Mobile app developer heads to the valley
Oz geek drain continues as VC cash lures MobileNation
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Australian DIY mobile app developer MobileNation has made its international debut at the DEMO start-up conference in the US and is currently dong the VC rounds. MobileNation was the only Australian company of the 53 start-ups selected to launch at the DEMO.
Its currently free platform gives non-geeks the tools to create a fully customisable app without any programming knowledge, the company says. Once users publish an app, MobileNation creates a QR code which is then used to install the app.
MobileNation was founded in 2008 by Tod Pedler, CEO of Australian Web content management company CentricMinds.
Pedler started the company with AU$500,000 of his own money, and said that the VC market interest in the US has been strong. "Investors recognise that the mobile market is driving innovation globally and want to find a smart play that gives them exposure to this sector. Within a few years, billions of smartphone and tablet devices will be connected to mobile networks," he said.
Pedler is currently on the capital raising tour with MobileNation Product Architect Ben Davey and CentricMinds chairman, John Hummelstad, a partner at Independent Capital Partners whose former roles include regional director of Microsoft Australia and Manager, IBM Venture Capital Asia Pacific at IBM Australia.
The company has also opened an office in Palo Alto and Pedler is planning to move to Silicon Valley later this year to continue its push into the US market. ®
COMMENTS
Welcome to Silicon Valley!!
A few pointers for new residents moving in from Down Under.
1. Don't confuse your phone number with your house price. They are both 7-digit numbers, so this will take some practice
2. You can drink the water, but the beer can be kind of iffy
3. The letter j is pronounced as an h in Spanish and the e is pronounced as a hard A. We don't need Aussies asking where the night life is in "San Josie"
4. if you keep nice glasses or nice china in a cabinet wwll off the floor, wire the doors to the cabinet shut when you are not using the nice dishes. You'll thank me after your first real earthquake.
5. In Silicon Valley its more than acceptable to love (the) Sharks.
Sort of a new rad?
@Neoc
The demo clips on youtube will show you something.
The glimpse from the demo makes it look that this service would help new developers, and maybe some non-developers that would like to get into it a bit, to get started quickly. It could be a bit of a stretch for a non-developer who is currently doing presentations in powerpoint. Maybe someone currently using access or excel would be familiar enough with data sources to just be off and running from the start.
The vids show a development interface that appears to include many familiar tools and interfaces from different app building platforms that may be intuitive to anyone already using xcode and/or the android SDK (or the old visual studio for that matter). Tied to what looks like an almost one-click publishing tool and with the licensing is all done up front, distribution might be tidied up some too for someone starting out.
For someone already in the mobile app stores, this part of the terms quoted below might be a bit of a bump. The intent is clearly to limit the service's claim of ownership of published applications to within the area of providing the service itself, but I'm not sure how that would be effectively limited with this wording?
"By submitting, posting or displaying the Application on or through the Service you give MobileNation a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, perform, display and distribute the Application for the sole purpose of enabling MobileNation to provide you with the Service, including storing the Application on its servers."
Pricing was yet to come according to the site. I'll be interested to see how that is set when it's released.
Nice to see something more happening with HTML5 on mobile.
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