10 promising mobile startups from Switzerland

In Others by Sébastien FluryLeave a Comment

Discover 10 swiss mobile start-up that have taken part to the competition during first Swiss Mobile Basecamp in January!

DidThis, formerly known as Quantter, is a startup mixing the world of micro-blogging, self-tracking and business intelligence. They’ve built an application ” to spread actions”. You can start a trend and… change the world. DidThis guess is that small actions, done many times by millions of people will induce real change. In Beta phase, they had around 500 registered people. The startup applied to YCombinator  and was in the last 150 (on a total of 3’500 teams applying). A potential usecase presented by Denis would be for fitness coaches, who can drive action and enhance motivation from their customers.

GbangaMatthias presented his mobile mafia-game, where you can walk in the real world and play virtual games (accomplish missions, etc.). You can play against your friends or other players, and can, for example, take control of your real-life favorite bar. Gbanga is live for a while now and has gotten some market knowledge. For instance, their players (“only” in 5 digits) engage in physical tasks, share with social media and are very immersed in experience. People seem to be ready to buy power application and Gbanga is initiating product placement in the game thanks a collaboration with local publishers.

StuffbookStuffbook.ch is building an application where you can share stuff you own and rent stuff you need. They know that this proposal was already tried thousand of times around Silicon Valley, but argue that their killer advantage is that you can earn income without beeing involved (people renting a product can “under rent” it, but you still get paid). Business model is commission based.

Kliq.in is a networking application, which is aimed to better organize your event participation. This app would allow to directly ask an audience in a location around an event. Application was launched on the AppStore  early 2012 and have a couple of hundreds users. The startup hopes to get some traction when adding video features and counting at least 10’000 users by the end of 2012. They bring some Augmented Reality components, which could be integrated on top of events management tools like EventBrite.

NewscronNewscron has launched an Android + iPhone application to agregate news from newspaper, like Pulse. News are organized, grouped by topics, you can follow the chronology and have a multisource perspective. Curation is automated thanks to an own algorithm. Newscron positions itself between Zite/Pulse and top newspapers. Apps have been downloaded 19’000 times since November 2010 and target is to reach 150’000 downloads until end of 2012.

PokenPoken‘s mantra is to collect people, places and things with just a touch, thanks to NFC (Near Field Communication). The startup focus on tradeshow events, where it helps to reduce clutter and cost, and generate more leads. Rather than distributing physical flyers, visitors can just pick up the stuff their want digitally, opening a new ear: “Touch Marketing”. You can  think on Poken as an “Evernote of tradeshows”, with a huge business opportunity represented by statistics (nowadays, exhibitors don’t really have the tools to measure impact). Poken is not a newcomer, as it launched successfully the famous digital business card gadget in 2009. It’s a huge transformation and now you better understand why great investors backed the company.

PubliwidePubliwide is tackling the online reading experience and try to make learning/reading content dynamic. They’ve developed an iPad reader allowing you to dynamically composing your eBook layout and editing rich interactive content.

ScanditScandit (who finally won the competiton) tries to connect millions of mobile camera with millions of product’s barcode (iPhone and Android apps available). You scan every barcode, compare it with other similar products (price, quality, etc.), ask your social network or share products you love with it and also buy it online.

Samuel explained that they developed tools to identify products, analyze users interest and also monetize apps (you can use their technology thanks to an API). Market experience helps them to describe their technology as the fastest and most reliable mobile barcode scanner, which additionaly works well without autofocus. Last but not least, the startup is totaly bootstrapped by now, which is impressing with what their already achieved.

SpocalSpocal builds a “communication platform to help students share their thoughts with fellow students”, because they discovered that students are not connected beyond departments. App allows you to interact with people you currently don’t know on the campus. Spocal convinced successful Zurich-based entrepreneurs like Michael Näf (Doodle) and Dominik Grolimund (Wuala) to join the board, which is already a good starting point.

SysmosoftSysmosoft provides secured telecommunication for mobile devices, to outdo the fear of most companies of having employees accessing sensible data remotely. The startup host custom applications on its specific servers, where its security technology protect the data and fill the critical security holes of mobile devices. First market is finance industry and Sysmosoft plans afterward to market its technology where secured data are critical (healthcare, government, etc.).

Other interesting mobile startups (like NewsMix, Skeeble, Amandaonline, Everdreamsoft, and a lot more) where in the room, who contributed to make the first Swiss Mobile Basecamp a real success!

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