MoMo London at 3i last night

A quick round up of MoMo London last night. It was a very very hot evening but fortunately the offices at hosts 3i were pretty cool. The place was full - not least because this was a night talking about funding mobile ventures. And there were 4 VC/investors on the panel judging a variety of 4 minute presentations followed by questions from the panel.

I missed most of the WeeWorld presentation as I arrived late due to client commitments. But that's ok, I kinda know WeeWorld anyway from my own MSN usage and because I've worked with Yomego in the past who are a WW mobile partner and they've had lots of funding so not really on the lookout for more dosh. If you don't know who they are, they're a virtual community where you can create your own avatar to express yourself.

Next up was Active Media who teamed up with flytxt to work on Orange Wednesdays. Ramesh and Pri did a good job of summing up what they've been up to in the last few years and the headway they've made, particularly in India, where they are one of the main mobile marketing service providers.

After that we saw Otodio who have a very interesting concept about being able to 'hear' your newspaper or whatever instead of reading it. So a bit like automatically podcasting your morning newspaper but with some navigation tools added so you can go forward and back (like you would with an audio typing system) and speed up or slow down - all from your mobile phone or voice activation. The technology sounds pretty fancy but it's gonna be a long journey to change both consumer and publisher behaviour. Good luck to them!

Then we saw Red Bend, a deeply technical company who sort out OTA updates for handset manufacturers thus making the user experience better and enabling bug fixing and the like.

And finally, Dennis from Zzizzl Films was up talking about his early stage short independent film aggregation business. He made a big play around the fact that he was offering a 50:50 profit share but that's pretty standard fodder for the mobile video on demand world. What that 50:50 actually means in reality could be 50:50 of 30% or less profit depending on how many other partners are in the value chain taking their cut. The panel seemed very keen on his concept and awarded him the £1,000 prize that was up for grabs that evening and told hiim to chat to them afterwards. And out of all the presenters, Zzizzl was probably the one that needed the funding most of all.

Met some new people and bumped into some old friends too - Jan from W2forum, Nick from Juvino, Daniel from Equal Mobile, Mark from Leiki, Julie and Damien from Vodafone, Richard from ARN, Nandi from Bango, Richard of KidsOk fame, Nate (ex Win), Tom from Red Oxygen and a lovely lady from the BBC whose name I have completely forgotten! I'm sure there were others too. Richard, Tom remind me who she is! Drinks and canapes were courtesy of 3i and we all came away with goodie bags. Now that *is* a posh networking do. In the bag was a notebook (saves me buying one), a pen, some WeeMee stickers and some 3i blurb on mobile bits and pieces in a posh bag. Oh, and Dan Appelquist did some vlogging of the event and I got caught. Dunno if it will make it to the final cut!

Definitely the best MoMo event so far. Well done guys.