VentureBeat » FoneMine: Expand your business into the mobile web Annotated
FoneMine: Expand your business into the mobile web
By Dan Kaplan 07.11.07
FoneMine helps companies build interactive mobile web applications — including things like a shopping carts, comments , and search — that work across any mobile carriers and phones.
So far, companies wanting more than a basic mobile-friendly website have to build a customized back-end, host it, and maintain the code.
The Sunnyvale, Calif. company is the latest in a string of companies that help companies build more sophisticated mobile sites, and it claims to be the most complete and scalable service on the market today. There are companies like iLoop Mobile and Air2Web that help businesses develop mobile storefronts and manage SMS-based mobile marketing campaigns, but FoneMine wants to do that and more. Bling Software, which we’ve covered, offers a platform to build mobile sites. (It has teamed up with baseball star Barry Bonds and rap mogul Jay-Z to show them off. Bonds’ application alerts users when he hits another home run, just in time for baseball fans to track him as he closes in on Hank Aaron’s record.)
Chief executive Jagadish Bandole said Fonemine can offer a hosted, interactive mobile website with full SMS-based marketing functions within in a matter of days. More complicated sites will take a couple of weeks, instead of the months previously required. Through FoneMine’s straightforward interface (see screenshot below), we built a mobile page with photos, sub pages, a commenting section, and a “click-to-call” link that called our phone.
Jagadish showed us a mobile banking application that had been built on the FoneMine platform. You can check your balance, make cash transfers, see outstanding bills and pay them. Theater Bay Area, a company that sells half-priced theater tickets on the day of the shows, uses FoneMine to extend the reach of its marketing into SMS. Customers opt in to receive text alerts when tickets become available, and can click on a link in the message to buy tickets on their phone.
Jagadish says FoneMine will allow developers to create browser-based applications of just about any kind. For example, he says building an equivalent to Google Mobile Maps would be a “straightforward” task. All of this is yet to be seen, and we welcome feedback if any of you use it.
The company has raised around $6 million from angels and individuals, and makes money by charging companies for hosting, licensing and transactions. Depending on the needs and scale of the mobile application, the costs range from $500-2000 dollars per month for hosting and licensing, and up to $2000 extra if mass SMS-marketing functions are used.
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