Background information, investors and promising start-ups at the Swiss Mobile Basecamp

Yesterday the second Swiss Mobile Basecamp took place in Bern. The event organised by Martin Coul was sold out since quite a while. Entrepreneurs from all over Switzerland, investors, industry insiders from home and abroad, representatives of industrial companies and bloggers have participated.
 
The speakers delivered a number of important information about the current developments in the industry. Andreas Constantinou of VisionMobile explained the strategy of big players like Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Google and Facebook. With her presentation Siddhi Saryaiya of Xyologic drew attention to the large number of apps already available. Only a very small portion of them is getting real popular. 0.1% of the apps get 50% of all downloads.
 
In the afternoon Mobicamp teamed up with Capital on Stage to put 7 investors on stage from across the investor lifecycle. The investors were two business angels – Michael Dillhyon and Dave Brown (co-founder of Poken) –, the crowdfunding platform c-crowd, and two VCs: Affentranger Associates, Creathor Ventures. Particularly interesting were the presentations of two corporate venturing organisations: Swisscom Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), the leading global growth stage venture firm focused on mobile technology, services and media. NGP is a global venture capital firm with US$250M under management for direct investment in promising mobile companies.
 
After the investors the start-ups entered the stage. Richard Marler, has selected 6 companies for the Dragon’s Den competition:
Cooala - http://cooa.la/ Cooala is a mobile app for young, urban consumers to playfully connect with brands in a completely new, trustworthy, and straight forward way.
InZair - http://www.inzair.com/ The ZMS application is an innovative and powerful new messaging application for smartphones, tablets, and more.
Sanovation - http://www.sanovation.com/ Sanovation are developing an online chronic pain diary called CatchMyPain which allows the detailed description of pain problems (e.g. using pain drawings to indicate the pain location) and will initially be launched on tablets towards the end of 2012.
Skeeble - http://skeeble.ch. Skeeble provide an online self-service product to create mobile and multi platform apps without technical or administrative hassle.
VocaBoca - http://www.vocaboca.com VocaBoca is a mobile app to effectively learn new vocabulary. The app combines the power of the best existing technologies such as Google Translate, Flickr images, Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, Wiktionary and Wikipedia to explain any word in more than 40 languages..
Des p'ttits bonheurs - http://www.desptitsbonheurs.com/ Their family of mobile apps let you create and share personalized cards from your smartphone.
 
Winner was Sanovation, Cooala ranked second. Sanovation got a prize worth CHF10.000 including 2x entrance tickets worth €699 each to Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona. The winner also received a lifetime subscription to Fluid UI, a mobile app prototyping tool for iOS & Android Apps worth CHF1290 per year