Berlin-based aka-aki, which offers a location-based social network for mobiles, has raised additional funding. The amount of this second round of financing was not disclosed, although the company did say it was ‘several millions of euros’.
Investors were Creathor Venture and Innovacom.
Aka-aki has been running its mobile social networking service for about two years now and says its community is growing much faster than anticipated. Aka-aki’s Roman Hänsler tells me the user base is currently 350,000 users strong and located around the world. The company started generating revenue only last August, mainly through advertising. → Read More
Europe is a hotbed of mobile startups right now, so appropriately enough the Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco is putting on a one-day international event tomorrow in Barcelona which focuses on mobile startups, dubbed Mobile 2.0 Europe. I’ll be moderating a panel there, hosting a TechCrunch networking party and we now have the exclusive on the early stage start-ups selected for the competition: aka-aki (from Germany) focuses on Proximity Networking, as in mobile social networking with Bluetooth-sensing capabilities which are pretty interesting. For instance, it will build a network of encounters with other Aka-Aki members even before you sign up, populating your network automatically. We’ve written a lot about them here. Dial2Do (from Ireland) lets you do common tasks by calling a number and speaking. You can send email or SMS and post to Twitter for instance. It asks you two or three questions like “Do what?”, “To who?”. You say what you want, it recognizes what you said and completes the task. That would probably make it pretty handy for those tasks you’d like to do while driving but now can’t due to the increasing number of laws which band people from talking on the phone while driving. Shout’Em (from Croatia) is a “roll your own” hosted mobile social network which has an Android client already. The video looks slick at least, but it will be interesting to hear more about them at the conference. youlynx (from Spain) is a social media network, not unlike a mobile YouTube, but you can send pictures as well. It would be good to see if they have any plans to extend this idea as currently its a fairly simple video sharing site for mobile content. Zipipop (from Finland) is a start-up that is developing Zipiko, a mobile service for sorting your social life on the go, as in, broadcast where you’ll be at a certain time in the day. Think Dopplr, but on a much more granular level perhaps. Rummble (from UK) is a location based discovery tool and social search platform we wrote about here and here. Rummble’s idea is that location will soon be a “given” (via FireEagle, Google or GPS) on the mobile, as will social networking, so the value lies in filtering all this data to make it relevant in the mobile experience. ViaMobility (from France) is a mobile widgets and applications startup with a → Read More
