Following the content trail

Bill Stone has been all over the map, both figuratively and literally. He's crisscrossed the globe to lend his skills to mobile operators in Australia and Japan as well as those in the U.S. But all of the marketing, product development, operational and eventually chief executive roles that he's performed have had one thing in common: He's been on the cutting edge.

Prepaid wireless may not sound cutting-edge today, but it certainly was in the mid-'90s, when Stone oversaw the introduction of pay-as-you go services to AirTouch Cellular, which itself was breaking new ground with the adoption of CDMA technology. After moving overseas to Japan's J-Phone Tokyo — today known as SoftBank Mobile — Stone was tasked with the marketing campaign for the first ringtone, short message service (SMS) and mobile data services in Japan. His next stop was Vodafone Australia in 2000, where his project was location-based services, long before the advent of GPS in handsets.

After a stint at Verizon Wireless, Stone joined multiple virtual network operator (MVNO) pioneer Peter Adderton in his most ambitious role yet: the creation of Amp'd Mobile, a heavily content-focused MVNO targeting a young, hip audience. Stone may have struck out on new paths beforehand, but with Amp'd he was in entirely uncharted territory. Amp'd wasn't just pushing song downloads and streaming sports highlight clips. Amp'd streamed live footage of Ultimate Fighting Championship matches and motocross events. It produced edgy cartoon shorts, one of which, Lil' Bush, became the first mobile program to move to a broadcast channel, in this case Comedy Central.

Amp'd, however, went bankrupt in 2007, bringing an end to its grand content experiment, and Stone moved on to his next venture. Surprisingly, that move was to the chief executive role at Handango. Not only had Stone decided to get out of the carrier business, he was abandoning the world of cutting-edge content for a company that traditionally has sold business applications to smartphone users. At Amp'd, Stone fed streaming video of to-the-near-death cage matches to Red Bull-fueled teens with the latest in high-tech gadgetry. Now he's pushing mobile travel-expensing applications to suits with BlackBerrys. What gives?