Merged! Photobucket and Ontela To Become One

Massive photo-hosting website Photobucket and mobile imagine service provider Ontela plan to merge.

This will create a giant image corporation with tens of millions users, and cutting edge wireless technology.

Photobucket was acquired by News Corp in 2007, and the parent corporation will retain a large stake in the new combined entity. No financial terms were available at the time of writing of this post.

Tom Munro, Ontela’s chief financial officer, will become the president of the new entity, with Jon Miller of News Corp as the director. Miller is the chairman and CEO of News Corp’s digital news division.

From the press release: “Photobucket is one of the largest standalone photo sites in the world. More than 11 million photos, graphics, and videos are uploaded to Photobucket every day and the site serves more than 100 billion images each month.

Ontela is the leading provider of services that get pictures off camera phones. Ontela’s proprietary technology automatically uploads pictures from phones, solving the last remaining problem with mobile photography – getting at the pictures. Ontela’s technology has been certified by 30 operators, including Verizon, T-Mobile, and Alltel on more than 100 handsets. It also is available preinstalled on devices from all five of the top global handset manufacturers.”

Finally, Ontela’s previous investors will be injecting capital into the new entity to keep their equity position strong. More as it comes. The full press release can be found here.