Verve Wireless Acquires Mobile Ad Company Deconstruct Media

Verve Wireless, which helps create smartphone applications for newspapers and other publications, has acquired Deconstruct Media, a mobile advertising technology company.

Verve said the acquisition will help monetize mobile media at the local level by leveraging Deconstruct’s self-serve ad network, which allows advertisers to buy ad campaigns with a credit card.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and not much else is known about the company, other than its platform was built by product and engineering executives from Advertising.com, which is now apart of AOL Advertising.

Otherwise, information on the company’s Web site is fairly sparse, with a lot of its pages saying they are still in the works. Brent Halliburton, founder and CEO of Deconstruct, will join Verve as VP of product management. Prior to founding Deconstruct, Halliburton was senior director of new product development at Advertising.com. He and the rest of the team will be based out of Verve’s Washington, D.C., office.

Verve serves hundreds of media companies, and had the goal of serving 2.2 billion pages in 2010. It works with McClatchy and Belo Interactive, and has raised almost $10 million in capital from investors, including the Associated Press.

The price tag was likely small, but in the past year, mobile advertising and marketing companies have been a hot commodity (luckily, there’s still plenty to go around).

Last week, we broke the news that Facebook acquired Rel8tion, a mobile advertising company out of stealth mode for an undisclosed sum, and earlier this week Motricity said it had purchased Adenyo for up to $150 million.

Of course, these more recent deals pale in comparison with Google’s purchase of AdMob last year, and Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless to create iAd.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald