MBlox


Mblox Inc. was a global company that provided Saas-based mobile messaging solutions to enterprises, including global one-way and two-way SMS, MMS, push notifications, short codes and virtual mobile numbers. Mblox Ltd. was founded in 1999, in London, United Kingdom but later Mblox inc. became the US based parent company after the successful merger with Mobilesys. The company was headquartered in Campbell, California, USA, with additional offices in over 30 countries, including London, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Singapore and Sydney.

History

Mblox was founded in London, England in 1999 by Andrew Bud. Between 2001 and 2003, MBlox opened offices in France, Spain, Germany, and Sweden.
In 2003, the company acquired carrier-grade message delivery capabilities through the purchase of a SMSC from Comverse. Also in 2003, Mblox merged with MobileSys, the leading US provider of enterprise SMS services, to form Mblox, Inc.
From 2005 to 2006, the company opened offices in Singapore and Australia. The year 2009 was marked by the opening of the Milan office, Italy.
In December 2017, parent company CLX Communications retired the Mblox and CardBoardFish brands.

Products

Mblox product lines were all Enterprise to Consumer communications related:
Since phone bills from some carriers attribute charges to the company doing the billing, rather than to the business that actually sold and provided the service, Mblox had been accused in Internet forums of enabling a process called cramming, or automatically signing mobile customers up for unsolicited services and billing them accordingly. As of 2008, the company had been fined 22 times for cramming-related offences, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since Mblox had never had any involvement, direct or indirect, in creating or promoting such services, its responsibility was to try to prevent its customers abusing the SMS-based billing services it provided them. Following the sudden spate of problems in 2008/9, in 2010 the UK regulator Phonepay Plus commended Mblox for "a significant investment in new technology, personnel and resources to aid compliance and prevent further harm occurring to consumers from services operating over its platform." In the UK, Mblox had not been cited in any case since December 2011, at which time the regulator described its actions as "exemplary". On March 19, 2013, Mblox sold its PSMS business to OpenMarket as it chose to focus exclusively on Enterprise to Consumer mobile messaging. This brought an end to its involvement in mobile payments