Three India mobile value-added services startups have made it to the nominees list at the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona 2008 – Chennai’s mobile-worx and Bangalore’s Mobisy and Ziva Technologies. Thanks S R Raja, founder trustee of MobileMonday Bangalore Trust, for emailing the details this morning.
The peer awards are an annual event organized by the worldwide MobileMonday community and hosted by the Barcelona chapter. The nominees will be evaluated by a 12-member jury. Finalists get to enjoy a number of benefits, the details of which are up on the website.
A bit on the three Indian nominees:
mobile-worx: This startup is led by a very seasoned team of founders. At the helm is chairman and adviser Nat D Natraj, who was previously founder-CEO of eFORCE. Then there is Terry Uppal, co-founder and president, who heads sales and marketing and has ten-years of prior experience in the field. Finally, Asif Ali, co-founder and chief technology officer, leads the company’s technology thought process and has earlier been an entrepreneur with a Malaysian telecom company. mobi-worx has two key products — ZestADZ (mobile advertising marketplace) and mklix (free mobile content-based social network). No information available on how long the company has been around.
Mobisy: CEO Lalit Bhise has been around quite a bit working at Infineon and Wipro among other jobs in the past. The company has developed a product called Mobitop which offers rich web 2.0 applications on mobile.
Ziva Technologies: Ziva is pretty well known now and even better known is Zook, the company’s mobile search service. Zook went live in March last year and apart from the fact that the founder team is made up of Ajay Sethi and Sameer Sisodia, not much more information available about them on the website. Ziva was incubated at IIM Bangalore’s incubation cell and received seed funding from Nadathur Holdings & Investments last year.
The spotlight on these three mobile VAS companies comes just after OnMobile, the country’s largest player in the segment, pulled off a successful initial public offering this week. Read more here.
Dear Snigdha,
Thanks a lot for covering Mobisy here, we had a great time in Barcelona. We started in early 2007 ..:-)
Lalit.
Hi Snigdha,
Been following your posts. Quite informative. Look forward for more.
Sunitha
hi,
thanks for highlighting about mobile-worx here.
just to respond to your last sentence about mobile-worx. the comapny is nearly one year old and ZestADZ which has hit market is 6 months old and doing fantastically well. it is india’s only multi-format mobile advertising engine with the best real time reporting system.
as for mklix,which is in it is pre-alpha state , will be the first of its kind mobile social networking community with free best of mobile content available for end user. people will hear more about this product in the coming months.
and yes. we are gonna be there at the gsm barcelona campus…
Vikas
Product Manager