46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
Blyk Closes A Whopping 17M€ Investment
The Finnish mobile media startup, Blyk, has closed a very impressive 17 million euro investment lead by Nexit Ventures and other individual investors. Blyk started off its path in 2006 as an ad supported virtual mobile operator, which was later pivoted to focusing on the mobile advertising platform as a business of its own. Blyk's revenues in the recent years have averaged around 12 to 22 million euros with over a six hundred thousand euro profit in 2009.
Moyume Brings Twitter For Photos
Moyume is a Swedish startup offering a service allowing instant sharing of mobile pictures to web. It has been described as the Twitter, or Jaiku, for photos.
The service allows you to deliver the pictures from your phone by MMS or email to the web, sharing automatically with the friends you've allowed to see them. The photos are visible on the web site, and you can also get a widget to show the photostream on your web page (example), and you can also forward the photos to Flickr or other sites offering email upload.
A neat feature is however the Adobe AIR based client, which you can download and install on your computer. The photos from your friends will appear directly to the client, and you have the option to comment the photos online or by SMS. The SMS is sent immediately to the photo uploader's mobile. The account creation process is rather straightforward and I got the first photo uploaded within minutes. The photo shows up instantly on the service. However there seems to be some problems with the website at the moment as I needed to login several times when trying to browse different menu items.
The business model of the company is unclear, but in a video pitch the founder Peter Sandberg
explains they're working with mobile operator 3 Sweden that provides the MMS destination to send all the photos in, and makes money from the incoming MMS messages from the users of other mobile operators. I would assume Moyume gets some kind of revenue share.
