Labotec Raises Funding For Crowd-Sourced Mobile App Development Venture

Miami, Florida-based Labotec has landed a round of funding from Kima Ventures, a European early-stage investment fund founded by entrepreneurs and angel investors Jeremie Berrebi (Zlio, Net2One) and Square backer Xavier Niel (Free, Iliad).The VC firm thus joins Kipost and FS Ventures as investors of the crowd-sourced mobile app development venture. The size of the round remains undisclosed, but we hear the amount of financing totaled just south of a seven-figure sum, so we'll peg it at in between $800,000 and $999,999.Labotec offers a relatively unique way of mobile app publishing, based on crowd-sourcing ideas from third parties. Basically, people who have ideas for mobile applications on any of the major platforms but lack the time, development skills or resources to actually build them can submit their ideas through the Labotec website. The ideas are subsequently evaluated by Labotec, and if one gets thumbs up from a committee of unnamed field experts associated with the company, Labotec funds the entire development, distribution and marketing of the app. The IP is co-owned by whoever submitted the idea ¿ targeted are carriers and handset manufacturers ¿ and Labotec.The 'Inspirer' (the person or organization that brought forward the idea for the app) doesn't pay a cent, but if the app ends up generating revenue, the first $25,000 that it makes goes to Labotec ¿ no matter how long it took to get to that point. After that, the Inspirer gets 50% of any revenue that may follow. Labotec notes that they're still testing this model and that it is subject to change in the future.Labotec says that it has received hundreds of new project ideas from 27 countries since its inception in May 2009. A total of 3 applications out of those ideas have launched (iSOS for Android, iMove2Music and FakeSMS for iPhone) and 20 are slated for release by the end of this year ¿ which basically means a lot of the submitted ideas are junk. The company says it plans to use part of the just-raised capital to hire 10 more developers of mobile apps for platforms such as iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry.CrunchBase InformationLabotecInformation provided by CrunchBase
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Sony Ericsson Dot: Crowdsourcing Mobile Ideas

Sony Ericsson has gone live with a new initiative called ‘SE-dot’. SE dot is aimed at crowdsourcing and developing new ideas. As the company informs us, the idea behind SE-dot is to jump the focus from technology and come down to practical ways in which mobiles can make things easy. On the site you would find ideas being put up, discussed and taken right upto prototype stage. Most of these ideas seem to be problems that developers can offer a solution to via a mobile app, but given the strength of community, Sony Ericsson can really get some good inputs from power users. Using collaboration between users Dot does better that other attempts that we have seen, like Palm asking you to give them ideas.

One cannot buy innovation but hope SE-dots sparks some good ideas though!




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Phoning It In

The brave "upstanders" of the DRC--the group Women's Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence, for example--would have the tools to report instances of abuse, crowdsourcing sexual violence the way Clinton hopes young Kenyans will crowdsource anti-corruption efforts. The people of the Congo certainly don't lack for courage. Perhaps mobile phone technology can give them the tools they need to take action against the thugs and war-criminals who are ripping their society apart.
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Spike Lee & Mofilm.com seminar...

Spike Lee, the Emmy Award-winning and Academy-nominated film director, producer, writer and actor, has recently entered the user-generated content fray directing a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones for Nokia. Spike came to Cannes Lions to share his own UGC experiences and preside over the results of the MOFILM user-generated content initiative.
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