Hollywood and Berlin fight over Jamba

SOMETHING STRANGE is going on at Jamba/Jamster, the mobile content specialist that brought the world the Crazy Frog. Ex-Vodafone man, Lee Fenton is departing under a mysterious cloud.

Lee is widely credited as being the brains behind Vodafone's Live portal and was poached by Jamba/Jamster back in 2007. The company is actually now part of Fox Mobile Entertainment having been acquired from its original German owners based in Berlin.

As we all know, of course, Fox is in turn part of News Corporation, the guys that brought us Brits Wapping. Fox Mobile entertainment is also a joint venture between News Corp and Verisign. Complicated enough for you?

Anyway, it seems that Fenton has been caught up in a classic power struggle between the Holywood moguls and the mobile phone industry specialists.

Fenton had been acting CEO while the company searched for a successor to Lucy Hood. Back in February 2008, a replacement was found as CEO in the shape of Mauro Montanaro who's actually an ex-Nokia man himself.

A struggle seems to have taken place between the entertainment industry stalwarts and the younger mobile phone content industry acolytes. And Fenton has proved to be one of the casualties.

The INQ asked Jamba for a comment expecting the company to say something like he's decided to spend more time with his family.

We were very, very close. What Jamba actually said was, "Lee has decided to return to London to pursue other opportunities and join his family on a full-time basis. The search to replace Lee's role as COO is almost complete and will be announced shortly in a news release."

Now that's a surprise. Incidentally the reason why the company has a split personality is that Jamba is a popular brand of orange juice in the USA, so the decision was made to call it Jamster instead over there.

There's a lot to be won or lost in this particular struggle. Hollywood has the inventory and Berlin has the innovation and sales experience. It'll be interesting to see what happens next. µ