Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Boston's mobile start-up ecosystem

Connecting mobile phones to the Internet creates opportunities for start-ups -- and erodes the totalitarian control your cell phone carrier has long exerted over what you do with your handset. That's the starting point of Carolyn Johnson's piece in the Globe this morning. She looks at Boston's mobile start-ups, writing:

    Mobile media companies in New England attracted $33.5 million in investments in 2005, a number that tripled to $104.2 million last year, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. In the first half of 2007, mobile media companies have attracted $49.5 million in investments in Massachusetts.

    "People say that it's just a novelty now. But when the PC connected to the Internet, it transformed a word processor to a communication platform, to a media platform," said John Puterbaugh, founder and chief strategist at Nellymoser in Arlington, which takes content from places like Comedy Central and VH1 and mashes it up into cellphone-sized bits of video, audio, and visuals.


There's also a related piece about a contest sponsored by Boston-based Ulocate that'll try to motivate developers to create new location-aware applications.

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