MobileBeat Startup Competition: Infrastructure and services companies go head-to-head

The MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition, sponsored by Palm, recommenced this afternoon with the introduction of five infrastructure and services companies striving to improve the architecture underpinning our mobile systems. Two winners at the end of the day — selected from a field of 20 consumer apps and infrastructure services — will receive prestigious Tesla Awards.

The panel of judges for the afternoon portion of today’s contest includes Peter Barry, head of venture capital and startups for Vodafone; Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield Fund; Shai Goldman, director of SVB Accelerator for Silicon Valley Bank; and Brook Wessel of T-Mobile Ventures.

The judges are evaluating the startups based on three factors: presentation, innovation, and market opportunity. This first group of infrastructure and services startups presenting today includes:

Anyfi Networks: The startup is in the process of patenting technology that turns broadband network operators’ spare capacity into mobile broadband. Considering how limited mobile network capacity has become, this could be a major development.

Judge response: “I think any business that helps an operator offload network congestion is going to be helpful for the ecosystem, and it looks like you’ve found a way to do that,” Wessel said to Anyfi Founder Bjorn Smedman.

Call Loop: The company offers a web-based service that helps marketers launch multi-media, multi-modality campaigns from a single dashboard. For example, a marketer could set up one campaign that would sync with all of their autoresponder services like MailChimp and Constant Contact, pushing messages out via email, text, and voice simultaneously, and easily capturing new leads.

Judge response: “The use case Call Loop is addressing is interesting, but it’s unclear what the differentiation is,” said Chaddha. “Clearly you guys have a beautiful demo, but there’s going to be a lot of competition from existing providers. We should catch up offline and look at the barriers to entry here.”

Micello: The company describes itself as Google Maps for the interior of buildings like airports, shopping malls, universities and more. Micello can also tie its maps into marketing apps and events apps. One of the first startups to address this problem, it has already mapped 1,000 locations and it’s constantly adding more. (Founder Ankit Agarwali is pictured above.)

Judge response: “I think this is a very interesting proposition and I think users will like it if they can find it,” said Barry. “What I worry about is how well do you have to have your location on the map before the service becomes useful? If users can’t get directions to what they are looking for, it might constrain their experience … I have heard of one or two people doing similar things but not to this degree.”

AFK Interactive: The company provides what it calls its M4 Platform, which allows gamers to stay connected to their massively multi-player online games (like World of Warcraft), virtual worlds (like Second Life), and social games (like Zynga’s Farmville), when they are away from their computers through their mobile phones, giving them access to key game features no matter where they are.

Judge response: “Mobile gaming is a hot area: We saw Tapulous get bought by Disney, and you have companies like Ngmoco and Aurora Feint in the mix — so on a macro level this is a hot area,” said Goldman. “I need to know more, but so far so good.”

Locomatix: The startup develops a suite of location-aware applications. It allows users to create groups, like family or friends, and then be notified when they are in your area. Its mobile promotion management service also lets businesses use a custom app that targets customers based on their location relative to a store that has promotional or coupon offers.

Judge response: “T-Mobile Ventures isn’t looking at location-based services at this time because there’s a lot of noise and it’s such a loud market, I’m really neutral on the space,” said Wessel.

“There’s more money to be made in mobile infrastructure than consumer-facing applications,” Goldman said to cap off the session.

“I think in the next five to ten years, you’re going to find many exciting opportunities to be investing in these areas,” Chaddha agreed.

As emcee and VentureBeat Executive Editor Owen Thomas noted, the stakes are pretty high in the MobileBeat Startup Competition. The exposure of winning has successfully propelled previous recipients to the top of their fields.

In 2008, the winner of best overall infrastructure was AdMob, which went on to sell to search giant Google for $750 million less that two years later. And both of last year’s winners, Aloqa and IQ Engines are raising funding and gaining significant traction.