Jumbuck brings 15 million chatters to the iPhone
Jumbuck Entertainment is one of the largest providers of messaging apps to wireless carriers in the world. Yet nine years after its founding in 2000, most Americans still aren’t familiar with Jumbuck or its mobile product, even though Jumbuck is on the decks of major carriers.
The company claims 15 million users of its various chat applications in Australia, the Pacific Rim, Europe and the Americas. Its Power Chat application, placed on phones by more than 80 carriers including Sprint PCS in the U.S. and O2 in the U.K., may be the most widespread built-in or “on-deck” mobile chat client on Earth. Another Jumbuck service, Fast Flirting, hooks up users by age/sex/location for 10 minutes at time, sharing photos and videos of themselves to potential dates.
This week, Jumbuck could get finally get some better U.S. exposure. It’s adding an iPhone app for Power Chat, in the hopes of hooking up some of the iPhone’s five million users. A company spokesman cites “AT&T’s pivotal decision to cede control of the iPhone desktop to Apple and to users and the emergence of the App Store” as the driving factors behind Jumbuck’s addition of an off-deck, user-downloaded application to complement its on-deck apps on other phones.
Power Chat is a $2.99 app that’s been hidden in plain sight at Apple’s App Store since late April.
The app is more than a flirting app for singles. It’s a way to make friends in other countries. Jumbuck already has apps for other phones, but in order to fit on-deck on a significant number of phones — some still use the aging Wireless Access Protocol or WAP — the apps have been limited in features. Power Chat on the iPhone will be much slicker, simply because it can be.
Jumbuck CEO Adrian Risch credits Power Chat’s success to its team of in-house moderators who preview every post and photo uploaded to the site. “The big guys got out of the chat business because they didn’t want to deal with moderation,” he said in a phone interview. “That’s where we were able to enter and create a business. We proactively contact authorities.”
The company’s financials aren’t as big as you might expect. Despite its widespread footprint, Jumbuck has a relatively low market cap of $21 million Australian, or nearly $16 million U.S. dollars. Sales revenue for the second half of 2008 was AUD$9.9 million, up 33%. EBITDA increased to AUD$4.5 million, a 10 percent increase.
Jumbuck’s 15 million strong other on-deck chat apps, is now at risk of being chomped by Facebook and MySpace, each of which comScore says have around 70 million monthly visitors. Being on-deck isn’t enough to convince phone buyers to sign up for Jumbuck’s chat network.
Risch insists it won’t happen, because Facebook has built a social network that carriers won’t carry. “Facebook is kind of taking a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach,” he said. “This is something we can’t do. A lot of countries have laws about what wireless carriers can allow to protect minors. Sometimes we proactively contact the authorities.”
It feels like a long shot, but if Power Chat catches on among 5 million iPhone users, Jumbuck could finally become a household word in the USA.
Images: Jumbuck
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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