Techcrunch40 Session 2: Mobile and Communications

Cubic Telecom

The guys take to the stage, with a couple of good jobs. They are announcing the launch of their product today, called MaxRoam. It’s basically a sim card that allows you to pay local call charges, no matter where in the world you are, by having multiple numbers on your sim card. The Demo Demons got a hold of these guys, so their demo doesn’t work. If it does, I’m going to save a lot of money!

Yap

Yap is a J2ME mobile client that allows you to send text messages, while driving - for example, by speaking into your phone. It’s basically speech to text for the mobile phone and with the new laws in California around teenagers using their cellphones while driving, it’s probably going to take off pretty well! There is a low of vapourware here, as they have promised a lot more than what I know can be delivered, effectively & within user irritability limits, but all the power to them if it can save lives or make it easier to send txt messages. They also got hit by the Demo Demons and the demo’s weren’t effective.

Ceedo

Ceedo is a mobile phone embedded web portal (or something like that). It allows you to store mobile applications onto the flash memory of your phone, and make it operable on a PC. They are focusing on creating custom virtualization sevices, uses the mobile as a store for personalization. The portal it creates, allows you to create a portfolio of applications that you can take with you and use on multiple computers, without changing the settings. It’s like Parallels for Mobile - very cool, very interesting - definitely one of the better products I’ve seen so far.

LoudTalks

Basically, their main value proposition is push to talk:

• Instant talk, no need to call
• Simple single button access
• Asynchronous talk at your pace
• Loud talk to all your friends at once

Nothing amazing, some interesting features though. I can’t see this becoming the next big thing.

Trutap

“Brings together the social life of young people into one, free, universal, mobile service”

They’re basically trying to build out MXit onto Europe, China, India & South America. They didn’t mention that MXit exists despite that it is already boasting 4m users. The nice thing is that they do aggregrate messaging from multiple networks and platforms.

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