Phonecom Agrees to Buy At Motion for $284 Million
-From AOL News. Some interesting information.- Cooters
Redwood City, California, Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Phone.com Inc., a maker of software for connecting wireless phones to the Internet, agreed to buy At Motion Inc. for $284 million in stock to gain voice-activated browsing capabilities.
Phone.com will exchange 2.25 million shares for closely held At Motion, based in Redwood Shores, California. At Motion's software lets people use voice commands to access e-mail, phone messages and other information services.
Phone.com wants to jump on the expected explosion in demand for wireless data services, forecast to draw 36 million U.S. users in 2003, compared with 3 million this year, according to Gartner Group Inc.'s Dataquest, a market researcher. About 1 billion mobile phones are expected to be in use worldwide by 2003.
``They want to be a premier supplier. . . of wireless- oriented content and applications,' said Edward Jackson, an analyst at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray who rates Phone.com ``strong buy.'
Because At Motion's software sits in the network operator's systems, any phone can access its services without modification. That includes regular, wired phones, said Alan Black, Phone.com chief financial officer. The services probably will be sold beginning in the second half of 2000.
``Any Internet site in the world can be voice-enabled, so that you'll be able to access data on those sites from phones that have the technology,' Black said in an interview.
A Hit in Britain
When Orange Plc, the third-largest cellular operator in the U.K., installed software similar to At Motion's in its network, it saw average minutes of use per customer rise four-fold, Jackson said. The software for the British network was made by Wildfire Communications Inc.
The At Motion transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2000. Forty employees from At Motion, including 30 engineers, will join Phone.com, the Redwood City, California- based company said.
Phone.com has helped develop and promote a software standard called Wireless Application Protocol to access Internet content while on the go. The market for devices and content ``has not gotten going yet,' Jackson said. ``There's going to be fertile ground for them to harvest.'
Black said the At Motion technology will help carriers, ``in that it enables them to better balance and marry the two aspects of their core business, voice and data.'
Phone.com agreed in October to buy Apion Ltd., a closely held Irish company, for about $267 million to add products and services for European phone companies. Phone.com has licensed its software to 47 wireless network operators and more than 25 phone manufacturers worldwide, the company said.
Phone.com shares rose 3 1/2 to 129 3/4 in midday trading. The stock is up more than 16-fold since the company first sold shares to the public in June.
Dec/21/1999 12:25 |
