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Here some impressions from the excellent Under The Radar: Mobility Conference from November 16 in Mountain View, CA. Debbie Landa and her team are doing an incredible good job creating this type of events bringing together various types of quality (!) value chain players in mobility. Just seeing the number of VC’s around per square meter shows that mobility is definately on the radar in Silicon Valley. You can view some of my UTR pictures here as a Flickr set.

The number of company pitches one could view in a day was pretty impressive: 32 companies, divided in 8 tracks in 2 rooms; The 2-track system however made me skip some presentations I would have loved to see too. Anyway, on the overal side, this was a very smoothly organised event and a chance to meet loads of new people in the industry, mainly focused Silicon Valley. It was very interesting for me to get a better notice of the US mobile market and understand better between the differences US and European markets.

The overal tone of the conference was all about web 2.0 going mobile, there has been numerous blogposts and discussions lately on the topic… Daniel Appelquist has one of my preferred mobile 2.0 definitions so far:

Mobile 2.0 is not “the Future.” it is services that already exist all around us. These services are maturing at an amazing rate and what they are doing is effectively knitting together Web 2.0 with the mobile platform to create something new: a new class of services that leverage mobility but are as easy to use and ubiquitous as the Web is today. These services point the way forward for the mobile data industry.

I started with the first session on VIDEO with ComVu, Juice Wireless presenting JuiceCaster, Nexage and Veeker; a very potential set of companies. My favourites are ComVu because I can stream (imagine a good flat rate deal somewhere of course) and geotag automatically, and JuiceCaster has it’s community building stuff together. I can’t really remember about Nexage, neither can I found notes back and the Veek Video Peek from Veeker just doesn’t sound right.

Then I went off to the other room to see Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob (excerpt here below); everytime I hit their homepage, I’m always impressed by the number of incoming live ad requests coming in, and they are not fake - as some suggested inside the Microsoft building… Correct me if I’m wrong.

In this ADVERTISING/MARKETING track Greystripe won the audience award for it’s great presentation and idea - inserting ads into mobile game downloads, ok but that’s too American for me, I just don’t believe a cell phone is not a TV and in the long run kids will just skip the ad whenever avaiable or possible.

Meanwhile I missed the session on MEDIA SHARING and SharpCast who won the audience award here. SharpCast is doing what everybody else forgot to do well between the desktop and the mobile: it’s all about syncing your life! I also missed the transactions track but you can view winner Mobo’s pitch here below by CEO Noah Glass himself:

During lunch I catched up with Scott Rafer from MyBlogLog and Dave Harper. Dave (here below) presented in the next MOBILIZE session his WinkSite project. Moderator Rafe Needleman from CNET made a very true review of that session. You can read Dave’s presentation here, don’t forget to check their pitch!

Meanwhile in the other track Loopt was winning the overall audience choice. Loopt is doing what Plazes (and some others) are doing for a while now yet, somehow Loopt chooses resolutely mobile and seems to have spend a lot of time on usability and user experience, stuff not the least to be underestimated on the mobile phone. I’ll check the new stuff Felix will show us next monday for an definitive update on MoSoSo.

In the IMAGING track Daem Interactive was to me way ahead of the others but I may sound too subjective here The key in the image recognition technology sector will be how fast the companies presented can go to market with the right solution. Japan is leading innovation and ideas in this area but the companies in this track at UTR showed some very mature technology and solid business ideas behind.

In the Galileo room, TalkPlus was showing what voice 2.0 is all about and convinced judges and audience with it. Get a grimp of it yourself here in demo and interview I did the day after with TalkPlus CEO Jeffrey D. Black.

Jeffrey explains the voice 2.0 concept (left) and demonstrates a SIP Call

Jeffrey D. Black, CEO TalkPlus explains TalkPlus

My list of companies to watch has been growing quite fast now, here below the ones I recently added - check back in a year or so and let me know what happened with these companies

ComVu
JuiceCaster
Loopt
Plusmo
WinkSite
Mobo
Sharpcast
TalkPlus

You can view all the Under The Radar: Mobility judges and audience winners here.

Note: all video shooting done with a Nokia N93, thanks to vpod.tv for hosting - actually you should check their portal, Rodrigo is currently live reporting from Nokia World in Amsterdam.

And as an extra for the incrowd fans: hear Peter Vesterbacka (Some Bazaar) explain his “to found 100 companies in a year” pitch. Way to go, Peter!

2.0, admob, Analysis, ComVu, daem, GreyStripe, image recognition, innovation, juicecaster, juicewirless, Loopt, m trends.tv, mobile 2.0, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile marketing, Mobile RSS, Mobile Search, mobile video, mobile20, mobility, Moblog, Mobo, mtrends, n91, n93, nokia, Nokia N91, Nokia N93, Operators, Plusmo, Predictions, ScanR, Sharpcast, silicon valley, social media, spanish startups, startups, TalkPlus, Trends, Under The Radar, utr, vc, veeker, web 2.0, web20, winksite

Mobile Monday Barcelona has created a speaker presentation download section. Sharing information is key to share experiences on a global level, it brings different players in the mobile value chain closer to each other and it stimulates more mobile business all together. If you don’t agree with this, please hit the back button in your browser or jump to the next post

For the ones sharing these thoughts, you can currently download the speaker presentations from the Mobile Monday July 3 opening event in Barcelona on Mobile Marketing and Advertising and from the recent Future of Mobile Music event of October 2, it’s really a must-read source of information, check it out!

Current presentations are available from:

• Ian Musselwhite, Bango
• Scott Cohen, The Orchard
• Bill Houghton, MyStrands
• Russell Buckley, AdMob
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research
• José Luis Jorge Marrasé, Alcatel

All presentations are in english, you only need to register to download the presentations. All future presentations will be put online in a reasonable delay after each future event.

admob, alcatel, Announcements, bango, bill houghton, ian musselwhite, josé luis jorge marrase, Mobile Events, mobile interactive tv, mobile marketing, mobile music, Mobile Search, mobile tv, mobilemonday, mystrands, partyStrands, ricardo baeza yates, russell buckley, scott cohen, taste based recommendation, the orchard, web 2.0, yahoo

My blogging rhythm the last weeks must have been as slow as Miles Davis‘ cool jazz tempo in the fifties. Not to be understood in the negative sense of ‘coolness’ of course, because those records are really great!

The reason is that I have started working on (probably) some of the most exciting projects currently in mobile: Admob and MusicStrands. Besides initiating Estació de França train station in Barcelona. Gotomedia, led by Kelly Goto, will be partnering with research partners Barcelona Media, which has ties to Pompeu Fabra University to engage in global mobile research. Check also the gotomobile blog to stay updated on results and mobile web issues.

I started helping Russell Buckley with business development for AdMob in Spain and other EU countries. It has been great working with him and learn more on mobile advertising and the mobile web in general. AdMob, launched in January this year by Omar Hamoui, passed last weekend a staggering 50 million ad views (!) Check out Russell’s promotion he does to celebrate the 50m ad views so far. Nice to know also is that Mike Rowehl, you might know from his This is Mobility blog, is currently working as an engineer at AdMob. Mike runs also the Mobile Monday Silicon Valley meetings with Russell Beattie (now at Yahoo!).

The other exciting project I started working on recently is MyStrands (also known as MusicStrands). They just launched a new project that touches probably all sectors I worked in before and of which (to me) the combination has tons of opportunities for the future… Music, Mobile, Internet and … (the next part I will have to explain you soon here

You can read part of the story how we got to eachother here, just know that this article was written completely independent before I got in touch with MyStrands people. Don’t expect too many changes in writing style on MyStrands because I just love this project!

As far as m-trends.org is concerned, it’s going to be business as usual. I will continue to write in my own style and rhythm on projects I work on and report on trends, innovations and experiences of todays’ mobile media lifestyle.

admob, Announcements, barcelona media, gotomedia, gotomobile, mobile 2.0, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, mobile marketing, mobile music, Mobile Search, mobile web, mobilemonday, musicstrands, mystrands, Personal