Emap buys YoSpace for 8.5 million quid

Link: Netimperative – Emap snaps up mobile social network for £8.7m

Emap has bought YoSpace, a UK mobile user-generated content business, as the publisher looks to expand it digital presence.

Yospace provides a mobile community based around user-generated videos. Its products include ‘See me TV” and ‘Look at me TV” services. Its customers include a number of major mobile networks in the UK.

I am 3 years out of date. If you’d asked me who YoSpace was 20 minutes ago, I’d have told you that they did wap pages and that I once downloaded a wap emulator.

Turns out that, whilst they still do an emulator, they actually do other things. Like run the SeeMeTV stuff for Three. I thought Three ran that themselves.

One thing I can tell you is that Yospace have an absolutely atrocious blog-outreach programme because, seriously, I had no idea. I haven’t even caught a press release or ANYTHING about them in a whole year.

Woops. I still remember them from 1999. Just in case you need a bit of a refresher…

Founded in 1999, Yospace provides multimedia messaging, personal storage and handset simulation solutions. Its clients include over 1,500 mobile development companies, internet portals and mobile operators such as O2, Vodafone, Orange and 3. In 2002, Yospace launched the Yospace Media Community Platform (MCP), one of the world’s first fully featured media libraries and applications platforms designed for MMS community-building applications.

Congratulations to all at Yospace! 😀

As for EMAP? Well. It’s all very well buying your way in, but really, they should have been in the medium years ago instead of arsing around with paper. 8.5 million plus another possible 6 million quid is an extremely expensive and massively lazy way of ‘doing something in mobile’. FIFTEEN million pounds buys quite a lot of smart interactive and mobile entrepreneurs and experts. Still, good news for all. Nice exit.

I wonder how the straight-laced PriceWaterhouseCoopers ladies and gentlemen got on doing their due diligence on the adult section of Three’s SeeMeTV. Heh.