OnMobile Global is putting most- of not all - its eggs in the caller ringback tone basket (CRBT): it has signed an agreement to acquire LiveWire Mobile, a Boston headquartered provider of caller ringback tone services, as well as stock of Fonestarz Media Ltd, a UK based managed services of LiveWire, for a total consideration of $17.8 million, alongwith certain liabilities that the company has. The US based entity will be called OnMobile Live Inc, a 100% owned subsidiary of OnMobile LLC, US. Livewire counts, among its customers. We'd heard murmurs of this deal after OnMobile's conference call for the last quarter, in which the company had said that it could use the money it has for inorganic growth, but the sense that we were got then was that the deal might not go through. Now, it has. This acquisition effectively defines the direction that OnMobile is taking as a company - it is clearly going to be a managed services play instead of a direct to consumer play, as CEO Mouli Raman had clarified to MediaNama, but more than that, it appears that the idea is to focus primarily on Caller Ringback Tones and dominate that business globally; the diversification that OnMobile will probably look for is in terms of markets and clients, perhaps at the cost of derisking via expanding its product portfolio. CRBT accounted for 58% of OnMobile's revenues in FY13, as opposed to 49% the year before, and increased 38% year on year, even though India…
