mobiliser blog: Helio is a new Data MVNO soon to launch in the US. And Helio is a $440-million-powered joint venture between Earthlink, a leading ISP in the US, and SK Telecom, the number one MNO in South Korea with a market share of 51%. Helio is cool.
The last news we had from Helio was their deal to mobilise MySpace - a deal that seems to be inspired by the mobile client for Cyworld - the number one virtual community in South Korea owned by SK Communications with 20 million users - out of a population of 48 million.
Now Wired published a great story titled “Sky Dayton Gets Mobile” about Helio and its 34-year old CEO and serial entrepreneur Sky Dayton who founded Earthlink (ISP) and Boingo Wireless (WiFi ISP).
Sky Dayton was very smart to invite SKT into the joint venture Helio. I have visited the headquarters of SKT in Seoul in October 2005 with our Mobile Executive Tour and the things we learned there about the latest service innovations from SKT where just amazing. In fact, the MVNO strategy is a very smart and affordable strategy for MNOs to enter new markets. Maybe NTTDoCoMo will consider the MVNO approach in the future, too.
There seem to be many fans of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the Helio team. The 2 Helio devices at launch are called Hero (Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash) and YT (Skateboard girl in Snow Cash). Of course, these devices will have 3G and WiFi and cool applications for uploading your digital data to MySpace or sharing it among friends.
Helio is a new MVNO that is worthwhile to benchmark. And I am curious to see which other matches between leading global players will be made - not in heaven but on mobile planet earth.
