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Showing posts with the label Mobile VAS

"Leveraged stock purchase led Arvind Rao to go astray": Forbes India

Forbes India has an article on the series of events leading to the recent controversial exit of Arvind Rao, Co-founder & CEO of listed Mobile VAS firm OnMobile. On November 23, 2010, Arvind Rao, the 53-year-old co-founder and CEO of OnMobile, bought approximately 6 lakh shares of his company from the open market, representing a little over 1 percent of the company’s total shares....At Rs 277 a share, he had to pony up nearly Rs 16.5 crore to acquire them....So he went ahead and borrowed money to buy the shares, thinking nothing of the interest it entailed or the fact that he’d need to put up nearly half his existing shareholding as collateral...OnMobile’s shares continued to fall from those levels, while Rao’s interest payments ballooned. ...Motivated by OnMobile’s growth all these years, he had never paid much attention to his salary, most of which went towards the monthly rental on his sea-facing apartment in Mumbai and his BMW 7-Series, both paid directly by the company. He req...

Deal Alert: Nexus Ventures invests $4-M in mobile apps developer Genwi

From the Press Release: GENWI (http://genwi.com), the leader in cloud publishing platforms for Tablets and Smartphones, has raised $4 million in Series A funding in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners (http://nexusvp.com). GENWI’s existing investors,Inventus Capital Partners and Quest Venture Partners, also participated in the round, bringing GENWI’s lifetime funding to $5.1 million including their original $1.1 million seed round raised in 2010. Offering one of the easiest and yet extremely powerful cloud-based platforms for publishing content on Tablets and Smartphones, GENWI has created and is actively managing over 1,500 apps for thousands of publishers. As opposed to custom building apps for each deviceform factor, GENWI affords publishers the ability to publish once and deliver interactive apps across all smart mobile devices - including iOS, Android, and HTML5. The GENWI Cloud Publishing Suite offers a mobile optimized, content aggregation and management system,a custom interf...