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Ontela snaps photo sharing deal with Alltel

Seattle-based Ontela will provide its mobile photo sharing service to Alltel, an important partnership since it marks the first national mobile carrier to deploy the technology.

Picture
Dan Shapiro

The service will be branded by Alltel under the name PhotoCopter, with data plan subscribers paying $2.99 per month. Ontela Chief Executive Dan Shapiro declined to say what percentage of the monthly fee his company will receive, though the wireless executive said "this is the next great step in our business, expanding to a national customer base."

Alltel camera phone users who are on a data plan will be able to have their photographs immediately saved to their hard drives, delivered to their e-mail or posted to photo sharing services Flickr, Blogger, PhotoBucket and Snapfish.

The deal follows a similar partnership that Ontela inked last fall with Cellular South.

Ontela raised $4.5 million from Voyager Capital, Hunt Ventures, Oak Investment Partners and others in November 2006.

It competes against ShoZu and PixSense, also overlaping with Seattle based Dashwire. (I profiled them earlier this month.)

Posted by at April 16, 2008 8:00 a.m.
Category:
Comments
#118252

Posted by unregistered user at 4/16/08 8:17 a.m.

Congrats to Dan, Charlie, Brian, etc. - this is great news for a great company!

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#118266

Posted by unregistered user at 4/16/08 9:01 a.m.

Congrats guys!

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#118272

Posted by unregistered user at 4/16/08 9:21 a.m.

Congrats!
Shannon

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#118429

Posted by unregistered user at 4/16/08 4:56 p.m.

You gotta love Joe Levy -- I'm sure he played a big part in this deal...

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#118574

Posted by unregistered user at 4/17/08 10:22 a.m.

John,
You asked a right question: "Shapiro declined to say what percentage of the monthly fee his company will receive"
It is a key to qualify deal like that. If Shapiro did not want to answer there may be a good reason for it, not only because of confidentiality. If a deal like that on the bad terms for company it can kill a startup very quickly.

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#118694

Posted by unregistered user at 4/17/08 3:11 p.m.

Hmm, let's see: Alltel has 13 million subscribers, assume 10% adoption rate, means 1.3 mil. x monthly fee = monthly revenue. For a 50% rev share that's nearly $2 mil./per month in revenue. That would be pretty damn good for a startup and this is just one deal.

Play with the adoption and rev share numbers as you will.

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#118994

Posted by unregistered user at 4/18/08 10:46 a.m.

10% adoption rate? you are kidding. Especially with conservative customer base like AllTel has. Ontela will be lucky if they get 1-2% of subscriber base willing to add $3 extra (don't forget extra taxes too) to their cel phone bill. Also not sure if AllTel agreed to 50-50 revenue share. AllTel takes a significant risk with unknown start-up that they are only one real customer.
I am estimating this deal with optimistic 1 million per year in revenue from this deal

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#119006

Posted by unregistered user at 4/18/08 11:20 a.m.

1 million per year = $80K per month. This is nice but nothing special. Ontela need to raise additional capital very soon. This deal could help them getting a better valuation

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