Bright Ideas from Mobile Startups

Bright Ideas from Mobile Startups

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At the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, BusinessWeek picks a dozen newcomers with promising products

Hot Concepts

GestureTek was the winner of this year's Mobile Innovation Award at the Mobile World Congress. Hardly a newcomer-the company has been around for 20 years-it won hands down for bringing a fresh new application to the mobile sector. GestureTek's EyeMobile Engine software lets mobile-phone users play games, scroll menus, navigate maps, and browse Web pages by shaking, rocking, or rolling their cell phones. So far, its software has been embedded in more than 50 million mobile devices worldwide.
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Social Phone Book
Zyb (www.zyb.com)Category: Contact managementCopenhagenZyb turns your dull mobile-phone address book into a live interactive experience. The company's technology lets you sync your address book with your Web profile on sites like LinkedIn and Bebo. And starting in May-provided the people in your address book opt in-when you click on their names you'll see a lot more than just a phone number. Using location-based technology, Zyb will tell you where your friends or family members are located (using Google Maps) and whether they're currently available to talk or text. It'll also let you sync up social calendars and exchange your most recent postings from sites such as Facebook, Flikr, and Twitter

Can You Hear Me Now?
Audience (www.audience.com)Category: Noise suppressionMountain View, Calif.Ever tried to make a mobile-phone call in a packed conference center or on a busy city sidewalk and struggle to hear above the din of the crowd and honking horns? Audience, the winner of this year's "Most Innovative True Mobile Startup" award at the Mobile World Congress, is a voice processor company that has developed noise-suppression technology based on the intelligence of human hearing. The technology is applicable across a broad range of voice-centered consumer products.


Hot Concepts
Pay-Buy-Mobile

French chip designer Inside Contactless specializes in chips for so-called near field communications, or NFC, which allows short-range wireless communication between electronic devices. NFC is helping cell phones morph into wallets around the world by letting users "swipe" their phones over a reader to make small payments. Inside's technology is playing a big role in NFC and the company won an award at this year's Mobile World Congress for "most innovative device-centric technology." Its MicroRead chip has been adopted by several major handset manufacturers and is a key component in the GSM Assn.'s Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, a program for standardizing contactless payments using mobile phones.

Spinning Your Messages
SpinVox (www.spinvox.com)Category: Voice-to-text conversionLondonSpinVox captures voicemail messages, feeds them into a speech recognition system, and then spits them out as text delivered per the user's choice-via e-mail, SMS, instant messaging, or even written on a Facebook wall. The service works on any handset or network, including mobile, fixed line, and VoIP. SpinVox is rolling out its service with operators, who like it because voicemail-to-text helps push up user revenues. After all, texting is often more immediate than voicemail, and users tend to respond faster to text messages by texting back.