Comeks

by Robin Wauters on February 13, 2009

This was one of the weirdest incoming pitches I’ve received in a while. Finnish startup Comeks, which I’d never heard of before, contacts us to tout its product, a nifty application that lets you generate funny cartoons based on the pictures on your phone and enables you to push them out to social networking services, and then casually lets us know they’re up for sale.

I got in touch with co-founder and CEO Arto Viitanen, who told me the startup simply ran out of money, after raising €400,000 from Accel Partners about two years ago when the outlook for internet and mobile startups was way better than in the current economy. With the seed funding, the company produced a tool called Comecs Shorts, which lets you send visual SMS messages for the price of a normal SMS message.

Last week, they added to that service “Fun Photo Blogger”, a tool that lets you create funny cartoons with available artwork (speech bubbles, add-on stickers etc.) in combination with your own pictures, both on the web and from your mobile device (with the help of custom applications for J2ME, the iPhone and Android).

Comeks Introduces Avatars for Mobile Text Messaging

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by Erick Schonfeld on November 1, 2007

Avatars are becoming pretty standard on IM clients these days, so why not on mobile text messages as well? Finnish startup Comeks, which is backed by Accel Partners and works with Swisscom, recently launched a beta for Comeks Shorts. It turns your plain-text SMS messages into cute characters talking in comic balloons. Both parties have to have the software downloaded to their phone for this to work, otherwise it just comes out as a normal text message. But the spread of these sorts of avatars to mobile applications just seems inevitable (see Meez, which does the same thing for ring tones).