Money-losing companies with interesting technology and a small, if rabid, customer base still frequently tend to sell for healthy chunks of change -- especially in the wireless space. We know Helio was burning cash like crazy, but that doesn't entirely explain why SK Telecom was so absurdly desperate to dump their $500m investment. At a $39m acquisition price, SK didn't just lose its shirt -- it lost that, the shoes, and then the pants. You know, the pants with a half-billion dollars in them.

Now, if you look at nothing other than the price per subscriber of some other, larger mobile acquisitions, Helio's numbers seem even crazier. Alltel's subscriber base is going to Verizon for about $2,100 per customer, and back when Nextel sold to Sprint, each sub went then for about $2,350. Helio's $39m sale to Virgin nets them $230 per subscriber. That's now what you're worth to Virgin, Helio subscriber -- $230 on an $80 ARPU. Clearly there's a lot more value in acquiring more than ten million subs than under 200k, but is that value ten fold?

And then to add insult to injury, the piddly $39m Helio did get from Virgin was an all-stock deal, which basically means SK won't be recouping material costs any time soon. Granted, that does amount to 17% of Virgin Mobile USA's market cap, and SK gets two seats on VM's board, but damned if Helio isn't like the reverse-Brewster's Millions of cellphone companies. Basically our pet theory right now is that either SK is playing the Korean tax system for the maximum possible write-off, or they literally didn't have another soul to turn to in this whole wide world. We know Helio wasn't in good shape, but a $39m all-stock deal means they basically stood on the corner and gave the company away to whomever was passing by at the time.

We wanted some more expert opinions, so we hit up a couple of old Engadget pals. Om Malik had this to say: Their losses are huge and there is no hope in sight. Why Virgin bought so few subscribers, I don't get. My best guess is that SK Telecom wants to do something with Virgin. Helio was one giant misexecution -- it is a micropennies on the dollar sale.

Michael Gartenberg offered this: I suspect there were not a whole lot of options... who else would have bought this thing? It's clear the MVNO model doesn't work for the most part. Virgin was probably the only buyer who had interest and it was probably the best chance for Helio's investors to get some of that money back.

Bottom line, it looks like Virgin and its shareholders should be pretty stoked today, because by all accounts they got a pretty killer deal.

It's official, MVNO lone survivor Virgin Mobile is picking up the struggling Helio from SK Telecom and Earthlink for a cool $39 million in Virgin Mobile USA stock. They expect the deal to close in Q3 2008, pending regulatory approval. The acquisition comes as no surprise, but it's still sad to see the one true innovator in a mostly doomed MVNO space fall to that pesky little "completely failing to make money" thing. The good news is that it while the Helio brand will be phased out, Virgin Mobile isn't just in this for the 170,000-ish subscribers it'll be picking up. They plan to leverage Helio's technology and content offerings, not to mention the willingness of its customers to pay a few extra bucks for the perks, to build the Virgin Mobile brand into new spaces -- spaces which hopefully prove profitable and Ocean 2-ey.

Do you hear that, Helio? That [cue Sir Richard Branson's soothing voice] is the sound of inevitability. Rumors have been swirling for a few weeks now that SK Telecom -- Helio's majority owner -- is getting ready to cut, run, and offload its share to Virgin Mobile, rolling the scrappy MVNO into the one and only virtual network in the US that's been met with substantial, quantifiable success (more recent stock woes notwithstanding). Now, the Financial Times is reporting that a deal is cued up and ready for a public introduction as early as this week. The sooner, the better, because tons of questions remain about the fate of subscribers and the introduction of the pretty hotly anticipated Ocean 2, a device that at one time could've been Helio's savior; too late for that now, we guess.

It ain't over until it's over, but we just got word that Helio store managers received notification this week that the axe is finally falling: (at least some of) the nationwide chain of retail stores will be shuttered during Virgin's takeover of Helio. As we've heard, "there is no 'merge' in this merger," so it sounds like after this year's big executive reshuffle, SK Telecom is bailing on their half-billion dollar enterprise a big way. No word if the fabled Ocean 2 will make it -- or if Virgin will even let Helio customers keep their phones.

Alongside Helio -- more or less the last man standing -- the great MVNO goldrush also dies. Unfortunate that besides Virgin and a few local and M2M providers (like Amazon's Whispernet), pretty much no one was able to make it work. Then again, no one ever never said making cellphones and running any kind of carrier was easy.

Text messaging rates have always been a little ridiculous, but a new class-action suit filed in Mississippi alleges that virtually every wireless carrier you can think of is basically cheating you by charging you for received texts and not allowing you to turn the service off. The suit names AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Alltel, US Cellular, Cellular South, and Virgin Mobile (surprisingly, T-Mobile didn't make the cut), and says that members of the class are entitled to relief for the unauthorized charges, wrongful collection, and unjust enrichment. Of course, this will all likely end in a useless settlement that nets subscribers like three extra text messages and a 20 percent discount on an "approved accessory," while the plaintiff's law firm banks millions, but we'll see how things go.

Looks like Virgin Mobile USA and Helio parent SK Telecom didn't bother to get their stories straight before turning to the press over recent rumors that they've been talking marriage. Right on the heels of an SKT statement that talks of a Virgin Mobile takeover were "groundless," Virgin Mobile has come out with a super-brief statement saying something quite to the contrary -- that the two are, in fact, in "preliminary discussions" over "possible strategic opportunities." That's about as vague and unhelpful as it gets -- a level of vagueness that's really only saved for situations where something big is about to go down, actually. The MVNO goes on to say that it's gonna stay mum on the subject at this point unless "a definitive agreement is reached," but at least we know they're chatting.

[Via mocoNews]

Times haven't been so great at Helio, but it looks like the troubled MVNO could be snapped up by Virgin Mobile. mocoNews did a little digging after Virgin's recent Q1 conference call, and says that the two companies are currently in merger talks. Since both companies use Sprint's network, the tech would be compatible, and the deal would give SK Telecom a way to keep Helio going as it tries to gain a foothold in the US market. Nothing's set in stone yet and the two companies aren't talking, but we'll definitely keep an eye on this one.

[Via Textually]

Virgin Mobile is officially dipping its toes into smartphone water with its latest offering, the Kyocera Wild Card. Of course, how deep into that particular pool both companies are going is a question for the ages. The Wild Card isn't exactly the most robust phone you'll ever get your hands on, though the flip-phone does offer a QWERTY keypad, dual screens, a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth integration, and a WAP browser. The hitch is that you'll have to view that browser on a 128 x 160 screen, which is painfully, embarrassingly small -- though they do throw in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to keep you distracted. Hey, for a price point of $99, you could do way, way worse. The phone is available now from your friendly neighborhood Virgin Mobile dealer.

Yesterday we sat down with Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of Virgin Group, in the first class cabin of Air Colbert on the inaugural flight of Virgin America. Richard's day started with a rush through NY rain to make the plane that morning, and was losing his voice on top of it, but he was nice enough to spend a some minutes with us chatting up a few of his myriad of companies. We requested to speak to him about Virgin Galactic, but he isn't allowed to comment on the current situation due to an ongoing investigation into the explosion at Scaled Composites.

Thank you for talking with us today. Congratulations on the flight!

Thank you very much.

How are you liking it?

[Laughs] Well, I'm biased. And we've spent years and years trying to get this Virgin born and off the ground, and so many people have put so much time and effort and sweat and toil into it. Our competitors have tried to smother it at birth and make sure it never happened, but now it's finally happened. It's the perfect birth, I can't think of anything I'd change. She's a beautiful baby, has got beautiful eyes, and I'm very very proud of her, very proud of what everyone's done to get this.

It's definitely been a well publicized fight to make this happen, what made it worth three and a half years to launch Virgin America?

I think anybody who's traveled on the legacy carriers in America will know why people have to fight to try to compete with them. The quality of their service is almost non-existent. I wouldn't say that's particularly the fault of their crews, it's the tools that those crews have been given by their masters, or they haven't been given any tools, and the end result has been... If you look at any poll of the best airlines in the world, I've never seen an American carrier come anywhere but very very near the bottom. So, in a situation like that, it's right for Virgin to come in and shake up that industry. The very fact that we come in and we offer that equality will mean that will lift those legacy carriers, it'll be actually good for them. They'll have to compete back, and I'm sure they will. But, you know, it's up to our team that we always remain one step ahead.

Yeah, we've seen this system before. It didn't work for Gizmondo's Tiger Telematics when it was called Smart Adds, we didn't think it was going to work for the company's unofficial spinoff, Xero Mobile (started by the CEO of Tiger's Smart Adds division), but now Richy Branson wants you to to stop paying for (some of) your minutes by watching youth-oriented ads. Welcome to SugarMama, Virgin Mobile's ads-for-minutes system which gives you airtime in exchange for viewing a video ad or interacting with text ad, and then providing feedback to the advertisers (presumably to make sure you actually performed the act of watching or reading said ad). We don't yet know exactly how many ads it'll take to reach the monthly ceiling of 75 minutes "earned," but what would really impress us is if you could earn your whole minute plan this way.