Adderton vows return

Peter Adderton isn't done with the mobile industry — not just yet. The founder of Amp'd Mobile and Boost Mobile is aiming to take up where he left off. He had planned to turn Amp'd from a mobile virtual network operator into a pure digital media company, and now he can form one without having to run a virtual carrier.

That may sound like a rosy interpretation of Adderton's prospects considering the fallout at the now-defunct Amp'd, which went from one of the brightest stars in the hot new MVNO space to a bankrupt company in a failed sector. But Adderton is not willing to shoulder all the blame for Amp'd Mobile's failure. A souring of the financial markets that prevented it from raising more capital, combined with Amp'd Mobile's own operational difficulties, he said, led to a downward spiral that saw Amp'd file for bankruptcy in June and Adderton's ouster as CEO a week later.

Adderton also took issue with the widely reported statistic — including in Telephony — indicating Amp'd was carrying 80,000 non-paying customers. Amp'd did not have 40% of its customer base riding the network for free, but rather 80,000 customers with a contested item on their bills — the carrier's back office just hadn't caught up, Adderton said.

“I never will take away from the operational issues we had,” he said. “I don't want to shift the blame. But even if we didn't have those operational issues, the market was in such a state we probably wouldn't have been able to raise more cash.”

The hedge funds and private equity firms that originally invested in Amp'd may have soured on MVNOs, but Adderton said there is still plenty of interest in Amp'd Mobile's other business model: that of a mobile digital media and entertainment company. Amp'd produced several highly acclaimed mobile entertainment brands, including “Lil' Bush,” the first mobisode program to move from the handset deck to broadcast TV. Now Adderton said he is reassembling the team that helped him launch Amp'd and Boost, including former Amp'd content guru Seth Cummings, and planning their next move.

“Our phones have been ringing,” Adderton said. “We have multiple offers on the table. We just have to figure out what we want to be when we grow up.”