Juice Wireless, offering mobile content sharing, gets more funding
Juice Wireless, a company that lets you send photos, videos and other content to your social network pages from your mobile phone, has been on a rocky ride.
Not only does it face plenty of competition, but it changed tack a year ago and laid off some employees when it aborted a separate marketing business. Yet that hasn’t stopped new investors from coughing up $6 million in new cash, led by 21Ventures.
The company’s mobile widget, called Juice Caster, also lets users share selected content with friends, and watch on their own phones through a straightforward interface.
Juice has evolved over the past year, closing its New York headquarters and moving into its Los Angeles offices.
The company and its CEO, Nick Desai, face criticism in the comment sections of blogs covering them. The comments come from a group of people claiming to be former employees, who typically leave several negative reviews below each post. When asked about the comments, Desai told us the company’s retrenchment is responsible, saying, “Maybe there were some hard feelings.”
Yet Qualcomm, also, has expressed confidence in the company, with a strategic investment of $3.3 million in March.
Juice Caster is now offered by the mobile carriers Alltel and Cricket Wireless, as well as two Puerto Rican operators. The company has signed deals with two of the largest U.S. carriers, to be announced within two months, according to Desai. It has also signed a deal with one of the largest handset makers, he said.
It still has plenty of competition. A host of other companies want to corner the market for mobile content, although many of their features differ. We recently covered two companies, Radar and Avot Media, that let mobile users view pictures and video. Seattle-based Treemo, which focuses more on sharing, just raised another $2.55 million from JK&B Capital, while just-launched startup Buzzwire works without a download.
Depending on whether mobile users are open to more than one video application, a more challenging opponent to Juice Wireless might be a video search app like Mywaves, which pulls video to mobiles from various parts of the web.
Mywaves says it has hundreds of thousands of users in 175 countries. Juice Wireless, by contrast, has only reached about 50,000 regular users, split between free (self-installed) and paid (through a carrier plan) customers.
Including this $6 million round, Juice Wireless has taken a total of $18.3 million to date.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.
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