Boldly navigating what’s next in connectivity.
We bring innovative concepts to life
by infusing startup thinking into big telecom
Our Services
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Carrier Partnerships - Industry Firsts
We’ve spent our entire careers building first-of-their-kind partnerships with telecom operators. We built the original US MVNO, Virgin Mobile, as a joint venture with a carrier, not an arms-length wholesale provider. We created Visible as a wholly owned business of a wireless operator.
We’re currently building several new, first-of-their-kind businesses with operators in both mobile and home internet.
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Business Strategy and Product Definition
We help you find the white space in the telecom market - the area where a new business concept can come to life and grow - and then help define the strategy, the product, and go-to-market approach to capture that opportunity.
Working directly with leading operators, or companies who want to co-create large scale businesses with operators, we operate as a seamless extension of internal teams.
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eSIM-Based Customer Acquisition
Consumer expectations are driven by their digital experiences across industries. Telecom has lagged behind on creating compelling digital experiences. The emergence of eSIM was a catalyst to open up new ways of acquiring customers and offering them global roaming services.
We created Awesim Wireless as a platform to help wireless service providers unlock new ways of acquiring customers through digital channels.
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Conversational Messaging and Commerce
We are experts in the evolving messaging landscape and the shift from traditional SMS to RCS and WhatsApp. Add in GenAI interactions and you have what we call Conversational Messaging. Just as much of our personal communication has moved to messaging, the way we communicate with businesses will do the same.
CRM is migrating from email and SMS to Conversational Messaging. We help companies to build user experiences and drive customer engagement through this exciting new channel.
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Telecom Rewards Programs
Offering customers a compelling rewards program has become table stakes in the industry. Yet most rewards platforms lack AI-driven personalization, the offers are not compelling, and they do not directly reward customers for business outcomes.
We work with TLC Worldwide, a leading global rewards network, and TIMWETECH, an innovative global tech platform to offer a best-of-breed rewards platform for the telecom industry. In addition to great, every day rewards, it offers special rewards for specific missions that drive business results, all done through an exciting, gamified user interface.
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Innovation Acceleration
We design and curate executive innovation events, including C-suite innovation days and custom industry events. We bring together telecom leaders, emerging technologies, and well-vetted vendors around topics shaping the industry, from AI to smart home to next-generation messaging. We create the right connections, conversations, and outcomes, helping leaders cut through noise and accelerate their company’s innovation execution.
Time is increasingly the key dimension of competition in many industries.
“Dave had a unique vision for a ‘digital carrier’ and brought it to life with Visible. It was way ahead of where the industry was at the time.”
Greg Haller, founder and former CEO of Visible
“The Connex Studio team has been instrumental in helping us navigate our best path in the mobile industry.”
Ted Fike, Chief Business Offer - Beast Industries
Our Partners
Dave Whetstone
Managing Partner
Dave has several decades of experience across many different areas of the mobile industry. Before founding Connex Studio, Dave led Meta's telco strategic partnerships, and built a new eSIM ads program to activate wireless service trials. Prior to joining Meta, he helped create Visible for Verizon, the first fully digital operator and designed a brand new consumer value proposition. Dave was CMO at MobiTV where he won an Emmy Award for bringing live streaming TV to mobile phones.
Early in his career, he pitched Richard Branson on bringing the MVNO concept to the US, and founded Virgin Mobile USA. Dave led product, marketing and distribution for the company, growing it into one of the most successful MVNOs and transforming prepaid wireless into a mainstream product. Virgin was the first to call phones by fun names rather than geeky model numbers - launching with the Super Model and the Party Animal.
Dave has a BS from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Michigan.
Erica Winkelman
Operating Partner
Erica has spent her career at the forefront of digital transformation across mobile, media, and cloud, working at the intersection of mobile operators, content, and technology. She began her career managing content distribution partnerships across the North American MVNO landscape. She later held key partnership and go-to-market roles at MobiTV, Dolby, Cisco, and AWS, where she helped bring industry-first innovations to market.
At MobiTV, Erica was instrumental in launching NFL Mobile, delivering live football streaming over mobile networks for the first time, and worked closely with North American Tier 1 carriers to bring the first white-labeled mobile TV services to market. At Dolby, she led early efforts to bring virtual surround sound to the mobile ecosystem. She later supported telecom providers in modernizing network infrastructure, helping guide the shift from legacy network environments to cloud platforms at AWS, placing her at the leading edge of telco digital transformation.
Erica has a BA from the University of Oregon