Most of the Time by Cliff Reeves : Lots and lots of cool Israeli companies. Part 5 -- Pitango companies: Redbend, WeFi and Axis Mobile

Most of the Time by Cliff Reeves

Lots and lots of cool Israeli companies. Part 5 -- Pitango companies: Redbend, WeFi and Axis Mobile

Redbend http://www.redbend.com/ … Redbend provides tools for remote management of mobile software on mass market handsets, specializing in firmware: FOTA (firmware over the air). This is a highly specialized and demanding area due to stringent requirements for the user experience and restrictions on the use of bandwidth. They have agreements with Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and estimate that they are now managing approximately 200M phones.

WeFi http://www.wefi.com/ …. Software to help users connect quickly and easily to WiFi anywhere and upload the information to a central server which creates an aggregate map. They also reward members who make the most contributions. They do more analysis than most connection managers by analyzing the connectivity and helping the user connect more effectively. 150,000 access points. Aprrox 6,000 current users, currently in beta with no marketing. Users can enter the routers they themselves own, and allow access to a limited group of friends.

Axis Mobile http://www.axismobile.com/ …. Delivering email and attachments via push to almost any phone. The MNO runs an Axis Mobile server which collects the users’ mail from any service: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc. For each user, the Axis Mobile server detects what device the user is holding at the time, and performs real-time transcoding of the email and the attachments, They can support a number of formats: MMS, XHTML, WAP, etc. Axis Mobile has contracts covering 200M subscribers via 15 operators in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland). Axis Mobile is currently listed on London’s AIM which is technically a $30M IPO (investors hold common stock) , but operates like a VC (the investment are corporations).

Axis has recently introduced MMBox, which allow non-MMS users to enjoy MMS services (with transcoding at the server) and allows the operator to bill where they often cannot with MMS that is sent to unknown recipients. PhotoSync enables management and sharing of mobile photos on the service provider’s servers. This runs in the background, synching at off-peak times allowing the phone to be used for other functions.

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Published Sunday, October 28, 2007 11:09 AM by Cliff Reeves

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	Amit Shaked said: Cliff Happy to see you find WeFi cool and promising. There is a lot more coming (like a Win-Mobile version in November), we'll be happy to keep you and your readers posted. October 29, 2007 7:13 PM
	Cliff Reeves said: Hi, Amit ... thanks for the comment. Yes, I did think WeFi was cool ... in fact I was really impressed with the companies we saw. I just expanded the WeFi entry a little, btw October 29, 2007 7:42 PM

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About Cliff Reeves

I was born in Sri Lanka (then it was called Ceylon) of British parents. I lived in Sri Lanka, England, and Malta before moving to the US in 1973. In the US I have lived in NC (Raleigh), TX (Dallas and Austin), MA (Boston), and WA (Kirkland). At present I roam between my family home in NC and my work home in WA I am married, with two daughters and one wife. I worked at: -- IBM -- Lotus (Lotus was IBM too … well, sort of). I am presently working in the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft. We work with start-up companies, and VCs to help them and our customers get the best out their relationship with Microsoft. I focus mostly on collaboration software, broadly defined. I plan to write -- mostly -- about software and the companies I really like. Like, that is, for any number of reasons. Maybe they do something really new, or really well, or maybe they signal a new trend. Or all of those things. I'm a Microsoft employee ... so expect both bias and insight in that respect. I worked at IBM and Lotus for a long time ... so same caveats apply.

Cliff Reeves

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