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I spend some time in Amsterdam for the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition for Dutch mobile startups, combined with a presentation I gave at MobileMonday Amsterdam. I have been nicely surprised by the quality of the local startups  presenting in the competition, I can’t say much about them yet… the winners will be announced shortly and will present at the coming MOMO event at the PICNIC conference.

MobileMonday Amsterdam #7 on Value was a GREAT event. The MOMO team has been building reputation since their kickoff event in June 2007 with Jyri Engestrom, putting together quality events ever since. I have been around seeing many MobileMondays a bit everywhere but MoMo Amsterdam is definately one of the best events in Europe focusing on mobile specific topics. What makes this a good event is the original venue and the TEAM working in perfect symbiosis with clear objectives to produce exciting events and not afraid to take risks trying out new concepts.

This time Raimo, Yuri, Claire, Maarten, Marc and Sam created a circle in the theatre for the first part of the event to stimulate audience participation. The discussions were in Dutch, the statements challenging and a bit controversial (user value vs. shareholder value) - why not? I particulary liked the discussion on the bankrupcy of a promising Dutch mobile startup, called Skoeps, as a learning experience towards the community. Wrong timing (flat fees not yet in place), contrary shareholder interest and not enough user base to create a user-driven news content site I believe were amongst the reasons the company didn’t make it.

The 2nd part included keynote presenations by myself, buddie Ajit Jaokar and Yme Bosma from the biggest social network in The Netherlands Hyves (5 million active users!). Ajit gave another interesting talk on what he expects to become a new boom on - non-voice - devices.

Yme presented (in Dutch) the coming rollout of the Hyves mobile platform, including rich adressbook (presence, status, profile, content, etc), communication options such as voice, sms, notes, www, blog, chat, video, photo, email, money, etc), location-based (cellid & GPS), bluetooth for physical identification in public area’s and multiplatform (J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile & iPhone). Yme and his team are very ambitious about the mobile platform, expecting mobile interfaces to be the dominant acces method on their platform in a couple of years. Note that Hyves was originally intented as a mobile social media platform years ago before its actual internet succes.

You can view the presentations of Ajit and Yme on Slideshare. The complete Flickr set of the event can be seen here. I’ll post my presentation in another following post.

The Mobile 2.0 Organizing Committee announced the selection of the presenting start-ups at Mobile 2.0 Europe on July 4 in Barcelona. Some 70 mobile start-up companies applied to present at Mobile 2.0 Europe conference. The committee was delightfully surprised with the quality of the ideas and technology of the start-ups coming from many different corners of Europe and the world.

Here are the selected start-up companies.

PRE SERIES A companies

kooaba (Switzerland) - Mobile Image Search
Mobiluck (France) - Mobile Location-based IM, Chat and Social Networking
Secufone (Netherlands) - Mobility and Safety
Unkasoft (Spain) - Mobile Advergaming
ViiF (Germany) - Mobile Entertainment Community

POST SERIES A companies

Futurlink (Spain) - Proximity Marketing
Nimbuzz (Netherlands) - Mobile IM and Text Message Service
Mippin (UK) - Mobilizing the Web
Palringo (UK) - Vocal Instant Messaging
Taptu (UK) - Mobile Social Search

Early-Stage companies

The presenters in this category will be announced the day of the event as to maintain the suspense.

During the event, all panel participants and organizers will vote their best Start-up in each category; the winner in each category receives an invitation to present at the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco on November 3, 2008.

Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Suites Management and Marketing, Services and Software at Nokia will introduce the conference with a keynote.

Participants will enjoy C-Level speaker and panelist participations from other mobile industry players, such as AdMob, AMF Ventures, Atlas Venture, Bango, Blyk, Debaeque Capital, Fjord, Getjar, Google, itsmy.com (Gofresh), Nokia, M:Metrics, Orange, Stradbroke Advisors, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Trutap, Vodafone, Yahoo!, and ZYB. The sessions will be moderated by some of Europe’s finest bloggers including Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK), Peggy Anne Saltz (MSearchGroove) and Raimo van der Klein (SPRX Mobile).

Check the full speaker list and program agenda here.

There is a lot of interest from the industry to attend this event. Early-Bird tickets at €99 and Standard tickets at €149 are already sold out. Currently, there are some 20 tickets left at €199 (breakfast, lunch, coffee and networking cocktail included), after which tickets will be on sale at €299 (prices all excl. VAT). Attendants can purchase their ticket online at Amiando Mobile 2.0 Europe.

We are also organising a meetup with our media partner TechCrunch, the evening after the event; please contact Mike Butcher or info@dotopen.eu for more information on this event.

Our Partners
Our thanks to our partners Nokia, Palringo, Taptu, Telefónica Movistar, Vodafone, Yahoo!, Bango, eBuddy and Mippin for their invaluable support.

The next Mobile Monday Madrid on June 16, 2008 in collaboration with Bango will dive into statistical data and analyse mobile usage, under the topic Mobile Analytics with some experienced players from the industry, including Patrick Dost, Director General, Nedstat España; Sixto Arias, managing director of Mobext (Havas Digital Mobile Marketing Division), Sarah Keefe, VP Marketing, of Bango and Andres Lozano Sanudo, Head of Spain, Portugal and LATAM of Nokia Interactive Advertising.

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaymadrid.com/subscribe/ and reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book now to avoid being left out!

Four weeks to go for the MOBILE 2.0 EUROPE conference and the program gets more and more exciting. Last week, Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Suites Management and Marketing, Services and Software at Nokia was added as a keynote and Charlie Schick, Editor-in-Chief for Nokia Conversations will talk about Social Media as the fusion of mobile and internet, exploring the ties into the Mobile Semantic Web.

More than 70 startups registered to participate to the event. The Mobile 2.0 Europe selected start-ups in 3 Categories (Seed Capital Stage, Pre Series A and Post Series A) will be announced next week.

The Open Platforms and New Application Areas Panel is also confirmed and will be moderated by Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst and founder of MSearchGroove

Panelists include:

• Ray Anderson, CEO and founder, Bango
• Javier Pérez Dolset,CEO, Zed
• Alex Romero, Director Partnerships, Yahoo! Connected Life Europe
• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist at Vodafone Group
• Peter Vesterbacka, Founder Some Bazaar

You can view complete speaker profiles here.

The Early-Bird tickets at € 99 and Standard tickets at € 149 are already Sold out. The next 50 tickets (Standard 2) are available at € 199 (breakfast, lunch, coffee and networking cocktail included). Late tickets will go at € 299 (prices all excl. VAT). So, don’t wait any longer to reserve your ticket if you’d like to attend. You can purchase tickets online here at Amiando Mobile 2.0 Europe.

Some free tickets will still be distributed on the Mobile 2.0 on Twitter channel, also handy to stay updated on latest news and updates on the event

Together with media partner TechCrunch, we’re organising a meetup the evening after the event; if your company would like to sponsor this meetup, please contact Mike Butcher or myself for more details. I can’t tell much more as of now, I’ll leave that for Mike to announce, but it’s going to be outside and near the beach

The next Mobile Monday Barcelona on June 2, 2008 will be held at the Auditorium of Barcelona Activa and covers the topic Micromedia, exploring user-generated microblogging content and tools. The session will include Hector Milla from Balzac.TV, Tony Fish from AMF Ventures, Mireia Fontbernat from QIK and Alberto Tognazzi from the Movil Film Fest.

Networking:
As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book now to avoid being left out!

• 19h00 Registration and Pre-Networking
• 19h30 Micromedia sessions and discussion
• 20h45 Cocktail and Networking Party
• 21h30 End

Venue:

Barcelona Activa
Llacuna 162, 08018 Barcelona
T. 93 401 97 77
barcelonactiva@barcelonactiva.cat
Metro: L1 (Glòries)
Bus: 7, 56, 60, 92, B21