MobileBeat: Vaayoo’s Socialbox turns your phone into a social media dashboard

Vaayoo is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards.

Vaayoo provides a platform for application developers, web publishers and social networks to create and serve up new social and multimedia apps. Now its new SocialBox applications ties together everyone’s favorite social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and more to make it easy to share media and content via your phone.

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The company says its goal is to equip users with the tools they need to build their own mobile communities. The application allows you to view photo, video and startup updates from people in your network, ducking text messaging limits. It also lets you attach photos and videos to your tweets and Facebook status updates, viewable by others surfing on their phones.

“With a few clicks I can take a picture and send it to all my social networks and sharing apps,” says founder Ranjit Sawant. “Without an aggregation social app like this, the user would first have to take a picture with a camera app and then save it somewhere. Then she would need to open each email, MMS, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or other app she has downloaded, and then upload it to each of them separately.”

In all, SocialBox supports more than 15 modes of sharing on popular social apps, including email and voice service. You can access all of the content you share or store on SocialBox through Vaayoo.com. That way, if you lose or break your phone, all of this data is tucked away safely in the cloud.

Vaayoo operates on a freemium model. The SocialBox application is free for the first 25 pictures, videos or audio files you’ve uploaded. After that, you have to switch to a premium subscription, which costs $2.99 for unlimited uploads. It has already been downloaded by 40,000 users in the last three months.

Right now, the app is available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, but the company is launching for iPhone and Android before the end of July.

Vaayoo competes most directly with Snaptu, a service that can turn your favorite websites into speedy applications for your smartphone (and another contender in the MobileBeat Startup Competition). But it says it differentiates itself by allowing its users to record and share videos, pictures, audio files and more from their phones to their chosen social networks. Its sharing capabilities rival those of Ning, while its ability to store data across platforms is similar to MobileMe. But Sawant seems undaunted by the competition.

Vaayoo is currently being funded by its founders, but it is looking to raise it first round of external funding very soon, he says.