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In September of 2005, New Zealand-based mobile phone service provider PlusSMS held its first

annual meeting of shareholders and promised a strong future for the company.

Plus SMS had a big idea to revolutionize the way globally branded products advertised.

The details are quite mundane to the layperson, but to advertising execs and shareholders

the text messaging-based promotional tool was exciting, a way for these

brands to reach potential consumers worldwide with the simplicity of a text, securing specific

numbers that coincided with a company's name on a phone's keypad. It might not have seemed like a huge deal to most.

The practice of assigning a word to a phone number had been around since the 1960s, after all.

But to secure specific numbers on a provider's network was a big idea to guide them to plus SMS,

the company figured, and it would provide global product giants

with the ability to use those digits, essentially their name in number form, for promotional

texting, those ads you see telling you to text something to 5555, plus SMS, of course,

would be paid for each of these texts. The company was

started only a year before by a man named Gary Donahue, and by the November following the

shareholders meeting. A month later, the market value of Plus SMS had risen to over $250 million after Donahue's announcement that he

had secured hundreds upon hundreds of these numbers for use by global brands. A year later,

it turned out that he had not secured nearly the amount of numbers he had claimed, and the company

began spiraling downward.

Donahue stepped down from the board and relinquished his shares in the company.

He seems to have seen the event coming, because months earlier in June of 2006, Chris Tench was

...