Social-Loco Startup Competition
Enter the Social-Loco Startup Competition for a chance to pitch your company to 100s of
social-location obsessed VCs, angel investors, executives and media at the 2011 Social-Loco conference in San Francisco. ENTER NOW!
Vote for ChimpIt as your favorite Social-Loco startup. Click here to view our profile and cast your vote.
Social-Loco Conference
Social-Loco will dive into social and mobile web convergence, and what that means for SMB, big brands and consumers. Learn from real-world successes in daily deals, location based services and advertising, mobile marketing platforms and more. Executives from Groupon, Facebook, Google, ATTi, Microsoft and leading investors will address these topics in a highly interactive setting.
Social-Loco takes place on May 5, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. ChimpIt will be demo’ing there and giving away our cool schwag. Come on out to participate and meet us. We’d love to meet you!
SF Mobile and Orange Labs teamed up for another great event last month–Everything Android.
Speakers included: Erick Tseng (Google), Olivier Ricordel (Qipit), Sean Galligan (Flurry), Brett Butterfield (Pixelpipe), and Mary Ann Cotter (Cooking Capsules), Tom Conrad (Pandora), Bhasker Roy (Qik) and Mark Hamblin (Touch Revolution).
There was talk of Google’s work on text to speech, but we saw a demo for something more exciting in Google’s quick search box. This feature scans everything on your “phonetop” and web search history. They call it speed dialing for life. It reminds me of Mac’s desktop spotlight, and appears to be an emerging trend in the phonetop experience.
Android was showcased as having applications that go well beyond phones. For instance, the development community at large has been looking at Android applications in automotive and elsewhere. Touch Revolution, one of the evenings presenters gave us a few examples of this, showing and telling about tablet based applications that appear to be in healthy demand.
Qipit demoed is a big idea, mobile copies. I realize that this might sound weird, possibly even useless, but trust me. This is a cool app. The 4 minute presentation limit wasn’t, in my opinion, enough time for Qpit to give its product a proper demonstration. Fortunately, I am familiar with them, having seen them present at another recent event. I actually wondered if Android wasn’t as over-the-top exciting for Qpit, as it seemed to be for other presenters.
The Flurry demo was one of the evenings most interesting points. The service is a mobile apps analytics that enables tracking of user navigation within apps. It supports multiple platforms and boasts an easy setup 5-30 minutes. Flurry sees great user engagement within Android apps, speaking to the stickiness of some mobile apps.
As Butterfield presented PixelPipe, a platform that enables users to populate and update any social network from any device that uploads photos, I was left wanting to hear more. This app was also victim to condensed 4-minute presentation time. It looks cool and allows users to make geo-relevant posts.
Cooking Capsules (recipient of accolades from Wired and Time), showed us that cooking can be turned into a mobile app. They don’t have many recipes yet, but are looking to showcase sponsored recipes. Should be interesting to watch their endeavors into creating revenue.
Pandora was one of the evenings highlights. Conrad entertained us with Pandora’s venture into Android, and confessed that he’d received death threats from Android enthusiasts who have been eagerly awaiting Pandora’s arrival. (Crazy Android people.) We also heard about his experience working with Verizon. Can you say odyssey?
Touch Revolution finished things off with a presentation on everything Adroid that’s not a phone. This company creates and white labels touch screen devices. Interestingly, the founder comes from the Apple touch technology team. When asked if his company found their space limited by Apple’s patents on touch technology, Hamblin informed us that he was involved in the creation of those patents, and that no, it wasn’t an issue for his company. For Touch Revolution, important factors with Android are that it’s seen as a great touch platform, it’s customizable, it’s build for cloud computing and it’s free!
So what did I learn about the significance and importance of Android? It offers multi device support, the Android marketplace offers a new market channel, and it has developed momentum on cell phones and tablets. I wonder if it might also appear much more exciting for new developers, as the iPhone app store has become immensely overcrowded, so much so that it’s now being seen as a source of little more than beer money for many developers. Maybe Android will save some mobile app garage developers from having to hang on those pesky day jobs. To Apple’s credit, it would appear that they are trying to create new ways for developers to make money, as noted in this WSJ blog post.
Less Networks holds strong interest in the Android landscape, as 3G traffic continues to flourish and grow.
~r
Last month, I attended my first SF Mobile event, Women in Technology, which turned out to be a different kind of SF Mobile event. Typically focused on the latest mobile start ups, SF Mobile teamed up with Orange Labs to pay homage to a group of extraordinary Silicon Valley women. All were entrepreneurial in the truest sense of the word, and were an impressive bunch in the eyes of yours truly. Special thanks to Vator.tv for the wonderful and useful recap!
Photo courtesy of DanielKokin.smugmug.com
It’s a tough choice deciding who was most interesting. Each of these women brought a unique perspective, experience and personality to the event. Sandy Jen (Meebo), was the classic Silicon Valley start up founder, laid back, unassuming and humble. Beatrice Tarka (Mobissimo) was as charming as any of her counterparts; and her company is producing revenue-bonus! Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare) had a compelling, and at times humorous story to tell, while Heather Harde (TechCrunch) provided insightful discussion on new media and the future of TechCrunch. Leila Chirayath Janah (Samasource) impressed the audience with the intelligent and creative philanthropy of her business model; and Silvia Console Battiana (Auctionomics) was entertaining in ways that I didn’t realize a Economics PhD with a radical idea could be.
I have to give big-ups to Orange Labs and Pascale Diaine for working with SF Mobile to produce such a fun event. Following the speakers, the cocktail/social hour was fun, relaxed and conducive to networking. Nice job! Diaine and VatorNews left us with a couple of great videos from the event. Diaine’s ‘Her Code’ can be seen on YouTube; and Vater.tv posted a great recap and video interview with Diaine (check it out below).
The event wasn’t what I expected from the SF Mobile, but it was truly inspiring. Membership in the SF Mobile Meetup and attendance at this event is doing more though. It’s leading Less Networks toward a new friendship with SF Mobile’s Lars Kamp, as we find our company immersed in mobile users, LBS technology and mobile advertising solutions; and tying it neatly into the social mobile world around Less Networks and humans at large.
~roberto
