Followap

» see followap.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkcell launched a messenger in February 2005 and called it TurkcellMessenger. I was a university student then, with TTNet at home and MSN on every screen around me, and I cannot remember one person moving over to it. Turkcell had 24.3 million subscribers that spring. The company that built the thing counted about 2.5 million of them as reachable, which meant they owned a handset the client would install on, not that any of them opened it.

The company was Followap, incorporated in Delaware in December 1999 by two brothers, Dan and Ben Volach, with its engineering in Tirat Carmel in Israel and its sales eventually run out of London. The product was called iFollow and its case was that instant messaging belonged to your phone company rather than to a website. Your identity would be your own number instead of a screen name, and the operator would bill you monthly the way it billed you for everything else.

For six years that argument sold. Eircell in Ireland announced the first commercial deployment on 23 November 2000 and branded it e-merge messenger. Vodafone signed Followap in July 2001 as the sole supplier of its instant messaging platform across its operating companies. NeuStar announced the purchase on 27 November 2006, about $139 million in cash, and by then seventeen mobile operators were running the platform. The audited accounts filed with that deal say something less comfortable: more than 90 percent of revenue in both 2004 and 2005 came from one customer and its affiliates.

~ the chronicle ~

~ presence ~

The part Followap cared most about was presence, which in 2003 was a hard problem and is now a feature nobody notices. The platform collected signals from the network and from the handset itself, whether you were registered, whether you were on a call, what profile the phone was set to, and turned them into a line of text beside your name saying you were available or driving or in a meeting. The idea was that other services would subscribe to that line, so push-to-talk and address books and games would all know whether you were there before they interrupted you.

It was standards work as much as product work. Followap certified iFollow against OMA IMPS, the standard that grew out of Wireless Village, in April 2003, and claimed the largest footprint of any vendor in it. That standard is now dead. The pieces of it that survived into the thing your phone does today, chat addressed by phone number and presence sitting in the contact list, arrived through RCS, which was a separate initiative begun in 2007 on a different set of OMA specifications. Followap built the feature list years early. It did not build the standard that carried the feature list forward.

~ the number that was never a number ~

Almost every press release about this company ends in a figure that looks like users and is not. NeuStar's May 2007 release says twenty-six operators "have a combined user base of close to 300 million subscribers," which is the operators' total subscriber count, not Followap's. By December 2008 the wording had become "addressable subscriber base of over 410 million," and addressable is doing all the work in that sentence. No active-user number for this platform appears in any filing, release or trade report I could find.

Instead there is a revenue model that leaks the answer. NeuStar's annual report for 2007 says the business was "typically paid a monthly fee on a per-active user basis." Set that sentence beside the 410 million and then go and look at what the segment actually billed.

~ fifty-one months ~

NeuStar was a telephone number registry. It ran the database that routes calls between American carriers, and its reasoning for buying a messenger was that mobile instant messaging would eventually need somebody neutral to connect one operator's users to another's, which is the same business as routing phone numbers. At announcement it projected Followap revenue above $25 million in 2007 and more than double that in 2008. The actual numbers were $8.1 million and $14.7 million.

The writedowns came fast. $29.0 million of goodwill went in the first quarter of 2008, $64.6 million more in the fourth, and another $18.2 million against intangibles and equipment, which is $111.8 million of a $139 million purchase gone twenty-five months after it closed. On 8 December 2008 the company cut up to 110 jobs and said in the same release that it reaffirmed its support for the business. The 2008 annual report is blunter: "The revenue we recognized from our NGM services has not grown at the rates we anticipated when we acquired Followap in November 2006." On 7 February 2011 the assets went to Synchronica, a small British company in Royal Tunbridge Wells, for a reported $251,000. NeuStar then treated the stock of the subsidiary as worthless for tax purposes and took a $42.7 million benefit for doing so.

~ fifty-seven press releases ~

followap.com still answers, and it is not a squat. Somebody who was there has put up a record of the company: all 57 press releases in full, down to a scan of the Turkcell newspaper advertisement offering a free trial in October, plus a contact form asking former employees and operator partners to send in whatever they still have. The site dates the company 2000 to 2008, which is three years short of when the business actually stopped, because it ends where the press releases end rather than where the money did. The name itself had gone much earlier. Followap Limited was renamed NeuStar (UK) Limited on 15 March 2007, and that same registration is trading today as Vercara (UK) Limited, a security company with nothing to do with messaging.

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