MoMo London - July

This Monday just gone, I decided to catch up with what’s happening in the mobile phone world and attended the Mobile Monday meeting down in London.

This month’s theme was funding. There was a brief presentation at the start about the funding process, and then five different startups pitched their businesses to us and answered a few questions from a panel of VCs.

• WeeWorld was first up. They're selling little identikit avatars to customise your instant messenger and mobile phone experience. It all looks very polished, and I'm sure they'll be very popular with people wanting to personalise their computers and phones. Doesn't seem too far beyond the ringtone market, and although your WeeMe isn't anything expensive, I'm not convinced I'd ever buy one.
• Active Media Technology are the guys providing the technology for the Orange Wednesdays promotion. They have the technology to provide ticketing via text message, and other messaging-related marketing solutions.
• Otodio are trying to improve the ways we can listen to podcasts and spoken documents. Their system for navigating through (and generating) structured audio documents is a good idea, if you listen to lots of spoken-word. I'm not convinced that this podcasting, and audio consumption of documents is going to last, but maybe that's because I don't have an hour-long commute by car each day?
• RedBend have some software that I can see being of great use and being in every phone in a few years, although I'm not sure anyone will know it's there. Their product lets manufacturers update the phone software over-the-air, making it easy for them to roll-out patches and fixes to phones in the wild - it's Windows Update for mobile phones. They also want to extend the system to allow seamless installation of mobile phone apps. A noble aim, and something that's much overdue if it drives take up of installing new software on phones; however, I don't envy them the task of persuading the handset manufacturers, phone carriers, and software developers to embrace their system.
• The final business, zzizzl films were, the panel decided, the most interesting and so won the £1000 prize. I agreed with the panel, and as they seem to be in the early stages of the business I'm sure the £1000 will be most useful to them. Their aim is to become film distributors for independent film shorts, with their distribution channel being mobile phones, video iPods and PSPs. They'll share revenues with the film-makers on a 50:50 split, and seem passionate about what they're doing. I think the video-on-the-move model of consumption with mobile devices is a good match for the film short - you're more likely to be able to fit in watching a five or ten minute movie in the otherwise dead time on the bus, or waiting at the dentist.

I enjoyed the whole evening, it was interesting hearing about the different businesses, and I got chatting to an assortment of interesting people during drinks and nibbles afterwards. The MoMo London events are getting bigger all the time, and it’s easy to see why.