[Germany] Now that was fast. Only two days after their first article on TechCrunch Europe, mobile startup Mobilinga gets its first VC investment. German entrepreneur Hans Rudolf Wöhrl, a famous fashion producer who bought the German arm of British Airways (Deutsche BA) for €1 in 2003 – just to sell it three years later for €120m, has invested an undisclosed sum in Mobilinga and takes over 25.1 per cent of the company. The deal was made via his holding company Intro Invest.
Mobilinga plans to invest the money to grow their iPhone software business. The two man company will create ten new jobs in product development, marketing and content generation in the next few months. Mobilinga claims to sell more than 10,000 apps monthly, which puts them among the top sellers of the App Store. Only 19 percent of iPhone/iPod Touch applications have more than 10,000 users and a mere 5 percent see more than 100,000, mobile advertising company AdMob revealed in its May 2009 metrics.
From this week on, Mobilinga programs can also be downloaded in the US and Canada. For $2.99 the Germans teach you how to speak Latin-American Spanish, French, German and Italian with their “mobilinga for Your Trip” line. Each learning application contains 1,000 sentences from different areas of life and there is a recording of every sentence which can be played out loud. This means that your cell phone can also help to ask for the bill or directions.
CEO Matthias Kose says further apps as well as internationalization will follow now. After more than ten years in mobile commerce, with different companies and varying success, he is now a big fan of the iPhone. The App Store has taught users that they have to pay for attractive mobile apps, Kose claims. Mobilinga’s small prices can attract impulse buyers, they are loaded completely to the iPhone and don’t cause follow-up costs for data transmission or further modules.
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