin Rosen Funds...the company has raised only about $9 million in funding till now, and Juha says that the low cost of operations and no marketing costs on Sonopia’s side has enabled it to keep the burn low.
The service online offers various handsets to choose from (at this point it seems Moto Razr, other Moto phones and LG), calling plans, including pre- and post-paid options, premium voice and data services, online sign-up and service activation, among other service. Juha hopes that since organizations will do the marketing for their own services, that will help in spreading the word. The branded service can deliver their own customized content through the online interface, and the services also have social networking tools built in.
The company’s target customers are non-profits, sports teams/leagues, universities, entertainment brands and even individuals. At launch, it is announcing some customers who are launching their own mobile services. These include: National Wildlife Federation (NWF Mobile); Long Island Ducks, a minor-league baseball team (Liducks Mobile); Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK), the national leadership honor society (Odk Mobile) and others.
These organization get a portion of the money generated by subscribers’ monthly usage fees. Juha hopes that about 10,000 Sonopia-powered mobile mini-carriers will crop up in U.S. within the next two years.
Will it work? Well, affinity credit cards have been around for a long time, and a big business, but work on very different economics than the wireless industry. Will the people (part of these group) do away with their existing individual services and go with the affinity-branded ones? Juha says the initial customers will be from within the overall churn rate in the wireless industry, not necessarily taking away from the operator behemoths.
You can listen to the 20 minute interview with Juha by streaming it below, or you can download as an MP3 here.