London-based accelerator Springboard kicks off its mobile-themed program today, with ten mobile-focused teams descending on Google Campus for three months of intense coaching and hard work to get their products ready to face investors in December.
You may remember our Tears, Tantrums & Tech video series that followed three of the teams on the previous Springboard run earlier this year. Well, we’re doing it all again. The first episode will be right here on The Next Web on Friday, so we can see how the startups evolve over the course of the program.
In the meantime, here are the ten teams taking part. Experience tells us that some of these concepts may change quite a bit over the next few weeks, and it will be interesting to follow their journey.
This San Francisco-based team is building an ‘intelligent app for sports fans'”. ApptheGame allows fans to engage with other fans and uses proprietary algorithms to analyze stats, game info, play-by-play events and social media to deliver fans what they want, when they want it.”
This social referral network allows you to reward your friends with a ‘finders fee’ for helping with a task, for example, finding a new developer for your startup. The New York-based team of four have previously worked for major brands, developed mobile apps with more than 350k downloads and pioneered a digital publishing suite.
Looking to break down social media language barriers, South Korea’s Flitto is designed to let users read all content in their own language with claimed perfect translation. Translations are crowdsourced, with translators matched to content that interests them.
One of a number of startups around the world tackling mobile gifting, London’s GiftCannon allows users to send inexpensive gifts such as cupcakes, glasses of champagne and yoga sessions via a service designed to encourage spontaneous, repeat gifting.
Romania’s House Map is targeting UK house hunters with a map-based approach to real estate search. While that may not sound too original, the team promises constantly improving, personalized listings based on how the app is used.
This Chinese startup definitely wins the award for most unusual name of the batch here, but its product is an interesting proposition. It’s a second screen social app for fans of niche sports that currently supports Mixed Martial Arts and will soon target boxing.
Shhmooze is yet another startup tackling social discovery while on the go, but the London-based team is focusing on helping you find relevant people at conferences and meetups. The iPhone app launched in stealth in July this year and the startup claims that it already maps 50,000 professionals at over a thousand events worldwide.
Aimed at the construction industry, Sacramento’s SpeedPunch a offers a centralized web app for administrators of construction projects, and a mobile app for entering and managing project data in the field.
Details are vague on how this London startup’s product will work. It’s building a platform aimed at brands, consumers, entrepreneurs, and landlords in the short-term, ‘pop-up’ retail market. “Our product revitalises both small and large cities using social networking and mobile devices,” the team says.
The mobile site building tool from a Lithuanian team is designed to allow users to build and maintain mobile sites without any programming knowledge, via WYSIWYG tools.
Image credit: Pond5
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