Here is my theory about CellNUVO.
The company is really small and essentially does only one thing which is solicit companies to place ads on their platform. All substantive operational activities are outsourced and there is very little technical knowledge at the company about the mechanics of managing device issues.
Sometime around the beginning of June something major happened and there was a big change in the rate of credit earnings. Around the middle of August some type of crisis arose as evidenced by the fact the website went down which means there were no new activations. That was flagged by one poster here days before the outage. Typically, the implies the carrier, Sprint, has declined new activations.
As some type of interim solution the company prefunded some limited service on Red Pocket with new temporary numbers.
All the MEIDs and ICCIDs were released and most of them (anyone who has service was migrated to Red Pocket).
Since then there has really been no significant news.
The only official statement from Tom Mannix was two weeks ago today and what was really interesting about it was what it did not say.
There could be a good reason for the silence but, even if there is, the public relations aspect of failing to provide any information to users is extremely damaging and may be impossible to erase even if somehow a way forward is found.
Once this type of situation happens, the story spreads all over the Internet.
Realistically, while the outage, although extreme in terms of duration, might not entirely erode confidence, it certainly make it clear that CellNUVO cannot be relied upon for any critical communication need. Once that is recognized then, the service is necessarily limited to being a backup resource which of course makes it interesting only to a very small group of potential users.
Typically these types of problem reflect financial strains. As it is a private company there is no way to know what the actual situation might be since there are no audited accounts to review.
My own reservation about the business model is not with the earning of credits. It is rather the number of times a user is able to earn credit for the same ad. I simply do not see how that can make sense from the perspective of the ad sponsor.