Thumbplay has hired an exec away from Apple’s iPhone ranks to bulk up its team as it attempts to transform the ringtone company to a full-track music download service for the phone and PC.
Pablo Calamera, who oversaw the launch of Apple’s MobileMe cloud services, will serve as the company’s CTO starting March 8. The Thumbplay subscription music service, which claims to have more than 8 million tracks licensed from the four major record labels and thousands of independents, will be generally available in beta starting Thursday. Initially, it will be available on the Blackberry, but will eventually launch on Android and iPhone. Release.
Most recently, Calamera served as Director of Apple’s MobileMe, which enabled iPhone and Mac users to sync contacts and other data to the cloud, so that it could be accessible on the computer or phone. While MobileMe supports “millions of worldwide active users on a daily basis,” the launch was considered rushed and full of bugs. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) ultimately gave customers a 60-day extension.
Prior to Apple, Calamera was the Senior Director of Service Engineering and Support at Danger for five years, where he lead the service engineering team for the Sidekick. He also spent time at NotifyMe Networks, AT&T (NYSE: T) Labs and WebTV Networks. In a release, Calamera said: “Thumbplay has an incredible talent pool, and they have done a remarkable job in building robust, feature-rich services that deliver beautifully across multiple platforms. This is a very difficult thing to do, and I have been consistently impressed with the energy, smarts and creativity on display.”
The addition of a CTO comes as the company’s executive team has undergone a number of changes over the past year. Its Founder and CEO Are Traasdahl recently stepped down to serve as chairman, and co-founder and CMO Evan Schwartz was promoted to CEO. Thumbplay’s previous CTO left a year ago in March.
Thumbplay may need all the help it can get. While its history of marketing and selling ringtone subscriptions will likely help, consumers have yet to adopt full-track subscriptions on a large scale. In this model, consumers are allowed to download all the music they want, but as soon as they stop paying for the service, all their rights to the downloads disappear—in other words, they rent the music and don’t own it. Thumbplay charges $10 a month for access to the service, and says it charges another $0.69 to $1.29 per track if a user wants to own it.