Mobile World Congress Barcelona

Thanks to Ewan from Mobile Industry Review and Blackberry I was able to go to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the third time as I received an invitation to attend the event without any costs. 600 Euro for a ticket would have been too much for our startup budget.

The event was – as in the previous years – very exciting. It had a hall that was completely dedicated to mobile application development on many different platforms (“App Planet”). I was able to attend many great talks on mobile development from Blackberry, Sony, Vodafone, Motorola and Google. The WIP Jam on the last day made a perfect end of the App Planet.

Besides the main event I attended many other great meetups in the evenings, such as the final of the Navteq Challenge 2010, Mobile Sunday, the Mobile Premier Awards, GoMo News Blender, Swedish Beer Party and Fring & FON’s Late Night Party.

BW Goes Mobile

The iPhone application I created for Tagcrumbs received a “Mobile Talent Award” in a competition called “BW Goes Mobile” that was held by the local government. Unfortunately I had an important meeting in Berlin so I was not able to attend the event where the winners were announced.

Deutsche Startups

Quite some industry blogs asked us to contribute guest posts on mobile development and marketing of mobile applications. I wrote a German article for a major German Blog called “Deutsche Startups”. The article covered the basics on what time, knowledge and resources are required to create an iPhone application for your own startup.

Many people rambled in the comments why I suggested to not use 3rd party tools like MonoTouch, DragonFire or Adobe Flash CS 5 to create your applications, as Apple could block them at any time. My advice seemed to be correct, just about 2 months later Apple changed its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement and prohibited the use of any such third party tools.

It was a fun ride with many ups and downs. In the end, the problem was that it was too hard to make a living with the service. Of course we thought about alternative ways of making money besides an ad-based revenue model. But further bootstrapping was not an option, as we were running out of money, so we decided to write a business plan based on the most promising alternative we saw in making money in the mobile LBS space that allowed us to leverage as much of our previous work as possible. We were not able to raise enough money to execute our plan. Was the plan based on a bad idea? The founders too young and inexperienced in the mind of the investors? Was it bad to try a split between consumer and business services? Were we too impatient or at the wrong place of the earth? We don’t know and we will probably never find out.

Nevertheless, it was a great experience to bootstrap a company ourselves and I learned so much in the process, that I don’t regret doing it at all. Some might consider this a “failure”, for me it was just a large experiment and a huge learning experience. I am pretty sure the day will come where I will found another company. And that next time, I will know many things already that will improve chances of financial success.

It will take some time until the next startup is due. I need to shift to a lower gear first for some time to recharge myself and my bank account. Working so hard and long on Tagcrumbs every day hurt my personal health and fitness. That’s why I will work as a freelancer for some months or maybe even years before committing to anything else. I have the startup fiver, but freelancing as a technology consultant or software engineer will be a good replacement drug, as I really value being independent. I will write more about my future plans in upcoming posts.

Finally, I want to say thank you. First of all a big thanks goes to Ben and Cornelius for founding the company with me, sharing all the ups and downs, and for the many sessions we had on all kinds of different topics. The next thank you goes to all our partners that supported us during the time. Last but not least I want to thank all of our users and other supporters.

We created a separate blog to keep you up to date. Check out our blog at:

blog.tagcrumbs.com

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.

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.

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?

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!