Mogreet

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

~ the goodbye ~

The original idea was a video greeting card you could send to somebody's phone. That was 2006, in Venice on the Los Angeles coast, and James Citron's company built a platform that could push short video, photos, audio and text in character sets plain SMS handled badly down a carrier's messaging pipe. Nobody wanted to send a video greeting card.

What people did want was the pipe. Marketers had opted-in lists of mobile numbers and no good way to put anything but plain text in front of them, so Mogreet turned into the vendor that handled the rich part. A viewer texted a shortcode and got a clip back, or a network pushed the clip to everyone who had already signed up. Glee and Pretty Little Liars ran campaigns on it. So did Paramount, Fox Searchlight, Entravision and Reebok's Speedwick line.

MMS never became a habit in Turkey. It was billed separately and more expensively than the SMS everybody was already rationing, and operators spent years making it a thing you configured rather than a thing you used. An entire American vendor category grew up on a message type I remember mostly as a failed send.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the channel it bet on ~

For about five years MMS looked like a real answer to a real problem. A marketer who wanted to reach a phone with a picture in 2009 had two options, and one of them was asking the customer to install something. The messaging channel was already on every handset and already billed, with the opt-in handled by regulation. Mogreet sold the plumbing for the half of that nobody wanted to build.

Then the install stopped being a problem. Once a network could ship its own app and push a notification for free, paying a vendor to pay a carrier to deliver a compressed clip became a cost that bought nothing. Mogreet's whole market was the gap between a phone that could show video and a phone that could run software. Both ends of that gap closed between 2010 and 2013.

~ the california record ~

It raised about $14 million along the way, from DFJ Frontier and Ascend Venture Group among others, including a $5 million round in late 2008. In March 2013 it launched Mogreet Express, a self-serve product aimed at small businesses that wanted to run the same campaigns without a sales call.

Two months after that, on 20 May 2013, a Los Angeles mobile payments company called Payvia bought it. Terms were not disclosed. The whole team went across and Citron took the chief marketing officer job, and Payvia said it would fold the rich-messaging technology into its payments platform so that it could sell targeting and billing together.

After that the trail goes thin. The company is recorded as defunct in 2016, and the only hard evidence anyone has produced for the date is a California corporate registration that stops. The domain stopped resolving entirely, and the last link Wikipedia still holds for the company lands on an unrelated vendor selling cloud communications to somebody else.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »