Snipp Interactive Q2 revenue up 19% as it bolsters sales efforts

Snipp Interactive (CVE:SPN) said Thursday morning that second quarter revenue rose 19 per cent, citing a growing sales channel. 

The provider of mobile marketing services said that at the end of the second quarter that ended June 30, backlog, or the dollar value of signed contracts including deferred and unbilled revenue, totaled $262,274. 

Sales rose 19 per cent to $106,321, compared with $89,660 a year earlier. 

The company reported a wider net loss of $330,380 due to hiring and implementing broader sales and administration abilities, it said. 

“Since the beginning of 2012 Snipp was mainly focused on closing financing and then implementing a sales strategy," said CEO Atul Sabharwal. 

“We are beginning to see return from our new sales efforts and are enthusiastic about our sales pipeline and sales prospects globally.”

Indeed, the company said it added two full time sales resources, and two outside salespeople, as well as a new COO, and "major ad agency executive" to the board. 

In late May, Snipp signed an agreement with VirKet S.A. to offer its "Mobilize Me" technology platform in Mexico in the Spanish language. Under the strategic partnership agreement, Snipp will license its platform and provide mobile marketing services with VirKet in the Mexican market on an exclusive basis. 

Snipp's “Mobilize Me” platform supports several input mechanisms for mobilizing marketing campaigns for companies, including text message, QR codes, Microsoft tags and Snapp tags.

The platform then delivers a variety of content experiences to customers as part of sales tactics, including SMS, mobile web pages to collect data, emails, mobile videos, audio, sweepstakes, coupons, and ringtones, among others.

Already, the business, which was established in 2007, has provided its services to several Fortune 500 companies and other major brands, advertising agencies and publishers, including Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), ESPN, Time Inc, Ford (NYSE:F), Nike (NYSE:NKE), Wendy's (NASDAQ:WEN) and Campbell Soup (NYSE:CPB). 

The company continued its progress in the second quarter, lauching "QR in the Cloud", a way to allow cell phones to get responses from QR Codes without having a smartphone or without downloading a QR Code reader. 

QR codes are two-dimensional codes consisting of black square dots arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded in it can store universal resource locator links, geo co-ordinates and text. The codes were primarily used for the auto sector, but migrated to the advertising realm.

The company says its “QR in the Cloud” allows users to take a photo of any QR code with their mobile phones and send it in through an instant messaging service (MMS) to receive encoded content back by text message.

If used in tandem with "Snapp", the company’s proprietary image recognition technology, “QR in the Cloud” also allows any logo or distinctive image to be used as a mobile response code in campaigns.

Further to its momentum, last month, the mobile marketing business unveiled a beta trial of its new photo sharing technology called Face-in-the-Hole. 

Using Face-in-the-Hole, marketers will be able to invite users to take photos of themselves, friends or family and receive back “uniquely designed images” combining the user’s photo with company logos. 

Images can also be combined with social media, and Snipp says the service will be compatible with its mobile coupon offers or loyalty program engagement services the company provides commercially.

Snipp Interactive provides print publishers, advertising agencies and corporate/consumer brands with a full suite of mobile marketing services in North America, and generates revenue by designing, constructing, implementing and managing these mobile marketing services for its customers.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C. and established in 2007, the company had current assets of $1.6 million at the end of the second quarter, and liabilities of $0.19 million.