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(on 2D-Barcodes and Image Recognition)

After a long summer break, the MobileMonday Global Summit and the Mercè festivities, MobileMonday Barcelona is back for a new and exciting season of 1st Monday of the month regulars on mobile innovation. Starting next Monday, October 1st on “Next Generation Mobile Marketing” (2D-Barcodes / Image Recognition).

The first event of the new 2007-2008 season brings together an explosive cocktail of some of the hottest start-ups in Europe on the Next Generation Mobile Marketing topic, including Dennis Hettema from Shotcode (Sweden), Roger Fisher from Kaywa (Switzerland) and Ignacio Mondine from Daem Interactive (Spain). The topic will be introduced and moderated by Raimo van der Klein coming over from Amsterdam.

Raimo will talk about the the two worlds of Mobile Phones (The Wand and The Crystal Ball) and the way information (content) is provisioned to the mobile phone and the change from Push Marketing to Pull Marketing (Marketing as a service) and will share various examples of innovate ways how information can be delivered to the mobile phone. A perfect start for a new season it looks to me. If you feel the same, please subscribe and confirm your event participation, seats are limited as always, don’t wait last minute to confirm!

All details on speakers, timing and location at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

NOTE: picture by Leonard Low under Creative Common license.

2d barcodes, 2d codes, Announcements, Barcelona, barcodes, daem, daem interactive, dennis hettema, events, Ignacio Mondine, image recognition, kaywa, marikaya, mobile, Mobile Apps, mobile marketing, Mobile Monday, mobilemonday, mobminds, momobcn, next generation, Proximity Marketing, QR codes, raimo van der kelin, roger fisher, shotcode, spanish startups, startups, Trends

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!

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Despite the excellent program at Mobile Monday Barcelona, I will attend the Villes 2.0 conference on November 6 in Paris, together with Ignacio Mondine, R&D director from Daem Interactive.

One can easily imagine how big cities will become more difficult to manage in the near future. The evolution of technology in general, including those of the internet and the mobile phone might bring some solutions in new urban practices and might find some innovative answers to the challenges that cities currently encounter.

The internet goes with and accelerates urban transformations. City is the main laboratory of different kind of uses : Wireless and Fixed Broadband, trade and logistic issues, home services, mobility issues (working, security, privacy,…), CCTV (security…), smart transport, on-line communities ,local democracy, public internet access ..

I’m looking forward to this conference, organised by Fing and Tactis.

The same evening I’m going to attend Mobile Monday Paris and meet team and organisers Marie and Véronique. They have been doing a wonderful job setting up MoMoParis nearly a year ago and bring the French mobile industry together, I heard the monthly event is really popular and highly attended, it’s going to be interesting to exchange experiences and opinions.

Ignacio from Daem Interactive will present Daem’s latest innovations in mobile image recognition, the same day, they’ll be anouncing a major campaign in Spain using image recognition and MMS. After all these years of struggling with MMS, will image recognition finally lift MMS? More about this and the campaign next week at m-trends.org.

If anyone would like to meet with me and Ignacio, please do get in touch by clicking my name in the sidebar.

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