VentureBeat

Skydeck, the online service that helps track who you call and text with your mobile phone, has raised a $3 million first round of financing to expand its service onto various mobile devices.

Skydeck launched at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in July, and won an award for boldest idea. It creates a sort of social network for your phone calls — showing whom you call the most and when.

It does things like remind you to call your Mom if you are used to calling her frequently, but haven’t called her in a while. (This “reminder to call” feature was actually asked for by one of VentureBeat’s writers, Dean Takahashi, during the MobileBeat conference).

But it also gives you historic record of who you called and when, something many mobile phone companies make very painful to track. It’s bold because it enters directly onto the turf held and coveted by the powerful carriers — something most startups have tried to avoid.

It provides things like real-time tracking of minutes used in your plan, the cost of each call, etc.

The investor is Los Angeles-based Saban Ventures, the venture capital arm of Saban Capital Group. Saban’s Craig Cooper, who co-founded Boost Mobile (sold to Nextel) and helped run or advise companies like Thumbplay, YouMail and EBT Mobile China, will take a board seat.

Skydeck has now raised $4 million to date. It raised $1 million in a previously undisclosed angel
round last year.

Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck, said to expect some major feature releases in the “November timeframe.” He also said the company has had “tremendous inbound interest” from carriers around the world — now nearing a total of 20 carriers — but that talks were all in the early stages. He said this suggests his service is not necessarily competitive with carriers, but rather can be seen as providing carriers with a set of features they may want to give their users.

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.

A major question facing mobile developers today is how to distribute their content — where, in what form, and monetized in what way? Custom-built applications using Java, BREW and other languages, while once the norm, are giving way to mobile Internet deployments. But will the mobile device, like the home computer, become dominated by the web browser and advertising?

Yes and no, the panelists said at today’s “Mobile vs. Web” talk at MobileBeat, moderated by Om Malik of GigaOmni Media. The general consensus seemed to be that applications are being squeezed out by the greater accessibility of the web. “If you’re trying to address a broad audience and you’re choosing between Java and mobile web, at this point I’d say you’re crazy to do Java,” said Skydeck’s Jason Devitt.

There’s a hitch: Applications are favored by many because they’re more easily used to charge monthly fees. “You’d be amazed at how many people are willing to pay $2-3 per month for a premium application,” Myspace’s Brandon Lucas said of his own company’s mobile offerings. And later, he also admitted that those people are a source of long-term recurring revenue because they forget they’re being charged — something Mike Baker of Nokia called the “sleeping dog” business model.

But Myspace is also gearing up a big push into mobile advertising, which works better on web applications. Facebook, too, is expecting significant revenue from mobile ads, despite a lack of information on how advertising really works in mobile. “The industry isn’t spending time figuring out what the value of a click is on a mobile device,” Baker said. Advertising budgets for mobile are steadily fattening, but just as with the web, advertisers will sooner or later demand evidence of results — or else they won’t pay much per view, or click.

Despite the uncertainties, both MySpace and Facebook, represented at the event by Jed Stremel, are betting big on revenue from mobile advertising. Applications aren’t as good for that because ads tend to be hidden deep within the apps, making them less accessible. They’re still useful for conveying a unique, more full-featured experience than the web can offer. But for most mobile startups, web deployments will be the frontier of the future.

And as with the Internet, the economics will be in large scale. “We’re beginning the golden age of mobile,” Stremel said. “People will find a way to get tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of users, and monetize them.” Such wide-scale adoption would be nearly impossible for opt-in subscription fees, but ads would fit the bill.

To round out Skydeck’s contribution, the company also used the event to announce that it’s opening its public beta today. Skydeck, in case you’ve forgotten, collects data from your mobile phone about your calls and clearly presents a report (unlike your carrier). The company has its own call-based social network, and an API for third parties to access its information. If you want to check it out more closely, sign up here.

SocialMedia, a San Francisco company that places ads on social networks and other areas where there’s a social component for advertisers to tap, has hired Savvian investment bank to raise what could be a $20 million second round, we’re hearing.

I wrote about SocialMedia last month, and described the evolution of its offerings including its new FriendRank technology to help place socially relevant ads.

Apparently, so much interest from venture capitalists has since hit the company that it has decided to hire Savvian to manage the incoming. Savvian helped manage the fundraising process of Federated Media, another new ad company that raised a large round. Savvian’s partners Rich Jasen and John Labros are the bankers involved, and are said to understand this sector.

Typically a company at this stage doesn’t like to sell more than 20 percent of its shares in a round, and we’re hearing SocialMedia is of this mindset. If you do some quick math, that means it could be looking to raise money at a $60 million value before the investment ($80 million post). From what I hear, the company hasn’t set a valuation yet, but plans to wrap up funding by end of summer.

The company raised a small amount of capital last year. The company told me earlier it sees a large opportunity and wants to hire a bigger sales organiztion to help it move beyond serving ads within applications on Facebook and leading social networks. It wants to serve ads on other platforms where advertising can be made social, such as FriendFeed or Wordpress or on the iPhone.

A slew of new companies have arisen to serve ads and analytics on the iPhone, which is notable, because the precise location information, and potential to tap into communciations between people afford a whole swath of new social advertising potential.

We at VentureBeat have invited companies like Skydeck (which tracks your communication patterns on your phone) and new iPhone ad company MediaLets to MobileBeat, our conference next week, for demonstrations of their technology and their findings of the market thus far. Other companies like Pinch Media, which provides iPhone tracking stats and analytics, and Apploop, which offers repurposed CPC ads on iPhone apps, are emerging.

Social networks, up until now, have been at the center of so-called data portability efforts — new ways for developers to let you connect with friends across web applications. Companies like Facebook, MySpace and Google have introduced ways for you to access your “social graph” on other sites, letting you do things like see which friends also use the site.

But there are big missing pieces of social data and they’re on your phone — your address book of numbers, who calls you, and who you call the most. Skydeck, a startup that lets you aggregate and analyze your phone calling behavior based on bills from your phone carrier, is introducing a way to see the strength of your friendships, and your connections to friends of friends. See screenshot, above. Signal bars show you the strength of connections based on call volume, frequency, and number of mutual calls. The company is also announcing new application programming interfaces for developers to build their applications using this data.

A developer could build a Facebook application that matched your Facebook friends with Skydeck data showing which of them you talked to the most, and how much you talked to each person. Or maybe a developer could build a desktop application that shows you a meter with how many cell phone minutes and text messages you have left on your monthly plan. For business users, Skydeck data could be imported into Outlook and cross-referenced with your email contacts to show you who you both talk and email to the most.

Skydeck chief executive Jason Devitt claims this is the easiest access developers have ever gotten to phone usage data, with the API being based on the OAuth protocol for connecting APIs. As we’ve covered, Skydeck is going up against mobile carriers that until recently have shown a certain antipathy towards third parties, giving only a select few other companies access to their users, and even then at a price.

Skydeck is trying to help you make sense of your phone bills, and more generally, how you use your phone. It collects data from within your mobile phone bill, like who you make calls to and who calls you, and how long you talk to each person, and presents this information to you in a simple interface that lets you do things like organize your contacts and see who you talk to the most.

This is a strike against all of the major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — who intentionally obfuscate your usage data in order to nickel-and-dime you with overage charges and others fees.

In order to use Skydeck, you first need to use the Firefox web browser, then install the free Skydeck plugin (pictured). During the installation process, you give Skydeck your online username and password from your carrier, which gives Skydeck access to your phone bill data. Then, every time you open Firefox, the Skydeck plugin scrapes your data from the carrier’s site and shows you how many minutes and text messages you have remaining on your phone plan.

The Skydeck site, meanwhile, stores all of your past phone bills and lets you extract social information — you can sort by who you talk to the most, who talks to you, etc. The Skydeck site also lets you import your address books from webmail services like Yahoo Mail or Gmail, and from Outlook or the Mac Address Book, so you can pair people you call and people you email — merging separate address books for one person into a single identity for them. You can also tag calls, which is a way to clearly separate your personal and business calls — useful for getting expense reimbursements from your employer or the IRS.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Skydeck is taking a pro-consumer direction within a notoriously anti-consumer industry. In that sense, it resembles personal finance sites like Mint, Wesabe, Buxfer and others, which let you extract and analyze your financial data in ways that banks don’t offer. On the other hand, Skydeck is also trying to help you be more efficient about who you spend your time talking to, somewhat like email analysis company Xobni.

So Skydeck launched in private beta on Monday, with some promise, but when I tested it out, I ran into — unsurprisingly — the structural problems of the telecom industry as well as the generally difficulty of syncing lots address book data.

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