LOS ANGELES – In its acquisition last November of privately held pay-per-call, search and directory solutions provider Ingenio, AT&T received an unwanted bonus; control of the NiteFlirt phone sex and Keen psychic hotline services.

“Ingenio’s technology and products deliver an innovative approach for lead generation and help advertisers efficiently place themselves in front of consumers who are ready to act,” Mark Britto, president and CEO of Ingenio, said. “Combining Ingenio’s capabilities with AT&T’s resources and YellowPages.com’s strong reach and brand is great news for advertisers and creates a foundation to expand this business.”

One area of its business that may not see any expansion is its adult offerings.

According to an AT&T spokesperson, however, the company is not interested in adult operations.

“We are acquiring the pay-per-call and earn-per-call portions, but we are not acquiring the adult portion because it is simply not consistent with our brand,” the spokesperson said.

The Ingenio acquisition was intended as a means to bolster online productivity for traditional print-based Yellow Pages advertisers who may not have their own website, by implementing unique phone numbers for advertisers that allow for efficacy tracking and performance-based pay-per-call billing.

“As advertisers add performance-based advertising to their marketing mix, this investment makes sense for our business,” Ray Wilkins, AT&T group president for diversified business said. “Ingenio’s technology will allow AT&T to expand our robust service portfolio for print, online and mobile advertisers, and that will further differentiate us from our competitors.”

AT&T also expanded its mobile search offerings to include a new online application for iPhone users; along with downloadable, localized search tools that will incorporate the company’s Yellow Pages listings.

As the adult entertainment industry pioneers the new frontier of mobile, FriendFinder and Streamray are looking to connect on every conceivable platform with the launch of a new proprietary application.

FriendFinder and Streamray, which merged this time last year, already have a mobile presence, but the currently unnamed proprietary application will boost that presence by making mobile versions of FriendFinder and Streamray available to nearly all users.

“Different carriers have different protocols,” Legendary Lars, marketing director for FriendFinder, said. “With this new application we should be able to reach any platform created in the last three years; that’s excellent.”

Both companies see big potential in the mobile market. According to Lars, the expectation is to reach approximately 10 percent of customers in a mobile setting. That number should yield profits in the neighborhood of $1 million for the first year. But at present, the product is not aimed at reaching new customers via mobile.

“Only the cam sites are expected to draw in new customers,” Lars told XBiz. “We’re working on applications to make cam to cam work over the phone.”

To develop the new mobile applications, FriendFinder and Streamray brought on Harvey Kaplan, who helped AEBN launch its Xobile division.

“Harvey is our champ for mobile,” Lars said. “He’s going to help us make this happen very soon.”

According to Kaplan, the choice to join FriendFinder and Streamray was easy.

“My goal at AEBN was to help establish them as a recognized leader in mobile; that’s what I intend to do here [FriendFinder and Streamray],” Kaplan told XBiz. “They’re a great company with a great reputation.”

According to Kaplan, the application will be ready by the Internext show in Florida this August.

“The challenge with these ventures isn’t building the software,” Kaplan said. “The hard part is adding to the user’s habits. We know that we can show them that their mobile experience can mirror the PC; it’s about adaptation.”

More information about adult Friend Finder here.

FriendFinder, Streamray Go Mobile article found at Xbiz

XBiz – Ecstasy Mobile Touts ‘One Stop Shop’ For Mobile Content
The latest mobile porn provider, Ecstasy Mobile, hopes to be streaming live 24-hours a day by the second quarter of 2006, banking both on the support of major stars, large studio partnerships and the company’s emphasis on keeping abreast of technology.

Ecstasy Mobile officially launched in early January at the Adult Entertainment Expo. It was there that President Marvin Jones announced a series of contract negotiations, including deals with company partner Tawny Roberts and exclusive contract star Devon, as well as mobile content offerings from Jessica Jaymes, Briana Banks, Jenna Jameson, Sky Lopez and Tyra Banxxx, to name a few.

Like some of his competitors, Jones is looking to offer up Ecstasy Mobile as a “one stop shop” for adult mobile content. Studios can partner with the company to have their films hosted on branded channels, which can be made available both for direct download or, with a little extra work, to stream directly to mobile phones.

Using a proprietary compression technology, Jones said films hosted on the Ecstasy Mobile site can stream seamlessly to compatible phones, which is no small task in the U.S.’s comparatively low-bandwidth arena.

“There are some companies that actually do streaming video but they can only stream at four frames per second, which is not very clear,” Jones told XBiz. “The problem with being able to stream at higher rates is our bandwidth is very low here in the U.S., so you have to compress each individual frame, send it to a phone and use a special player that decodes and decompresses the video before it shows it.”

Users download the player from Ecstasy Mobile the first time they access the site’s content, which Jones said only takes a couple of minutes. Once downloaded, Jones said the streaming video only needs a standard 10-15 second buffer before playing smoothly.

Jones knows that the U.S. phone market still has some catching up to do compared to much of the rest of the world when it comes to bandwidth. Realistically, the ability to view streaming video is an option for only about 40 percent of the phones in the U.S. market today, which is why Ecstasy Mobile also is developing download packages Jones hopes to market to studios that want to mobilize their content.

Using Ecstasy Mobile’s compression technology, Jones said he could fit four full-length movies on a standard 128MB phone memory card, which could then be branded and sold within a variety of formats.

“We can put companies in a situation where they put four of their films on a 128MB card and then when a consumer makes a purchase they can unlock the first film with a code,” Jones said. “Then, in order to get the next three films they have to call in a number, pay a certain amount, and then they get an additional code that lets them unlock the other films.”

But Jones is not content to merely work with other people’s content. Ecstasy Mobile plans to produce its own films as well, beginning with the girl-girl feature, “Devon Loves Tawny,” which will air exclusively through the company’s mobile platform before being released on DVD.

“When you have a situation where you can provide exclusive content to the consumer that they can’t get elsewhere they are going to come to you,” Jones said. “We plan to release about two exclusive films a month, which will air on our mobile platform first before being distributed on DVD.”

Aside from being able to download and stream video off the Ecstasy Mobile site, users can access photos, chat with stars, download ring tones and order branded content from the Ecstasy store.

“Right now we are signing a bunch of contract providers and getting our affiliate programs set up,” Jones said. “By next week we should have several niche categories up, along with some major library additions.”

Check out thier site at http://ecstasymobile.com/