ZYB, a mobile social network that we gave high marks to in August 2007, has been acquired by Vodafone for €31.5 million, or about $50 million. The company had raised just €3 million in venture capital. ZYB was smart in how they built their service. At first they were a simple address book backup-to-web service. But they realized they had a very complete social graph from the data (who’s… → Read More
Danish startup Zyb has confirmed our report from last week that it bought mobile social-networking startup Imity. Here is Zyb’s press release and Imity’s blog post. Terms were not disclosed, but it wasn’t very big (Zyb has raised only 3 million Euros so far). The deal was a combination of cash and stock and Imity’s three employees are now working at Zyb. As we noted… → Read More
Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This… → Read More
The rumor of the day is that Danish mobile startup Imity is being acquired by Danish Mobile startup ZYB. This isn’t confirmed yet, but we’re hearing it from a solid source. Imity is a mobile social network that locates people via the bluetooth feature on their handsets. It detects other members via bluetooth and send basic profile information to your phone. It also keeps track of… → Read More
Companies are starting to figure out that the contact information on your mobile phone may be the most important social network you have – perhaps even better than the email inbox that Yahoo is targeting. Danish startup ZYB started offering a service that simply backed up your mobile phone contacts to the web in mid-2006. A year later they turned all that data into a mobile social network. → Read More
Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October. Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile… → Read More
We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence… → Read More
Forget watching the big social networks slug it out for market share. People want to take their social networks with them when they step away from the computer. That means applications have to be mobile friendly. Most of the big networks have mobile versions of their site, with stripped down functionality. Facebook has, hands down, the best mobile application if you happen to own an iPhone. But… → Read More
The idea of taking an address book application and turning it into a social network isn’t new – Plaxo just did it two weeks ago. Now ZYB, a Danish startup, is using the mobile phone contact list as the center of the network, and the company doesn’t have the emotional baggage that still lingers with Plaxo and makes many users hesitant to trust them (I, for one, forgave them long… → Read More
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