Nielsen acquires Telephia

Media research firm The Nielsen Company, which has struggled to gain headway in the wireless market, has agreed to acquire San Francisco-based Telephia. 

Telephia, of course, is known for its ability to measure wireless carrier market share and network performance. The firm, which was founded in 1998, made a name for itself because of its independent technology-based measurements that could track market share, customer behavior and network performance. A few years ago the firm expanded and added mobile media and mobile content measurement to its portfolio of services. And at last week's BREW 2007 conference, Telephia announced that it had partnered [1] with Qualcomm to launch a pair of new tools designed to track mobile content consumption and behaviors. The tools, dubbed MobileView and Applogger, are functional on all new Qualcomm chipsets that support BREW APIs.

Telephia has also been involved in a patent-infringement suit [2] against content measurement firm M:Metrics, which was founded by former Nielsen executive Will Hodgeman.

Telephia says it has more than 100 clients in the U.S., Canada and Europe from all sectors of telecom including carriers, infrastructure vendors and device makers. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

For more on the Nielsen/Telephia deal:
- see this release [3]
- also see this RCR [4] article.