We've been running Virtual Mobile in betas for the last year, and have had some great feedback from you about what you want to see. However, shortly after our launch a number of other companies with very similar offerings to VM, released their services onto the market. While we're all for competition, some of these companies had a scale and reach that we simply couldn't match (i.e. Microsoft). Although we're convinced we have a better product, the ability for us to gain enough market share to make our service financially viable looked in doubt. We decided to keep VM open during 2009 to see how things went, but as we suspected we haven't gained the market share we needed. The running costs of VM are high, so last week we decided it was time to bow out gracefully and focus our attention on other parts of our business.
Virtual Mobile was turned off on Tuesday 8 December 2009. All account data was permanently deleted from the system at that time.
So Where Now?
We've learnt a lot from Virtual Mobile and even though VM won't continue, we've been harvesting from it to produce some new products. One of the big ones to come out is Sprite Migrate. This allows you to take your mobile data from Windows Mobile, Symbian or Blackberry to a Google Android phone. It's been a big hit and is growing every day. We also used VM technology to help us put out Android Backup, which has also been amazingly well received.
As for our backup products in general, well we've had loads of feedback from you and the big request that keeps coming up is online backup. We hear you and we're onto it. VM taught us a lot about online services and syncing and online backup aren't too different. Keep checking our blog for more details, we hope to have an announcement soon.
Thanks to everyone who helped us beta test Virtual Mobile, we're sorry that this one didn't make it into production.
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