Tapioca to deliver video, audio over SMS

September 12, 2007 | Matt Marshall

Tapioca Mobile, a San Diego company that lets publishers deliver video, images and audio through SMS messages on a cell-phone, has raised seed funding from Silicon Valley venture firm Venrock.

The company was founded this year by former employees of wireless companies Qualcomm, Nokia, and Openwave.

Venrock’s David Siminoff and Neeraj Choubey joined the board.

In a statement, Siminoff said the rise of mobile messaging is “astounding” and rivals the adoption of the Internet a decade ago. Tapioca Mobile gives media companies and advertisers the ability to deliver video and other “rich media” formats, such as images and audio, to cellphone users via the fast-growing Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) protocol available on most mobile devices. MMS enables multimedia files to be attached to text-based SMS messages. MMS does have its challenges (scroll down).

Siminoff was a founding investor in 4Info, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in SMS-based search. Choubey worked earlier at Yahoo’s mobile division and began his professional career in the CDMA infrastructure division at Motorola.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.