I’m not sure exactly what MOBshop (the company name is Cross-Platform Corp. but will likely change) co-founder Cyriac Roeding is up to, but he’s convinced some very serious people to invest time and money into his idea. And he has put together a killer core founding team.
The company has raised $2.5 million in an initial round of financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and entrepreneur/angel investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman also joined the board of directors of the company, and Kleiner actually added two board members: Matt Murphy and Aileen Lee. It’s rare for a fund to spend two partners’ time on a single investment. And Hoffman has said he rarely invests in startups any longer, let alone taking the time to sit on the board. Clearly, they think there is something under the hood at the secretive MOBshop.
But just what that something is, we don’t know. Roeding, a German-born entrepreneur and former EVP of CBS Mobile, most recently did a stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner. He will only say that the company will hit the intersection of mobile and physical worlds. That doesn’t really narrow things down much, but Roeding says that it’s still way too early to start talking about the product. They don’t even have a website up yet. Hoffman described the project to me as ” extraordinarily interesting” but wouldn’t go into any further detail at all. He’s not generally one to gush, so I assume he’s genuinely impressed.
Roeding has also put together a strong core team. His co-founder is Jeff Sellinger took over CBS Mobile after Roeding left to join Kleiner. He has also pulled senior people from Loopt (Evan Tana) and Six Apart (Aaron Emigh) to complete the team
One thing the company is being very vocal about is hiring. “Right now we’re looking for a small group of the Valley’s best and brightest developers for the iPhone, other smartphones, and backend systems,” Roeding says. Email resumes to makecontact@mobshop.net.
Hmm.. Very secretive. Its either gonna be a success or a total disaster.
wow…you really went out on a limb with your prediction.
Yes. LOL!!
http://www.tech...-on-the-iphone/
they are going to do what sekai is doing. see video at about 1:08 mark
Good guess, there is definitely a market in America for a product like Tonchidots. I remember seeing that demo a while back and thought it could work here as well
I doub it’s gonna be a failure. Those are highly prepared guys who dont play building startups. They are patient, they plan and they excel executing. Proof of that is the strong endorsement this guy has. It would be great to see more examples like this and less pseudo-genius drop outs that drive others to failure (dropping out too).
There was a company called mobshop back in the late 90s. Part of the short-lived “buyer aggregation” trend.
yes. it became accompany and raised quite a lot of money. not only have all the ideas gone, so have all the names…
it just got easier to hire a hit man online, yahoo!
Interesting… based on the name I wonder if MobShop will be like the Chinese team buying websites written about on TechCrunch a while back (see http://www.tech...-big-discounts/).
Something to do with augmented reality connecting to backend data sources or something I bet.
I agree, @zahidmalik.
AR is hot stuff right now and the right team with the right funding could make a strong move to help to define the space – making it that much easier for them to compete in it.
AR shops like LAYAR (@layar) are already generating tons of interest and the technological inevitability seems clear.
They are bringing together mobile hot shots and adding in a blogging platform leader.
And when you add in Roeding’s avatar/virtual world experience, I think it becomes highly likely that some type of AR platform is in the works.
Roeding has proved that he knows how to get people to use this kind of stuff. And that will be one of the biggest challenges to AR – convincing people to use it.
think layar augmented with roaming avatars identified when you click on your camera through their app + combine with commercial offers etc – imagine walking past a starbucks and see through your iPhone if they have a special deal just for you…. analytics out of this can be resold ++
Willing to bet it’s to do with product search. I believe this is pretty similar to something I am working on right now so a little worried if up against a team of this calibre.
hahah competition is good, it only validates that your idea since others will follow suite, plus there is always room to make your product niche in the long run
No wonder they got funding, they are from the future!
“Cross-Platform Corp. was founded in 2099″
Shopping? In groups. Collects pre-orders ( or any purchase, but pre-orders easiest) for popular products, allowing groups to purchase products at bulk discounts, without retailer markups. Could act as a radically discounted online store. Aggregates consumer demand pre-purchase.
I have no idea.
Likely not. They’re taking people from Loopt and Six Apart, and Cyriac did mobile and online ventures before. Going mobile.
Not that my prediction’s that precise, either.
My guess its a way for mobile users to purchase items in the real world by some sort of image recognition.
@James there’s a company in Santa Monica that’s got some pretty advanced image recognition software for mobile phones. Send me a tweet if interested In a contact.
I wonder if they picked “MobShop” because it was such a spectacularly bad name from the first boom.
I remember it was first called “Accompany”, which has obvious issues (Q: Where do you work? A: Accompany), but then when they changed their name to “MobShop”, it was almost worse. Ironic naming FTW!
Yeah, seeing this name from 2000 is weird… Mercata, LetsBuyIt, MobShop.
http://www.nyti...r-business.html
website name tells it all…why is this secret?
So tired of lame stealth startups, don’t care what “killer team” they have or how much money. Put or shut up.
@Hauser: Yeah, I’m with you on this one.
MOBshop’s vision is huge. My search firm, ReedShay and Co, is retained for the CTO search, Reach out to me if you want details, robin@reedshay.com
Major red flag: a stealth startup retaining a firm to source a CTO?
could you elaborate?
whts secret in it yaar…………
My guess based totally on the name is that they will be a collaborative design company producing limited runs of physical objects.
Imagine a community designed thing (table, lamp, vase) produced on a small scale and sold to its designers and the rest of the online community.
Just an uneducated guess.
Sounds like they are about to make alot of money
So interesting noone will understand it.
http://AppUseful.com
Actually, probably Mobile Shop. MobShop sounds a lot better, and mobile shopping sounds much more fundable.
Mobile stores are pretty ideal. Huge opportunity.
Agree.
i second that!
There is no such thing as “stealth startup”.
In the old days people create a product first before they start a business. Nothing new here. You start a company to hire people to create the product.
Why would they be dumb enough to sign up for 2 KP board members for a measly $2.5 million investment. Reid is awesome, so nothing wrong there, but Matt and Aileen? Come on…
Only 2.5 million in the first round? I want just 1 million …
Well I am sure that MobShop will be a surprise
“MobShop Inc., one of a handful of companies offering group buying on the Internet, is closing its consumer operations, on the heels of the recent announcement that its chief competitor, Mercata Inc., was going out of business”
It’d be nice if I could get some serious investors to invest a couple million in my recently released website! http://www.bfn.im.
Ahh well… This could get interesting!
MOPshop+Android+Google OS=?
Interesting that Matt Murphy is on the board of this new company and has brought along Evan Tana of Loopt. He sits on the board of the parent company for Whrrl, one of the most heavily invested iPhone startups in the same space that has gone pretty much nowhere. Wonder what this move signifies.
mobshop = mobile shopping i guess. Physical+digital > a service that let people buy online the same products they find offline? hence need for iphone advanced camera and OCR?
in any case they will need a different URL http://www.mobshop.com/
Sounds like augmented reality to me.. there is definitely going to be money poured into this area.
Given the name is supposed to be changing, I woudn’t read too much in a company name – the company probably started in one direction and has now shifted in another.
Twitter wasnt always called Twitter..
Maybe they will go from mobshop to mbshp as twitter went from twttr to twitter.
c-b325e555:~ jacob$ whois mbshp.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
…
No match for “MBSHP.COM”.
>>> Last update of whois database: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:04:51 UTC <<<
MobShop meanings Mobile Shopping. Just another attempt at a mobile payments platform.
Agree with Michael valera , I guess on a mobile app that enable bar code / 2D code recognition and offers a shopping experience right on the phone.
But shop in the real world, instead of online. Coz real world market is just 10x bigger than the online one.
Shop in the bus and just pick up your materials at the store.
Scan a product in a store, get reviews & decide to buy on site. Or get a coupon to help you take you buying decision on site and right now
Follow consumers through their capture scans and finally know the real consumer behaviors in a store…
what’s with all this super stealth? blue rover labs http://bit.ly/lwpBi
Maybe Roeding goes back to the roots?
His former German company, 12snap, was founded in Munich during the Dotcom bubble as “Ebay for cellphones”. Shopping offers and auctions came in as SMS broadcast.
But soon it morphed into a mobile marketing agency for companies like Coca Cola. Probably because nobody understood the original concept. 12snap’s ads in Berlin’s public transport said in 2000: “You are sitting in a shopping cart”.
Unfortunately, I never got a valuable shopping offer.
hmm…. its becoming more apparent that i cant keep sitting on my arse.
With Kleiner Perkins involved, those plans cannot be highly secret anymore…
There was an interesting company a few years back, pre-iphone, that would put coupon codes in street/magazine advertisements and allow you to redeem the discounted product from their WAP site. Or maybe it was done via txting… They didn’t last too long.
@William Kasel – is it numb already ?
Don’t like the name and the fact they are getting free publicity -:)
OH YEA, cause CBS was/is so cutting edge. The work they did no mobile for Idol – oh wait, that was Fox. No, the money they made on deal or no deal mobile – oh wait, that was NBC. When Dancing with the Stars gave the viewer of a choice over mobile – oh wait, that was ABC.
These two are hacks. Anyone want to bet me that they make it big? 20 to one. Any takers?
It’s a big market in America for this type of product. We need to test that.