Spectrum Marketplace Funding Story Featured in Dow Jones eNewsletter

With talk about the tanking world economy becoming cliché, it's reassuring to hear someone is still receiving funding... Today's Dow Jones eNewsletter "VentureWire Alert" featured Spectrum Bridge's Series B financing news today.

The article reads as follows:

After seeing plenty of action on its newly launched online marketplace, Spectrum Bridge Inc., which matches up buyers and sellers of wireless spectrum licenses, has closed an $8.1 million funding round.

The Series B round, which is expected to be the company's last, should carry the 27-employee company to profitability within a year, said Rick Rotondo, vice president of marketing.

New investor Espirito Santo Ventures led the round, joined by previous backers True Ventures, Telecommunications Development Fund, Milicom Venture Partners and company founders.

In mid-September, the Lake Mary, Fla.-based company activated its Web site, SpecEx.com, and since that time has listed more than 1,000 licenses for spectrum, and registered more than 100 companies and agencies as potential buyers or sellers.

"It's been cranking," Rotondo said. "We are building [the site] so that buyers and sellers can have a one-stop shop."

Radio spectrum, which can also be used for broadband delivery, is a patchwork quilt of chunks of bandwidth, with pieces large and small, that together blanket most of the United States.

The FCC frequently auctions off parcels of spectrum, but until now an online marketplace for these pieces of bandwidth has not existed.

VentureWire is available for a two week trial, and touts itself as the "premier source of breaking news and critical information about venture-backed companies and their investors."

New Site Revealed

The SpectrumBridge.com website just completed its face lift this weekend. The site remains a portal and showcase for the SpecEx marketplace (for trading licensed spectrum), but it now also includes more info on:

• The FCC's view of secondary markets
• A breakdown of how SpecEx works for Buyers and Sellers of spectrum
• Education on the secondary market
• "Get Started" section for demos, eNewsletters, spectrum requests
• and more.

WCAI Trade Show Follow-Up

“The conference began the day of the presidential election, so that was fresh on everyone’s minds, “says Beverly Lambright, a member of Spectrum Bridge’s marketing team. “But the big buzz was focused on the economy and how that will be affecting the wireless industry."

The 3-day, annual conference included 700 registrants, 20 exhibitors, and 63 speakers in 19 panel sessions on wireless topics from WiMax deployment in North America to digital television white space and beyond. Attendees enjoyed keynote addresses from Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, Benjamin Wolff, CEO of Clearwire and Larry Page of Google, among others.

The event also hosted a Broadband Summit with FCC Commissioners and State Utility Commissioners for a Joint Conference on Advanced Services.

To read Spectrum Bridge's full report on the show, visit our Industry Events page, or click here for a pdf document.

Commentary on the White Space Vote

The white space issue was pushed through at the November 4th FCC meeting, probably as a political expedient. As such, it was not well supported or thought out. At this time it is likely that there will be a court challenge and possibly a review by the new administration. Both of which will significantly slow things down.

Even then, this is only the beginning; not the end. The FCC now has to define rules and regulations for the use of White Space and you can be sure all the interested parties will be actively involved. So it will take a significant amount of time before we can truly analyze the impact. Right now White Space is perched on the crest of the hype curve.

We will have to watch how deeply it drops into the trough of disillusionment before the reality can be assessed.

The eBay of Wireless Spectrum

Network World published a great piece on Spectrum Bridge and the new online marketplace for spectrum: SpecEx. The article hit on major points relating to the FCC, past attempts at the spectrum marketplace idea, numerous quotes, and nails some points we are currenty explaining to interested users.

See the article here: SpecEx the eBay of Wireless Spectrum

Press Releases and Forbes

Among the notable sources which are now talking about Spectrum Bridge and our product, SpecEx are:

• forbes.com
• techcrunch
• moconews.net
• fiercewireless
• washingtonpost.com
• nytimes.com
• TheRegister

Each of these links goes directly to the story about SpecEx. We are trying to keep a running list of stories on our news page, but things are taking off so quickly we're bound to miss some!

Spectrum Bridge Featured in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal newspaper reaches approximately 2 million subscribers, and the online edition boasts around 930,000 paying subscribers. The recent Spectrum Bridge feature in the WSJ was written by Mr. Amol Sharma and introduced this huge audience to the idea of buying, selling and leasing licensed spectrum on an online resource.

A notable quote from the piece was by an FCC spokesman who stated "Chairman Martin has always been supportive of secondary markets and generally sees this as a positive business framework."

We will never get tired of hearing how the FCC thinks this is a good idea. Look for Spectrum Bridge in more coverage from respected news sources such as the Wall Street Journal shortly...