In the last session of the day at MobileBeat 2009, five judges listen to mobile startup pitches on stage, where each had two minutes to present.
Moderated by CNET’s Natali Del Conte, the judges included: Jason DeWitt, Jake Seid of Lightspeed Ventures, AT&T’s Will Lowry, Intel Capital’s Stephen Saltzman and Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures.
CardStar is in the Mobile Loyalty Market. SyncScan is a key differentiator, they say, which allows you to get subscriptions to Mobile Loyalty Intelligence. They also offer mobile surveys direct to the consumer, which provides a channel for mobile coupons and promotions.
With mobile survey, CardStar can create custom reports for customers, and show how that usage compares to their competitors. Users use them at the point of sale on a regular basis which gives them a direct to consumer channel for coupons.
They support iPhone and next is Android. They want to be defacto solution to connect merchants to consumers.
For consumers, it’s free. Once they get a critical mass of users, they’ll approach merchants on a one-on-one basis and say “we now know how your customers are using customer loyalty cards.”
For merchants, they can further develop their relationship with their most loyal customers by providing personalized offers and promotions.
Waze’s CEO Uri Levine talks to the audience about their GPS solution. Israel-based Waze is driver generated live maps and road intelligence. They’re all about guiding you to your office on the fastest route possible. Waze has created a network of drivers in real-time on the actual speed drivers are traveling.
They launched in Israel in January 2009 and today, they have 130,000 drivers. “The real time traffic is simply better than anything else in the western hemisphere,” says Uri.
Android support was announced a few weeks ago and they’ll be extending it to the Windows mobile beta.
Aloqa solves mobile search and discovery problems by sending real time recommendations to your phone.
The Aloqa premise: phones should just send personalized real time recommendations based on user context = location + preferences + social graph.
Their mobile service proactively notifies you of interesting places, events, and Facebook friends near you. Instead of having to search, you can just look at your phone and see your favorite hotspots, friends, events of interest, and recommended bargains close by, wherever you are.
Publishers that have location relevant content or services now don’t need to build their own mobile client and support hundreds of phones. They can create an Aloqa Mobile Channel that notifies their users when their content is relevant. Then, they can distribute, track, and monetize their channel on Aloqa.
Aloqa won the people’s choice award at the end of the day. Above accepting the honor on-stage with Matt Marshall.
TazzleIT CEO Dr. Christopher Savoie talks to us about their service which is going live in San Francisco starting at the end of this month for $79.95.
Savoie touts his service as the quickest, easiest way to view, print and send email, attachments, photos and files from your BlackBerry directly to any PC.
Using their solution, companies and individuals to easily and securely view, print and share their important data and files. Legal is a huge vertical for them because lawyers want to go back to their office and view and print right away.
A future app to help facilitate this will be management for documents that are and are not allowed.
SocialScope is a bit like ‘crack for social media,’ their spokesperson says on stage.
Think of it as a unified inbox for all your social networks. Their private beta went live yesterday which includes a new UI and support for flickr. They offer one interface that allows you to see everything all combined in one place.
You can create groups and track only what they do. “We’re not just about text updates, you can see video and pictures as well. What people really love is that “we turn it into conversations. You can do things by location, to let me know what people are doing anywhere.”
“Is this FriendFeed for mobile?” asks Scott Raney. People also want to know why Blackberry and not iPhone out of the gate given that there are 45 Twitter apps on the iPhone and only two on the Blackberry.
“We have to provide an engaging experience. Aggregation is a really important part of what we do and the Blackberry is more flexible for that.”
Ringful provides a software platform that makes it easy to develop rich, multi-modal mobile applications with deep integration into existing enterprise infrastructure, social media, and big data warehouses (i.e., Google).
They currently have a focus on Personal Dashboard applications in the healthcare field. Ringful’s vision is to use the consumer smartphone as the hub for personal health information.
The smartphone connects to personal medical devices to collect data, and visualize the data for the user.
The data trends help the user to adjust his/her behavior to lead to a more healthy lifestyle. The smartphone application also connects to Ringful data interop gateway servers to send the medical data to backend electronic medical systems so that doctors can have access to the data as well.
IQ Engines makes visual connections.
Their software can search a large set of images or videos with high reliability. IQ Engines works with companies to provide image search solutions using their visual search software.
The company was founded as a collaboration of computer neuroscientists at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, who were inspired by the brain’s vision system – how the brain represents images and how the brain recognizes objects.
Their goal is to bring advances in biological vision models to practical image and video search, using algorithms that are hierarchical and massively parallel (fast and accurate). The result is image and video search on a web server platform that can be used by their customers to solve image and video search applications.
They want to partner with people who want real time image intelligence. Their open API allows others to integrate image intelligence into their platform.
From a user perspective, it’s largely 99% accuracy, in other cases, some tags are correct and some are not.
Revenue model? Main ones come from web services that have lots of images that need labeling or tags, or large partners who want to build a mobile application that want to take advantage of this technology.
Below, they won the judge’s vote for best solution.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
