10 companies competing to win a place on the UKTI stand at Mobile World Congress 2014 and press & media activity to go with it. ICT KTN, Mobile Monday London, UKTI and Cambridge Wireless all work together to whittle down the competitors to a shortlist of 10, all competing for five places on the stand.
All the companies this year were remarkably different — in their approach, their development stage and their presentation styles.
In the audience vote, I went for Changify, but the five who were selected were PeachInc, 5 Tiles, 23 Snaps, Capito and Viewranger.
There’s also an official blog post with pictures on the Mobile Monday London blog.
Red Glasses
Adam Martin, Founder
http://MyEarthApp.com @RedGlassesApps
- embedding rich content into 3D objects
- have built a native 3D engine for iPad that deals with data
- also built two sample apps:
- visualization of magnified Earth heights
- showing videos on a 3D globe
- aim to partner with media & content organisations
- have built bespoke apps for clients for last 15 years
- want to expand to a white-label product
- other demos:
- showing travel time from a point across the globe
- luxury retail, where purchasing from
Changify: Design for Social Change
Priya Prakash, Founder
http://www.changify.org @Changify
- basic idea:
- spot & share ideas for problems
- get support from friends & neighbours
- ideas get backed by brands & biz
- earn credits for making the change
- partnering with Clear Channel to make a digital bus stop
- crowdsourcing local opinion by voting on screen
- touch & NFC
- council get realtime data of reports
- running a 3 month trial with Guardian Data at Elephand & Castle
- working with councils & local businesses
- http://changify.org has been available for 6 months
- also accessible via SMS
Coveritas
Sean Redmond, CEO
http://www.coveritas.com @Coveritas
- based in Bletchley Park
- founding team did functional verification of hardware verification
- have applied same system to software functional testing
- specialise in machine to machine interoperability
- uses randomisation & rules (constraints) to generate end to end use case tests
- 3GP took 9,000 hours of test engineering
- looking to partner with domain experts in M2M standards testing
- customers are those companies with massive test labs for M2M interoperability
- have an annual time-based license model
SpatialBuzz
Leon Hardwick, Director Global Sales & Marketing; Andrew Blake, CTO
http://www.spatialbuzz.com @SpatialBuzz
- cloud-based customer experience management for mobile operators
- delivering info on status and capability of network
- give the operator an idea of how customers are reacting
- can also provide an early warning to operator of issues
- mix together operator outage & planned works with crowd-sourced input
- can cater for any service delivered geographically
- deployed with Telefonica UK & Germany, also Tesco Mobile
- benefits seen:
- reduction in calls
- reduction in response times
- improving customer satisfaction
PeachInc
Dr Daniel Morris
http://www.peachinc.com @PeachInc
- mobile ticketing using the “MorrisCode” — 2D barcode
- patented format
- optimised to be read from electronic displays
- at the moment PeachInc are the only people who can read them
- displays well on small screens
- stores a 16 digit number
- have built a suite of apps
- can receive tickets via SMS (even on iPhone)
- also make hardware
- will be integrated into a
- biggest customer so far Saudi Professional football league
- versus QR codes:
- reads faster and more successfully
- reads at 20 frames a second with most mobile cameras
- 5,000 people at an event with 100% success rate
- 60,000 football matches in Saudi Arabia with no problems
5-Tiles
Michal Kubacki, Inventor & CEO; Piotr Pieczynski, CFO
http://www.5-tiles.com @fivetiles
- keyboard for Android
- business model based on app sales & licensing deals
- works well for smartwatches (with a touch screen)
- takes a small amount of screen space
- have a demo on i’m watch Android smartwatch
- looking to port to Windows & iOS
- also getting keyboard tested by RNIB
- currently have 100s of users on Android
- and 4,000 downloads of the training app
- takes about 30-45 minutes to learn the combinations
- working to make the learning curve lower all the time
23snaps
Meaghan Fitzgerald, CMO; Ivailo Jordanoc, Co-Founder
http://www.23snaps.com @23Snaps
- mobile-first private social network for families
- spans across different generations
- also organise photos by date & location
- 500K registered users
- posting one photo every second
- make money by selling photo print products
- have users in 179 countries
- going to be launching in Brazilian Portuguese
- content owned by creators
- also provide a one-click export of all content
- wanting to meet consumer electronics, mobile networks, etc
- don’t want advertising next to family photos
- may go for other monetization such as premium features
Available for iPhone, Android, Windows 8, email, web and printed books!
Capito Systems
Tony Ballardie, CEO
http://www.capitosystems.com @CapitoSystems
- speech assistant technology specifically for mobile commerce
- about to sign first customer
- language variations, background noise?
- have focussed on language understanding rather than speech recognition
- aiming to license to mobile commerce companies
- have built support tools to enable customers to build up a speech corpus of domain language
Viewranger
Ben Howard, Marketing & Sales Exec; Craig Wareham, CEO & Co-Founder
http://www.viewranger.com @viewranger
- digital mobile platform for outdoor activities
- interest-based social network
- publishing platform
- trail guide marketplace
- over 2 million app downloads
- used by over 100 search & rescue teams in UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Germany, Ukraine
- work with 22 mapping agencies & trail guides from 400 brands
- including CAMRA :-)
- wanting to engage with handset OEMs & wearable manufacturers
- earn revenue through:
- premium in-app data & services (maps & guides)
- premium services & analytics for brands
- syndication of content
- could go for advertising in the future (have steered away so far to keep UX well)
- main competitors are still dedicated devices
- there are sport-based apps that seem to be fragmenting the need
Available for iPhone & iPad, Android and Nokia
UBIAPPS (Nquiring Minds)
Nick Allot, CEO
http://www.ubiapps.com @nallott
- secure end to end framework for managing apps both online & offline
- server management + enterprise-grade security is proprietary
- protocol is open-source (JSON-RPC over HTTP)
- all nodes are two-way — can manage apps and IoT devices using the same system
- easy & quick to integrate on any device
- looking to work with system integrators
- seen most interest so far from asset tracking systems
Announcements
- Vision Mobile Developer Economics Survey
- IDEALondon offering desks, mentoring & support for start-ups and SMEs working on new products & services
- apply at http://idea-london.com
