Jamster

Jamba!, operating under the name Jamster in China, Brazil, and the company's English-speaking markets, is a premium-rate monthly SMS mobile phone content provider, based in Berlin, Germany.

Jamba!'s main line of business was the creation and marketing of ringtones for mobile phones. It is perhaps best known for the Sweety the Chick, Crazy Frog Anna Blue and Schnuffel characters. The company also sold insurance for mobile phones and home electronics and ran online gaming and online dating services. In 2005 it started doing business in the United States and China.

The company was founded in Berlin's Kreuzberg district in 2000.

VeriSign was a successful internet security company that had a series of product lines that connected mobile network companies' text message networks together securely—in 2004, about 3 billion per day. VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos recognised that with VoIP products developing, the revenues could decrease, and so he hired Vernon Irvin as Executive Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign's Communications Services division to solve the problem. Irvin saw good but technical and expensive products, but saw the volumes of exchange over the system as the solution.

In late 2004 under Irvin's direction, VeriSign bought Jamba for $270 million. Jamba at the time built mobile applications, games, ringtones and wallpapers, and was also in over 40 countries worldwide. The VeriSign team had recognised that there were twice as many mobile phones as there were computers, which also had built-in computer technology. Effectively, VeriSign now had a new content distribution platform which also integrated with the internet, which was both secure and auditable—now all they needed was the content.

VeriSign relocated Jamba's HQ Office to prestige premises in the Dom Aquarée building near Alexanderplatz in the centre of Berlin.

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