Conveneer, a Swedish mobile startup with offices in Lund, Sweden and Palo Alto, California, closed a $4.5 million venture round, led by the Swedish foundation Industrifonden. Broken Arrow Venture Capital also participated. The company previously raised seed money from the founders and Teknoseed.
Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.
That is a powerful idea. How well it works in practice, and on which handsets remains to be seen. The company is talking to both handset manufacturers and mobile carriers to embed the service in new phones. Carriers could strengthen their mobile Web offerings by giving customers their own mobile URL. The business model is selling and maintaining these mobile domains, which can provide a Web interface to a mobile phone. This is the type of premium service for which carriers would charge extra.
The company’s goal is to launch Mikz sometime this year.
I can’t come up with a single positive for this.
You will never loose your contacts again. You will never need to backup your mobile data again. You will never need to enter all your contacts manually may you loose your phone and get a new one. When you think of that text you sent x months ago, you could run a query and find the info. Oh, that gal/guy you met and lost her number, you can easily find it again. You can synh Facebook, Gmail and mobile contacts now……………….
iPhone already does/will do this for me, and it doesn’t create a webserver on my cellphone for someone to break into.
Go back to dreaming about having you own lemonade stand and let the big boys focus on the things you don’t understand.
Any use case for this?
I am worried that it extends out of safety questions.
How did these guys get funding? There are several open source projects that already do this.
http://code.goo...ocoahttpserver/
http://www.lighttpd.net/
http://code.goo...wiki/TouchHTTPD
Lots of mobile phone applications already do this? It not very hard to write your own server.
Here is a typical mobile phone app that implements a server http://www.sant...sicTrainer.html
Yep, not unique to run a webserver on a phone. Secret seems to be the way the URL for the phone is always glued to the phone regardless of which IP its sitting on, no need to write any code or use any special SW to connect to the phone
That sounds like dynamic DNS. That’s been around for a long time too…
This uses lighttpd
http://www.sant...sicTrainer.html is clever iPhone app. Its a music app for guitarist. It lets you slow down a song with out changing the pitch. Apple does not allow iPhone applications to access music files loaded into the iPod. This app uses a web server to allow user to import audio files they want to work with.
Do I really want this? Then again maybe that is a way to get in touch with my stolen mobile phone!
Nice idea, but what’s the uplink bitrate on your average GSM data connection?
Brilliant idea but a lot of question remained.
Taking away issues on privacy, security, and draining your battery let’s think of positive uses of this.
I guess you could have a simple webservice running to accept requests for your location
http://555.222....433.att.com/gps
To allow yourself to access your address book and modify it, it’d be useful when you forget your cellphone somewhere…
Broadcast video…
Have public folders with images and files on your phone..
I think it’ll depend on how powerful phones will be, how much you’ll be willing to serve, but its an interesting idea. Basically you gotta think a few years from now, and imagine, what would happen if datacenters could be mobile. If we’d all be assigned with IPs, and enough bandwidth (for that matter) maybe we could run personal sites from our phone, or even p2p based services out of many many phones.
Running a webserver on mobile phone is going to be a pretty expensive solution in terms of battery consumption. There are better ways of doing this:
- Invoking an agent app on the phone through binary sms and letting that app do all the stuff – extracting client data(after ofcourse privacy checks) and sending that data to a centralized server.
As our phones become more synced with a web interface of some kind (MobileMe? Facebook in the future? etc.), wouldn’t you be able to grab everything from the services we use to sync our phones?
http://joe.mikz.me gives a 404 error, service is trying hard not to impress
It said its going to launch next year and the URL was an example. Not suprised its not working yet :p
http://twitter....om/ollieparsley
you would thing they would offer a domain that makz sense and users would use.
ServeLocator.com – give yourself
Oh, there you are.
DoucheBagLocator.com
i agree with ankit’s question: phones are already connected to the web. i have no tech. knowledge to evaluate which kind of connection would be better, but it would be very nice if mikza would enable any developer – no matter what size, connections, funding or other – to get access to user data and create meanifull functionality. i hope the “personal data access thing” won’t be in the hands of a few.
Nokia has a product already like this for Symbian S60 devices..I think it is in Beta.
http://mymobilesite.net/
I’ve never heard about that, cell to server. But, who knows? maybe it works
)
Cool idea, and as always with such ideas the real potential will be revealed when communities of developers will start to build apps and services on top of it.
Two important observations, though:
1. Keeping the “mobile web server” open and available for all will consume the 3G data plan quite rapidly – and the more popular your phone’s content becomes, the faster you’ll go broke… so this must be coupled with a simple way to keep your phone connected to Wi-Fi as much of the time as possible
2. Setting up an HTTP server on your phone is like flashing a big green light for Trojan horses and worms… all the bad-ware stuff that attacked web sites a decade ago will now have a new playground. So it must come with decent security.
*Yawns*
http://gizmodo....apps-282139.php
How can you not see how this could be useful? Did we not see a Zyb acquisiton to the tune of €30 milion by Vodafone? I think this is a great idea, especially if they hook the carriers and manufacturers. Obviously, people have to remember that they don’t really launch until next year…
If this crisis though us something, it should be that acquisition doesn’t mean usefulness.
>How can you not see how this could be useful?
You fail to give any single use case.
PS. I’m not saying it’s not useful. But your arguments don’t show how it’s useful either.
Let the hacking begin.
Sweden, make meatballs not startups.
This is HUGE if they can pull it off technically… combine the url address with gps and you get most useful services from the pocket computer (or mobile phone).
Yes!
1) I subscribe to your phone.
2) I check your GPS coordinates.
3) When you’re out I steal your TV
4) and your wifes jewellery
5) Profit!
You failed to mention the founder is Orjan Johansenn, who came up with the concept for BlueTooth. Also, he showed me how it worked on his Nokia N95, it was pretty sweet.
This can provide developers an easy mechanism to push message/command to a mobile phone. SMS can push a message as well, but I don’t know if I can easily trigger a function upon received SMS message.
On the other hand, I don’t see why I want to store data on my limited storage phone to serve other people. Is that something the high capacity servers supposed to do?
1 step closer to making users (takers) into servers (givers). It would be great if it worked.
Why all the fussin’ and fightin’? Just because you can’t imagine a use-case today does not mean one doesn’t exist. Just the opposite: give users options and the use-cases will find the product.
Besides, haven’t we learned anything from the user-generated content model? Turning users (takers) into givers (servers) is a no-brainer.
Sweet concept. As processing power continues to increase and costs decline, who knows what’s possible. It wasn’t 12 years ago that people were using car phones and now our smartphones are more capable than that age’s PC’s. I’ll keep up to date on the related security issues here.
Wonderful idea, When you think of that text you sent x months ago, you could run a query and find the info.