The battle for your address book: Will souped up contact apps monetize the data explosion?
[Editor's Note: Below, MobileBeat advisory board member Jason Devitt explains why we should care about new innovative address books. Not only are they key to a much better user experience, but they may greatly impact the way we pay to use our phones. He also looks at how different parties, from carriers to mobile startups, are approaching new address book services from opposing angles.]
There’s a battle brewing for control of your mobile phone’s address book…. Continue Reading
Skydeck makes your mobile phone an online productivity tool
If you’ve ever wished you could get more out of your data in your mobile phone, you should check out Skydeck. Its new web interface, launching today, shows you your call history, text messages, your phone’s address book, tied together with useful premium features like voicemail-to-text recording and transcription, and the ability to call or text anyone else from your computer, using your mobile number. All of this information is displayed from your phone to… Continue Reading
Skydeck gets boost for service that reminds you to call your Ma
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… Continue Reading
Congrats to the winners of the MobileBeat Tesla Award: Loopt, AdMob and more
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… Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Apps, advertising and the “golden age” of mobile; plus, Skydeck opens to the public
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… Continue Reading
SocialMedia, the social ad company, is raising what could be $20M
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… Continue Reading
Skydeck launches call-based social network, API for third parties to access phone data
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… Continue Reading
Facing a recalcitrant industry, Skydeck pushes to make your mobile data more useful
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… Continue Reading
Skydeck, mobile phone software company, funded by iHatch Ventures
Jason Devitt, founder of Vindigo, has gotten funding for a new San Mateo, Calif. company called Skydeck.
It is secretive, but apparently funded by iHatch Ventures. Paidcontent reported this a few days ago.
The company hints at the product: “We are developing software and services at the intersection of mobile phones, telephony, and the web…”
Devitt founded Skydeck with Mike Wells.
Check out Devitt’s rant on wireless regulation.