What was a slow-moving glacier of change just a handful of years ago is now a roaring rapid of activity: The mobile market of 2012 and beyond is quickly maturing, driven by factors such as global smartphone adoption, more efficient 4G networks, more intelligent mobile apps and advances in hardware.
At a high level, none of this is surprising. Dive deeper into the sea of change, however, and you’ll be hard pressed to track all of the lower level currents enabling this movement. That’s why we have Launchpad, our mobile startup competition at GigaOM’s Mobilize event: We wade through everything going on in the mobile sector and seek out the next generation of companies, products and services that will shape the mobile world of tomorrow.
We’re proud to announce the 10 companies that made the cut for Launchpad. So here they are, in alphabetical order. Join us at Mobilize 2012 on Sept. 20-21 to see who wins!
- Dashlane – Dashlane believes that mobile purchases need to be frictionless and work without a keyboard. The company’s mobile app goes beyond merely saving passwords and payment information and allows users to automate tasks such as registering, logging in and checking out of websites with minimal use of a keyboard but a high level of security.
- Eyeona – Eyeona’s mobile app is all about price transparency between the retailer and consumer. When a user adds a photo of a receipt to Eyeona, the app tracks that product to see if it goes on sale. If the price drops within the retailer’s price protection policy window, the app alerts the user, and the user can contact the retailer to get the lower price.
- InfiniteCanvasApp.com – Originally created to tell non-linear stories in comics, Infinite Canvas abandons the traditional left-right page-turn navigation of ebooks, digital magazines and other media, expanding the usable space to tell non-linear stories that go up, down, back, forward, and hyperlink to other parts in the document.
- InTooch – On the surface, InTooch’s mobile app helps people easily exchange contact information. But it goes further than that. The app’s auto-prompt technology means that the app is open and ready for the information when you are, and once connected, you and your new contact can discover mutual friends and interests and instantly connect on social networks.
- myERP.com – myERP’s recently launched mobile app, Intelligent Business Assistant, is like Siri for the company’s all-in-one business suite. The app uses speech recognition, natural language processing and predictive technology to turn spoken commands and questions into real-time results.
- OneTok – Post-Siri, voice is becoming the new user interface. But building voice control system is complicated. OneTok’s SaaS platform allows developers to easily add natural-language-based voice controls to their mobile app.
- Phroni – Ousia’s Phroni uses a machine-learning algorithm to scan text that you read on your mobile device, find the keywords, and create links for users to instantly search for those keywords on Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and other sites.
- Restlet – Restlet, a web API platform, is launching APISpark at Mobilize. APISpark is a PaaS tool that allows users to create, host and manage custom web APIs through a web browser.
- Snappli – Snappli helps you maximize your limited data plan (and speed up your mobile connection) by compressing mobile data in real-time by up to 85 percent, and even helps extend battery life.
- Thirst – Thirst digs through your tweets and, using its own natural language processing technology, surfacing the most important tweets and topics that have come up since the last time you signed in.
