VentureBeat

Updated

Well, it’s all over but the drinking. Our panel of experts has selected the best companies presenting at MobileBeat 2008 today in Sunnyvale. Since we didn’t know the winners ahead of time, the Tesla Awards (pictured left, named for inventor Nikola Tesla) weren’t engraved yet, but the winning executives did get a warm handshake from Accenture’s Lars Kamp, who presented the awards.

Here are the winners:

Crowd favorite (the favorite company, selected by MobileBeat attendees): AdMob, a leading mobile ad network serving billions of ad impressions monthly globally, and doing interesting analytics. The company just added some cool new features to its iPhone ads.

Best overall application: Loopt, a company offering location-based applications for users of various carriers, including Sprint and Verizon. Loopt just struck deals to access massive amounts of GPS data.

Best overall infrastructure: AdMob.

Best CEO: Dan Shapiro of Ontela, which offers easy-to-use photo-taking and sharing technology that lets you upload media from cameras to PC. The company sells white-labeled product to carriers.

Best mobile person under 35: Sam Altman of Loopt.

Most controversial move: Mig33, a mobile application that’s seeing rapid global growth for its bundle of SMS text messaging, instant messaging and cheap calls.

Biggest blunder: Mig33. Update: Just to be clear, this is meant to be a light-hearted award, and a celebration of a company that’s learned from its mistakes and gone on to be successful. That’s certainly the case with Mig33. I can’t speak for our judges, but when I interviewed Mig33’s chief executive Steven Goh before the conference, he said the company’s biggest blunder was its initial product, a failed SMS offering. Once the company relaunched its service with beefed-up features, however, things started to take off.

Boldest idea: Skydeck, which lets you analyze your phone calling behavior based on bills you get from your phone carrier. For one thing, it can show you the strength of your friendships.

The winners were selected from the companies that we identified as the Top 10 at MobileBeat. The only exceptions were “best CEO” and “boldest idea,” for which all top 30 companies were eligible. Attendees also voted on a “people’s choice,” namely a company in the 30 that should join the top 10 presenting on stage. The winner was Radar, a company that offers easy photo-sharing and commenting on all phones, and boasts over one million users.

Ringfree Mobility is seeking a round of funding to expand its mobile Internet voice calling solution for smart phones including the iPhone.

The company is entering a crowded space, as Matt Marshall wrote last week in a profile of a couple of competitors, Fring and Nimbuzz. But Ringfree Mobility believes it has a user-friendly solution.

The San Francisco company began beta testing its RF Dialer application in February. Like other voice-over-Internet-protocol services (VoIP), RF Dialer and its backend service, RF.com, enables cell phone users to make cheap international calls for pennies a minute. No software installation is required. The company’s motto is “call everywhere from anywhere with no hassle.”

The company believes it has simplified the process of using an iPhone or other smart phones. You sign up on its web site and can start making calls within a minute. You then put the web page icon for RF.com on the iPhone’s main screen. To make a call with an iPhone, a user clicks on an RF.com icon. A dial pad pops up. The user can select the type of call to be made from a pull down menu, with choices including Skype calls.

Here’s where it’s different. The choices on the menu also include GoogleTalk, YahooTalk, MSN Messenger, AIM, VOIP services such as Vonage or Gizmo, or an office phone system such as Asterisk. The RF Dialer is like a replacement for the iPhone’s built-in dialing application. Ringfree Mobility is not a phone company itself and so you can use any calling service you want with it. It doesn’t compete with the mobile carriers, and it also doesn’t compete with the VoIP service providers.

If the user selects the Skype service on the menu, then the user uses the iPhone keypad to type in the name of the person being called. Then the user clicks on the call button. The iPhone then makes a local cell phone call over the AT&T network to the RF.com media gateway. The gateway then goes out over the Internet and connects to the Skype service, which then connects the call to the person being called. RF.com reserves the data channel of the iPhone to find out pertinent facts such as which friends are online.

By contrast, other mobile VoIP services such as Fring bypass the cellular network and use the data channel to make an Internet call. But the quality of these voice calls is often poor, given spotty access to Wi-Fi networks needed to complete the connection.

Like Mig33 or iSkoot, RF.com works in tandem with — and not in competition to — mobile carriers such as AT&T since it generates voice calls on the carrier’s network. iSkoot, however, is Skype only, while Mig33 is a VoIP service provider.

Competitors include Hipsip, which we wrote about in April. Hipsip, which works only with Skype, can make Skype calls but for now requires that a user’s own computer running the Hipsip software be up and running in order for the calls to go through. Other rivals include Mobivox and Talkety.

The RF Dialer is available for the iPhone in beta mode and founder Marcelo Rodriguez (pictured below, right) says it works entirely within Apple’s permitted use guidelines. It is easily transportable to other web-based phones including those from Nokia, Samsung, LG, and Google’s upcoming Android mobile platform. PhoneGnome has already licensed the RF.com technology and a second major VOIP partner will be announced soon.

Ringfree Mobility is still exploring different business models, such as offering premium services or partnering with other VOIP service providers such as PhoneGnome.

Rodriguez was formerly CEO of VoIP news site Voxilla.com and managing editor of Miami Herald New Media. His cofounder is Eric Chamberlain (left), former chief technology officer at Voxilla. They formally incorporated the company in March, 2008. The company has four employees and has been self-funded to date.

[Disclosures: Rodriguez was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News years ago and occasionally edited stories I wrote when I worked there. He is married to Katherine Fong, a San Jose Mercury News deputy managing editor who is in charge of online journalism at the newspaper.]

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24.

Jaxtr now has a buck for every one of its users. The company has raised $10 million in a second round of financing to expand its cheap overseas internet calling business.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company uses a voice-over-internet-protocol service to knock the costs out of overseas calls. It can charge as little as 1 cent a minute for calls to China because of its unique system. It lets users advertise to an online community how they can be contacted via a widget they place on a blog or a social networking page.

A user puts the widget on a page, and a would-be caller clicks on the widget. The caller then enters his or her phone number on the widget and then clicks the “call me” button. Jaxtr figures out the location of the caller. Then it finds a local phone number to call the caller back. It gets the caller on the line and then proceeds to make a call to the user. No one realizes it’s actually a three-way connection. The caller is connected via a local phone call, the call itself is routed over the Internet to Jaxtr’s servers, and then the servers complete the call through a local call to the user who is being callled. The call goes through as a local call for a fraction of the cost of an overseas call. Every time the caller and user want to make a call across the same country lines, they use that same local phone number.

Konstantine Guericke, chief executive of Jaxtr, was also a cofounder of LinkedIn, the social networking company that recently raised $53 million at a $1 billion valuation. While his company isn’t that valuable yet, Guericke said he’s excited at the opportunity because overseas calling is a $60 billion business.

“I like to do new things, and I see the same kind of change happening here as when LinkedIn started four years ago,” he said.

We’ve noted how fast Jaxtr is growing in past stories. In contrast to Skype (which is projected to hit $500 million in revenues about five years after its launch), most of Jaxtr’s calls are phone-to-phone rather than PC-to-PC. Read the rest of this entry »

We last covered Mig33, an integrated mobile service that’s been growing fast around the world, back in May when it raised $10 million.

Then, Burlingame, Calif.-based Mig33 had gained four million subscribers in less than 18 months, by offering an integrated mobile download application that includes features for text messaging, IM, and cheap calls. Now, it has more than nine million total users, including two million in South Africa.

The company is especially popular in developing countries, where the average person is now able to afford cell phones and data services for doing things like accessing the internet.

Mig33 has just raised another $13.5 million Series B round led by DCM, with existing investors Accel, TVP and Redpoint joining in.

The company is currently getting two million user sessions per day, worldwide, with 45 million messages sent per day and more than one million pictures shared per month.

It has also introduced an affiliate program in South Africa, where merchants can sell calling cards for long-distance calls on Mig33, at lower rates than competing calling services (verify that claim for yourself by checking the company’s pricing per country here).

Having lived in Johannesburg for a year, in 1999, I can see why Mig33 is doing well in the country. The standards of living have been rising for many since apartheid, a policy of racial division in the diverse country, ended in 1994. Mig33’s software is the part of the first experience that many South African have with owning a phone — and if it offers the cheapest rates, so much the better.

Mig33 also launched in the U.S. market at DEMOfall 2007. CEO Steve Goh told us there are some specific challenges in the American mobile market, and Mig33 has had to adapt – mainly by focusing on compatibility with existing carriers. Goh declined to provide the company’s U.S. numbers, but he said Mig33 should make real headway here in 2008.

Unheard of mobile service company Mig33 is showing explosive growth — by offering a simple way to text, IM and make cheap voice calls.

The company has gained four million subscribers in less than eighteen months, mostly in South East Asia, many of whom are using it as their only way to access the Web. Significantly, this is not a technology company. It is using standard technology, and following through with a clean execution.

Tomorrow (Monday) it announces it has raised $10 million from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, two well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Technology Venture Partners also invested.

Its traction is impressive considering the company has paid less than $20,000 in marketing costs — according to chief executive Steve Goh.

Customers can use it on standard phones, to text and IM for free, and to share information in chat rooms. Mig33 gets paid when customers buy a pre-paid phone card, to use for voice services. While the voice calls themselves are made over the Internet (VoIP), and so very cheap, Mig33 takes a small cut for the service. The company did not specify how big its cut is. The company has just moved to Burlingame, Calif., from Australia.

While other companies offer various aspects of its service — eBuddy offers mobile chat, for example — Mig33’s advantage is that you don’t have to close your voice or text application to access its IM service. You can do all three in one session. See screenshots below. The service is downloaded via an SMS message, making it simple — and viral.

In most of the more than 200 countries where it operates, users don’t rely on the same sort of entrenched mobile carriers we are used to here in the U.S. In many countries, many people rely on pre-paid cards for making calls.

Mig33’s parent is Project Goth.

One notable trend is that most of its Mig33’s users are using the company’s own IM service, instead of opting to use more popular IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or MSN, which Mig33 does let its users choose. More than 75 percent of subscribers are choosing Mig33’s IM services. They’re sending more than 15 million messages a day. Mig33 also offers users a way to create a profile and to share photos.