@ CTIA: Infospace’s D2C Plans

Infospace, traditionally a search/directory business, is making a pretty solid move into mobile content by focusing around “five key verticals”: Faith, Family, Hispanic, Action Sports and Urban Male. I briefly spoke to Stephen Davis and Jeff Hasen at CTIA about the companies plans to move into the direct-to-consumer business later this year. So far Infospace has a lot of personalization stuff (who doesn’t?) but its also looking at making original video. It seems to have the technology down pat, creating ringtones from American Idol performances in a matter of hours. “Content isn’t any more king than technology…content and technology have to live together in the same world and are complementary to each other.”
The company is also very excite about social community groups, and plans to partner with other companies to build social community networks around brands, and then surrounding users entering that network with original content…”it plays very closely to our D2C strategy”. It’s different from providing the infrastructure and letting people form groups around interests they choose, and it takes out the problem of generating conversation (that’s what the brand is for), but it’s going to need brands that are not only popular but drive a lot of user interaction.

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