Startup culture and the mobile industry are perfect for each other. Small companies define the modern economy and a lot of what makes startups so appealing is the speed at which you can get an innovative product to market. Mobile is so suited to startups because you can code an app and begin making money very quickly. The barriers to entry are low and we’ve seen valuations for mobile companies that are bordering another dot com style bubble. But how come we don’t see much BlackBerry support in the startup world? Here is a list of cool mobile startups, what they do, and the platforms they support. What’s your guess as to why BlackBerry is consistently ignored?
FellowUp
FellowUp is a better way of managing your social networks. The idea behind the app/service is that we meet hundreds, or thousands of people online and offline and we need a better way of keeping in touch. While you might be adding a lot of people on networks such as LinkedIn, how often do you remember to follow up and keep in touch? Fellowup helps you do this.
FellowUp currently only supports iOS.
Fooducate
Fooducate is an app available for iOS and Android that lets you scan a barcode and learn all the nutritional information you need to know about that product. The app can suggest healthier alternatives as well as make it simple to understand whether the product is healthy or not at a glance.
Click here for Fooducate for iPhone.
Fooducate is also available for Android.
Onavo
Onavo is an awesome mobile service and app that shrinks the data you use so you use less of your data plan and you save on roaming. With Onavo, you can also get more out of low bandwidth regions. Even though BlackBerrys are very efficient with data, users are increasingly downloading data-intensive apps and Onavo can help.
Check out Onavo in the App Store.
Word Lens
Word Lens is a really cool service that lets you translate text simply by pointing your video camera at it. The app doesn’t even need an internet connection and will translate nearly instantly. There’s probably a lot of technical reasons why this app isn’t available for BlackBerry and perhaps the latest OS 7 APIs will bring apps like it to the BlackBerry platform.
Word Lens is available in the App Store for iOS.
Ness
Ness is an interesting startup that aims to improve local search by adding a social component. The Ness service ties in meta data about your social graph and can provide you recommendations on places you’ll like based on what your friends like. The service is great because while many of us use Yelp, it’s hard to determine whether or not you’ll agree with the reviews. Have you ever read a bad review of a restaurant but had a friend say he or she really liked it? Chances are you’ll probably have a similar experience as a friend versus an anonymous internet user.
Ness is available for iPhone in the App Store.
SoundHound
SoundHound is Shazam on steroids. Not only can you use voice search to find music, but you can also have the app listen to a song and recognize it, as well as you can hum the song without any lyrics and it will recognize the track. Sure, Shazam is great to have on BlackBerry, but it would be great to see more than just the one app.
Check out SoundHound for iOS. SoundHound is also available for Android and Nokia.
Forkly
Forkly iPhone App from Forkly App on Vimeo.
Forkly is a lot like FoodSpotting, a startup that has been saying a BlackBerry app is coming but doesn’t seem to be launching it any time soon. Forkly focuses on food pictures and ratings. You can “like” an item, “love” it, say it’s “okay”, or “not for me”. Forkly then uses this information to build up a “taste graph” for each user. This is then used to serve up other items you may like. The foodspotting and food pic taking business is taking off, and there are very few looking at supporting BlackBerry any time soon.
Check out Forkly in the App Store.
Obviously, this only represents a handful of current mobile startups. Find us some mobile startups with BlackBerry support or even better, a mobile startup that began on BlackBerry, and we’ll write about them. BlackBerry-based startups are very hard to find.
