White-Label Mobile Search Platform Provider Raises $6M Funding
(By Peggy Anne Salz): Mobile Content Networks (MCN) – the mobile search company I told you was just coming out of stealth mode—has made quite an entrance. But today’s news of a $6 million first round of venture capital is actually old news, the company told me. It was completed in June and just now picked up by the press through the registration documents. The Series A funding comes from Meritage Funds, Frontera Group LLC and The Angels’ Forum, VentureWire reports (sub required). MCN’s customers include Scandinavian mobile operator TeliaSonera and D2 Communications (D2C), an affiliate of Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo. Contrary to press reports, the company is not late to the msearch party. In fact, MCN, which is a search platform provider not a search engine provider, is the first out the gates with an approach that may shake up the search industry and render the branded/white-label debate obsolete. This is because MCN is search engine agnostic and can incorporate the results of all search engines into a subset of results that abides by operators’ and content providers’ business rules. (Put simply operators can decide on which search engine results they want to deliver – or even exclude a particular search engine from the results—entirely on-the-fly.) MCN can also connect with the indexes that are growing and flourishing under the radar such as blogs, user-created music and videos, and all the stuff that makes up the legendary Long Tail. And we all know how anxious mobile operators are to be the honest broker between users and the user-gen content buried in the mobile Web.
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