It happened at the Mobile Venture Forum at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona:
a VC panel with David Weilden ( Koshla ventures), Martin Gibson ( Accel Partners), Matt Murphy (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) and Roberto Bonanzinga (Balderton Capital) was moderated by Roy Vella and shared a glimpse of how VCs view the mobile world of opportunities from mobile advertising, to mobile health, Machine to Machine communications and Near Field Communications.
Shyam Kamadolli of Fidelity Growth Partners India has beaten me to it and already provided a full account of the panel discussion in his blog.
An open and good discussion which could have been even better had the mobile operators joined the panel too; we did not get to hear their side of the story why startups (and their VCs) find it so difficult to identify the operators’ platform APIs as well as their “corporate APIs” (whom to talk to).
Between the panel discussion and the well-attended reception later in the afternoon, there was a 3.5 hour marathon of 15 presentations from VC portfolio companies; although long, the session was sufficiently interesting to keep us in our seats.
DesignArt Networks(Niel Ranson) the fabless semiconductor company which delivers integrated System-on-Chips for the next generation multi-gigabit mobile broadband infrastructure.
Rob Keve of the London-based Fizzback for realtime customer feedback and customer experience solutions (and his interesting bell-curve distribution of general customer conversation or “noise signal” and refraction model for customer-feedback induced action).
CommProve ( Lars Pedersen) the probe-based network management tool for wireless operators.
Stoke Inc (Vikas Varma) the mobile broadband gateways which helps carriers manage the ever-increasing load of mobile data.
Gogii (Austin Murray) and the creators of textplus the new generation of text messaging ( who said SMS is dead?) from the same people who created JAMDAT mobile.
LiveUK (Ariel Galinsky) for real-time video that enables broadcasters to uplink and transmit videos live instantly, anywhere and at anytime.Waze ( Noam Bardin) the social GPS where driver-generated traffic updates and mapping is used to optimise routes in real-time.
Rebtel (Andreas Bernstrom) (I was one of their first customers before they started producing nice-looking account reports and invoices) a VoIP for mobile phones.
MobileAware (Armin Gebauer) a platform technology enabling companies to launch mobile solutions ( commerce, self-care, web) fast.
Zong (Nick Mackivleen) the mobile payment service used by online gaming and social networking web sites.
Movirtu (Nigel Waller) the Mobile Industry Management solutions which brought Cloud phone, the service that broke the link between physical identity and SIM cards enabling mobile operators to reach 1bn people who earn less than $2 per day.
WeFi (Eran Naveh) a wi-fi discovery and connectivity tool for consumers (84m plus wi-fi hot spots discovered to date) and a tool for operators to managed and offload data on wi-fi networks.
PerfectoMobile (Eran Yaniv) a cloud based testing of mobile services & applications on real devices.
NewBay (Paddy Hoahan) s/w platform for device-makers and operators to offer cloud-based digital content services to the end-user.
