CAMBRIDGE — The management team of
LiveHive Systems, a Waterloo digital media startup, has joined
Cambridge-based telecommunications company Fibernetics to run the
division that provides the Freephoneline.ca service.
Under the acquisition deal, LiveHive’s
management team, including president Dave Bullock and chief technology
officer Jean-Pierre Bhavnani, has taken charge of Fongo Inc., a company
owned by Fibernetics that runs the Freephoneline service. They retain
their titles as president and chief technology officer respectively in
Fongo.
John Stix, chief marketing officer of
Fibernetics, said Freephoneline.ca has a base of about 100,000 users and
is growing.
Under the service, people get a phone
line through their computers. It allows them to call anywhere in Canada
for free, receive calls, get voice mail and set up a “follow me” feature
that allows them to get their incoming calls transferred to other
phones. Right now, the service is primarily delivered over the computer,
but the company will soon be launching smartphone applications as well.
The calls are free because the business
gets its revenue from ads that appear on the top of the Freephoneline
application on the computer.
Fibernetics needed people with digital
media experience to drive new revenue and that sparked the interest in
LiveHive, Stix said. “We realized that if we wanted to take this to the
next level, we needed to acquire a digital media company with a proven
track record in monetizing digital media and developing applications.”
LiveHive, founded in 2005, creates
interactive media experiences for television shows. For example, people
could use a LiveHive application to play along with Who Wants to be a Millionaire, answering the questions posed by the TV host while watching the show on a computer.
Even though telecommunications is a
completely different industry, Fibernetics was interested in those
digital media skills and ideas, Stix said. “We weren’t looking to
acquire the technology, we were looking to acquire people,” he said. “We
wanted the people who had built LiveHive into a successful story. So it
was about finding good quality people to join our organization.”
Oct 03, 2011 -
http://www.therecord.com/news-story/2590999-livehive-team-joins-fibernetics/
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