Mobile social networking: To date, Good has focused on providing mobile e-mail and messaging tools to smartphones. It also has built a social networking tool, but ran into some roadblocks when it came to creating partnerships with the social networking leaders. Good’s CMO John Herrema: “It was challenging to get the kind of agreements that Intercasting has. They’ve been at it for a long time. They have a nice portfolio, which is unmatched. I don’t think anyone has as many or has the depth or breadth of the relationships that Intercasting has.”

Moving beyond social networking: Over the long-term, the two companies envision leveraging Intercasting’s technology to potentially solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in mobile—fragmentation. Conahan: “As the platform is integrated, we will go far beyond mobile communications to do any type of application.” Herrema said that goes way beyond social networks. “We don’t have to come up with all the ideas. We intend to let all third parties to leverage the platform. There’s a lot of creativity being held back by the complexity of mobile.”

Rafat adds: The company started in mobile social networking space, in early 2005, with its own app then called Rabble, but as other online social networking sites took off, moved away from a direct to consumer offering into its own white-label service called Anthem, where its software and services are used as an integration layer and client for various social media services out there. Intercasting had been trying to sell the company since early last year, and had conversations along the way with the likes of AOL (NYSE: TWX), News Corp (NYSE: NWS) and others, but talks stalled on various issues, including possibly the price. Since then, the world has changed and they probably got a lot less that what was on the table last year, something Shawn admitted in his quote above.