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Mobile Startups to Watch - ViiF

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 24, 2008
in Germany and Mobility
. 1 Comment

ViiF Logo

An easy and intuitive way to access a mobile service is one of the most important pieces to become successful in the mobile space. ViiF - Germany’s first mobile video community - has found such a way. No software has to be installed on the mobile phone. No specific browser is required.

Videos are uploaded and downloaded with the video call functionality of the phone. This makes it incredibly easy to access the service even for folks that are not so technically savvy. The only prerequisites are that your mobile network operator (MNO) runs a video-call-enabled 3G network and that your phone supports those video calls. All German operators provide access to ViiF with rates between 0,39€ and 0,58€ per minute for recording and watching content. O2 currently provides free access, which makes the service especially interesting for O2 users.

ViiF Video Call

After calling ViiF’s short code number from your mobile phone you are in a video call and can choose between recording a new and watching existing videos. Recorded videos can be saved in different folders to share publicly or only with friends.

Friends can be notified by SMS that a video has been recorded. Furthermore, it is possible to add ViiF to your blog with the ViiF Player and vblog your recordings to the blogosphere.

Besides streaming to and watching videos from your friends ViiF provides even more entertainment. They have contracts with MTV, ProSiebenSat.1-Group (large German TV stations) to push news, music, movie trailers and other additional content on your mobile.

Although ViiF is only available in Germany so far it is one of the first German websites that has a Facebook application. Facebook has not entered the German marked with a localized version yet but this is expected to happen in the next couple of weeks. Until today the Facebook-clone StudiVZ is the most active social network for college students in Germany. Facebook’s platform is way superior to the poorly copied StudiVZ website and I am expecting that most German students will turn their back to StudiVZ as soon as the language barrier drops. This makes ViiF’s Facebook Application a great move for the future.

ViiF is based in Berlin and has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital from Neuhaus Partners, VC Fonds Berlin and various business angels. They have even been nominated for (but didn’t win) the Mobile Monday Peer Award 2008.

ViiF is a great service but to make this a true success ViiF has to master the difficult task to get the mobile network operators to lower their prices or to provide the service for free as it happened with O2. If this is not possible another way has to be found on the long run to access ViiF. Unlimited mobile data plans are becoming cheaper in Germany and nobody will pay those prices per minute if other vblogging services can be accessed over the Mobile Web free of additional charge.

Crowdsourced Live Streaming - Will Mobile Photoblogging Provide Ubiquitous Webcams?

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 19, 2008
in Mobile Web and Mobility
. 0 Comments

A picture is worth a thousand words is the new slogan of Twitxr, a photo-enabled Twitter clone that has recently been launched by Fon Labs. The launch created buzz in blogs and the media even though similar Twitter variations already appeared such as Zannel or Twit Pic.

I didn’t test all the services in detail but Twitxr seems to be different as it is automatically adding location details to the picture and text which makes it much more powerful. Recently, I just had the same idea and really liked it…

Today we are viewing public webcams to get a glimpse of the current weather, skiing conditions or other things on certain places. If real time geo-tagged mobile photo blogging is taking off we will basically have ubiquitous webcams all around us where interesting things are happening.

Soccer World Cup in Italy
Photo by Giampaolo Macorig

Imagine the FIFA World Cup Final 2010 between Italy and Germany in South Africa. Do you want to know what is going on around the stadium, on the streets in Berlin, Rome or anywhere else (when Germany will - of course - win)? Go to a twittervision-like website that supports photos and geolocation, zoom in on the area of your interest and you will instantaneously see what is going on there. Brought to you live, with comments and feelings by real people like you and me and not the traditional media.

Crowdsourced live streaming of any place or event - your vacation destination, a football game, a demonstration or even coverage of a terrorist attack as it happened in London where people quickly started to upload pictures to the web.

Twitxr doesn’t provide exact pinpointing of your location to date. Hence, this is still a vision but more and more phones contain GPS receivers and mobile plans become cheaper. What do you think? Will we have a broad distribution of mobile photo blogging services by 2010 or is this to optimistic?

Mobile Startups to Watch - Plazes

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 15, 2008
in Germany and Mobile Web
. 0 Comments

Plazes

Plazes is an the first (?) international location-aware social network and has already been around since 2004. I didn’t come along the term for a long time but back in those days this has been called MoSoSo (= Mobile Social Software). You can discover “Plazes” anywhere in the world, share your location, hook up with your mates or other people in your vicinity and all the usual social networking features such as groups, messaging and commenting are included as well.

The venture has been founded in 2005 by Felix Petersen and Stefan Kellner in Berlin, Germany. By 2006 Plazes had secured seed financing from business angels such as Esther Dyson, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky. In 2007 Plazes raised €2.7 Million from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in another round of funding.

Plazes originally started to map a user’s location based on the MAC address of the wireless network that was being used. New routers were discovered by users and tagged with geo-coordinates. After having downloaded a “Plazer” your notebook was capable of detecting your current location by investigating the network you were using.

Nowadays there are plenty of different locations, which are not tied to wireless networks anymore, in the system. The tracking no longer relies on wireless networks. A user can submit his location by SMS, the website or an updated version of the “Plazer”. The new activity concept adds a Twittery Twist to Plazes so that I can describe what I am doing when broadcasting my whereabouts to the world. The latest version is also preserving a user’s update history and allows planning meetings in the future. Recently a new API has been released to enable developers to build their own applications and to extend the reach of the Plazes network.

Even though Plazes is based in Germany its majority of users is from the United States. Many similar location-aware services like Loopt, Helio or Dodgeball (still alive?) exist and similarities between Plazes and websites like Twitter and Jaiku are evident.

To gain more users the challenge for Plazes will be to distinguish itself from comparable services. Opening the system with a new API is definitely a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to watch the fight between the mobile social networks and how Plazes evolves in the future. I will keep an eye on them and inform you about any interesting updates.

Are you using Plazes? What do you think should Plazes do?

German Mobile Startups to Watch

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 12, 2008
in Germany and Mobile Web
. 0 Comments

Do interesting German mobile startups exist or is this area occupied by the often-quoted German Copy/Paste Innovation that has been dominating the German Web 2.0?

Magnifying Glass

Damn sure there are! During my research I was not bombarded with dozens of mobile startups, but I found a hand full of interesting and innovative companies I want to further elaborate on in future posts. Partly those companies are even targeting an international market and are not only focused on Germany. Stay tuned for the next posts!

Top Ten Reasons Why I Am Blogging

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 7, 2008
in Blogging and Miscellaneous
. 2 Comments

Compared to most I am starting to blog a little late - in particular because I have already been online and interested in the Internet for such a long time. To quickly catch up with all old-established bloggers here is a super trendy “Top Ten Reasons Why I Am Blogging” list:

10. Since being a Mac user I somehow have so much more free time.

9. To practice my English and writing skills.

8. Ohh and to help me to stay longer on the Mac and shorter on the Wii.

7. To have a technology playground and platform for my projects.

6. Because I can practice marketing by evangelizing funkfeuer.net.

5. As a long-term blog reader I now want to engage myself and give back to you and the community!

4. Focus on a specific area. I know quite a good deal about many many things in the IT and computer world but now truly want to become an expert in one of the areas I enjoy most. This blog will keep me focused.

3. Build knowledge for me and others. Writing about or teaching things makes me think much more actively about them than just skipping over it.

2. Because learning by conversations with others is more effective and interesting than learning alone.

1. Get to know interesting people and get interesting people to know me.

Broadcasting Started

Published
by
Sascha Konietzke
on February 6, 2008
in Blogging and Miscellaneous
. 0 Comments
Radio Beacon
Photo by Thomas Hawk

Three, Two, One… funkfeuer.net is on air! Welcome to my new blog.

I will write about mobility trends and development techniques for the (mobile) Web. As I am living in Germany there will be a focus on mobility and especially mobile web trends in Germany and on how Germany is evolving compared to other countries. This blog will be about mobile services and applications and only giving attention to the latest greatest gadgets if they are enabling those services. Many other excellent blogs like Gizmondo or Engadget are writing about devices - none I found so far is covering the Mobile Web in Germany.

I am excited to get this rolling! Please come back in the future or subscribe to this blog via RSS so that I can keep you up to date on the latest mobile happenings in Germany. Posts can be expected on a weekly basis.