Adamind launches with a big splash

The merger and IPO last month of two of the world's leading media adaptation companies resulted in Adamind, a funny name the industry is increasingly hearing more and more about as MMS gears up. The media technology vendor landed two critical wins last week for its MediaSpire technology, providing the core transcoding technology in both Motorola's massive MMS-center deployment with Verizon Wireless and Openwave's rollout of MMS services for Telus Mobility in Canada.

To top it off, the company just launched on London Stock Exchange with £15 million float and is celebrating with the latest release of its software platform MediaSpire v5.0.

"This is the next evolution for us," said CEO Shailendra Jain. "We've already been successful in the transcoding market, but we expect it to become a $400 to $500 million industry. Our next step is to build our brand and perfect our technology."

Transcoding in the MMS world is the process deep within the MMSC that translates the media sent by one phone into a format the recipient phone can understand. It doesn't sound like an arduous task, but the lack of decent transcoding technologies has proven to be a major hindrance on the proliferation of MMS services, since a vast number of multimedia messages never reach their destinations or show up in a garbled format. Just like SMS, MMS needs full interoperability--not just between carriers, but also on the varying handsets on an operator's network--to gain popularity, and Jain said Adamind could provide that interoperability.

"It took SMS seven years to take off because of those problems," Jain said. "I think the industry has learned its lesson this time though. MMS should take that time."

Adamind is the result of the merger of Philips' MP4Net division and Emblaze Transcoding, pairing the former vendor's standard transcoding interface with the latter's codec. Combined, the companies have their technologies in 80 carriers' networks around the world. Jain estimated that about 200 carriers worldwide have deployed some kind of media adaptation technology for MMS, which gives the Adamind a 40% market share. Its competitor Mobicell enjoys another 25% of the market, while the remainder belongs to the 1st generation technologies launched by the major vendors.

While Adamind is seeking to work directly with carriers to sell its media adaptation technology, Jain said 60% to 70% of its business does come through its OEM partners. "We intend to rely heavily on our OEM partners," Jain said. "We just plan to make their job easier by creating a brand for ourselves and going directly after some of the top providers."