Meet the 10 startups competing in the MobileBeat ‘Innovation Showdown’

We were blown away by the quality of the 200 mobile startup applicants to the MobileBeat 2013 Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of VentureBeat’s sixth annual event on the future of mobile (July 9-10 in San Francisco).

We’ve narrowed the pool down to 10 finalists, who will present their innovative mobile app or product live at MobileBeat. This year, we’ve broken down the finalists into two groups: Early stage companies (late seed stage to Series A), and midstage companies (Series A to Series B funding).

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They’ll each have five minutes to sell our expert panel of judges on how their company embodies, enables, or amplifies a killer “Mobile Experience.” The two winners will receive:

• 5,000 American Airlines Business ExtrAA Points (the additional eight finalists will receive 2,000 ExtrAA Points)
• Strategic bootcamp session with an executive from the IBM Venture Capital Group
• A one-hour coaching session with a partner at Emergence Capital Partners
• An editorial feature on VentureBeat

Here are the finalists for MobileBeat 2013 Innovation Showdown:

Early Stage

Lightt is your life stream. We give people an unprecedented combination of a mobile app and a cloud service to capture, connect, and stream life’s big adventures and small moments into beautiful ongoing stories that are easy to share and fun to watch, again and again.

Lettuce Apps is an online inventory- and order-management system that enables businesses to capture, track, and process orders from anywhere in the world in real time.

Instabug is a tool that runs in the background of an app, enabling users to send their feedback or bugs instantly by just shaking their devices, without interrupting their experience. And while running in the background, we gather all of the details needed for the developer to trace those bugs later.

Helpshift is the world’s first mobile help desk, powering customer service for hundreds of mobile applications and increasing customer satisfaction for millions of mobile customers. Helpshift integrates seamlessly with mobile applications to offer businesses a new way to engage with customers while reducing customer churn, support ticket volume and overhead.

*The fifth Early Stage finalist is in stealth mode.

Midstage

MobileSpaces helps enterprises secure any mobile app for BYOD, enabling new workflows for business while protecting enterprise data and respecting employee privacy. Founded by a team of mobile security experts, the company is headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., with offices in Tel Aviv.

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Capriza extends web-based business applications to mobile devices with no coding, no integrations, and no APIs. Using the Capriza Designer, employees can transform their cumbersome desktop workflows into secure, lightweight HTML5 mobile apps in minutes.

Followapps mobile application management platform is designed specifically to help chief marketing officers measure the return on investment on their mobile marketing spend and engage their mobile audience. Followapps becomes the first company to link a consumer’s mobile app activity with a company’s CRM platform.

Open Garden is a San Francisco startup dedicated to bringing Internet to every device by sharing and crowdsourcing connectivity. By joining the Open Garden mesh network, you get faster Internet access, stronger coverage, and free mobile broadband. Since earning the Most Innovative Startup at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012, over 2.5 million people have installed the app.

NewAer, built as an SDK for Android, iPhone, OS X, and Windows, is a software-based proximity platform that works inside of other applications to make them environmentally aware. The platform for machine-to-machine discovery enables any smartphone application or API to be automated from the presence of radio signals received on a device.

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Special thanks to IBM and American Airlines for sponsoring the Innovation Showdown, which takes place on day two of MobileBeat 2013. You can check out the full program here. It’s packed with over 90 industry-leading speakers, high-level discussions, breakouts, exclusive announcements, and networking sessions. Make sure to register today. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting MobileBeat 2013: Ford; CloudOn as Platinum Partners; HasOffers, IBM, Intel, New Relic & Tapjoy as Gold Partners; App Annie, Fjord, Flurry, IDA Singapore, Kontagent, LifeStreet Media, MoPub, PayPal & RingCentral as Silver Partners; Factual, HelpShift, IDrive, Papaya Mobile, Shared2you, Toon Goggles, Urban Airship & Xplore Technologies as Event Partners; and Followapps as Contributing Partner.