The MoPR Blog

You can add Under the Radar | Mobility to the list of industry conferences we really love at MoPR. This past week both Melissa and I had the opportunity to attend this conference together with our clients Talkster and Hovr, who were both presenting companies.

At Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, 32 early-stage startups, together with 10 “Grad Circle” companies further along in their development, presented to an audience of VCs, reporters, bloggers and other industry watchers. The premise of the conference is telegraphed by the conference name. All of these companies are young businesses that have not yet become household names in their respective markets – they are “under the radar.” But the name of the conference producer really implies the purpose – Dealmaker Media.

There were awards given to the companies that were considered best by a panel of judges and another by the audience in each of the respective mobility categories: Publishing Platform, Messaging/Sharing, Search and Discovery, Voice Services, Advertising, Media Platforms, Infrastructure and Social Network. Having worked with Dealmaker Media to place companies into the conference, we can tell you that all of the 42 companies that made presentations are in fact winners as there was an extensive vetting process, as one might imagine, to whittle down the field of mobility startups to just 42. As a result, the conference was a fascinating portent of how mobility is going to be changing consumer and business services in the near future.

Hovr walked away with the Category Winner prize in Advertising for their ad-supported mobile gaming and social network service. As CEO Vipul Sawhney began his presentation, a group of VCs sitting behind me casually dismissed Hovr as being the same as their competitor, Greystripe – a company that was earlier in the market with ad-supported mobile games, but does not include any of the ad targeting or social networking capabilities of Hovr. But as Vipul explained MobileSpace, the social networking component to Hovr’s service – which enhances the social engagement aspect of mobile gaming that encourages repeated play of the same game by a group of friends thus driving more ads to be served and more revenue for Hovr and game producers – these same VC’s had their “a ha moment” and understood the big gulf between Hovr and Greystripe. In the end, judges Erik de Kroon of Vodafone Group, Daniel Rosen of AKQA Mobile and Eric Ver Ploeg of VantagePoint unanimously picked Hovr as the best in the Advertising category.

But as I said, each of the 42 companies were winners just by being selected to present, and the purpose of the event was not to win prizes but to make deals. In between sessions and during the breaks both our clients were engaged in several meetings with VCs and potential business partners. Each exec that attended from both Talkster and Hovr left the event with a pocket full of important business cards and, more important, a schedule of follow-on meetings.

We saw a lot of interesting companies at the event. Certainly, and quite objectively, our favorites were Talkster and Hovr.  Talkster had great momentum having won Best Overall Service at CTIA in October, and the buzz from their newly announced platform to ad-enable any voice or text communication carried over into the conference. It must be very gratifying after all the hard work of building and launching a service to have VCs approach you, as happened on a couple of occasions for COO James Wanless and president Jim Fergusen.

But besides our clients, people in the industry should pay attention to each of the 42 companies. Among our favorites were Vollee, a company that can stream processor-intensive applications to 3G phones (and other IP devices such as IPTV set top boxes) in the form of video. Their application allows for the best of console and PC games to be played on a mobile handset. They solved the problem of portability for Second Life, and that alone should make them hugely successful. TileFile was another interesting Media Platform company which allows the easy sharing and publishing of video optimized for the mobile platform.

Socialight was our favorite by far in the Social Networking category. The company has built a platform for content producers to create communities based on location. Another company in Advertising that was interesting is Zoove, which is looking to replace the five-digit SMS short code with a telephonic process. Zoove’s CEO Tim Jemison showed how their technology can replace a six step text messaging based call-to-action with a one step process that works like placing a phone call. In the Search and Discovery category, Dial Direct was category winner by both audience and judges for their very simple service – dial into your phone the word d-i-r-e-c-t-i-o-n-s (347-328-4667) and speak your location and the place you want to find and this service will not only find it for you but will send you step-by-step driving or walking directions. We actually met their co-founder Amit Desai earlier in the week at FierceMarket’s Wireless Voice conference in San Francisco and used the service several times even before seeing it presented at Under the Radar.

Another favorite aspect of this event is the event producers themselves. I met a lot of people at this conference, but among my favorites was Dealmaker Media CEO Debbie Landa. She has one of the coolest jobs in high tech. Through her events and blog, she gets to see the entire landscape of emerging technologies and watch the progress of the very best young companies. I’m jealous. Most people in her position would be harried and frazzled as she had to manage all the moving parts to ensure everything went off smoothly. But Debbie was omnipresent, always with a smile on her face and happy to talk to anyone who came up to her. On her staff, Shay Nowick was extremely helpful to us throughout the entire process of submitting our clients and getting them to the stage. But the entire Dealmaker Media staff gets our vote for a great conference very well produced.

If you’re at a young start-up looking for funding and exposure, we highly recommend participating at Under the Radar. Oh, and if you’re a young mobility start-up hoping to emerge from being under-the-radar, contact Mobility Public Relations!