I’m writing this from Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona. I escaped the crowded Mobile World Congress for a while. The World Mobile Congress is huge and impressive. Apparently over 50.000 participants gather here in Barcelona for four days of gadgets, phones, operators, mobile shizzle and to do business.
If you’re in the mobile scene this is definitely the place to get deals done.
Most of the stands are mobile operator related and not really interesting to cover here, so I tried to find some young startups and I ended up in the Israeli corner.
Here are 4 companies from Israel for you:
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Datanetis: Founder and CEO Elery Pfeffer build himself a nice B2B application that helps big companies to determine whom of their customers are key influencers and who follow them. This data can be used to target certain customers better. Example: a Telco runs Datanetis software, it will see that I bought an iPhone and that other people that are close to me (they see that I’m getting calls from them for instance) are buying iPhones as well. In this case the datanetis software will tag me as an influencer.
Not a super sexy product, but for a lot of big companies this can be very interesting.
Puddingmedia: This company delivers all kind of mobile ads to carriers and operators. Think SMS ads, Ringback tone ads, in call ads, mobile web ads etc. What is pretty interesting to this company is that they can target the ad based on the content of the call or text message. To give an example, when I TXT my GF “Hey Babey, Barcelona is great, wish you were here. I’m back on Friday, shall we grab a movie? xoxo” She’ll receive the message with a ‘Watch Slumdog Millionaire’ ad. They gave a demo to me which was pretty cool, unfortunately there is no material I can embed here…
Skiller: Skiller is (another) mobile multiplayer gaming platform. Skill games like chess, 4 on a row and many other games can be played via the skiller application on your mobile. They support symbian and windows mobile phones. Nir Orpaz (CTO and Founder) told me that they charge a subscription fee to their premium users. How many people are actively using Skiller was still a company secret….
ethrix: A software development company that delivers multiple voice and video solutions designed for operators as well as for content providers and enterprise corporations. Their Mobile Interactive Video Services (IVVR) are impressive and you don’t have to be very creative to think what that can do for kids, gambling, dating and adult content. Basically, you see a video on your mobile and you can interact with it by talking into your phone. Unfortunately their website doesn’t show you what you really want to see (as almost all other websites of these Israeli companies), a demo!
It seems that the Israeli companies are superior on a technology point of view, but they still have a lot to learn when it comes to marketing and PR.
Bonus: Quammy (pronounce kwammy). Three young guys who dive into the crowded address book synchronization space. Quammy develops an add-on to your mobile phone that adds extra functionality to your address book. Besides a backup of your address book it will also add extra information to your contacts (like website, social network profiles etc.). They plan to build their own platform where Quammy users build a profile and can automatically update their info in other peoples address books. Personally I think they will have a hard time pulling this off with competitors like Plaxo, and MobileMe to name a few. They plan to launch in September this year.
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