Zipipop, a new media start-up that develops web-based services for making everyday life easier, is going to Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco on the 3rd November. Zipipop was selected to present at the conference when it won Mobile 2.0 Europe.
Zipipop CEO Helene Auramo informed ArcticStartup that Zipipop is going to San Francisco to win Mobile 2.0, but that they are also looking forward of seeing many interesting people and are going to spend an extra one and a half weeks over in the US. We believe that the extra week and a half will be spent driving between venture capital firms looking for investors. (Previous story on the topic here)
Why we have reason to believe this is because Zipipop has gone public with its Advisory Board and one of the Board Members who has already unofficially worked for a long time with the company, Peter Vesterbacka, has been making arrangements for the company’s trip to US for weeks now. These arrangements have very likely included setting up those magical meetings with the venture capitalists.
On a related note the company has revealed that they have a new partner, Robert Aarts. Aarts worked previously as Director of Engineering at start-up Trustgenix which was acquired by HP at the end of 2005. Earlier on Robert was a Senior Architect for Nokia Web Services for seven year.
All this looks very much like the company is getting itself tidied up and presentable for the investors. All well, except that as we all know venture financing has dried up almost over night due to gloomy predictions and the general downturn in the global economy. Let’s hope that Zipipop can assure the wary investors that they have what it takes to make Zipipop’s flagship product, Zipiko, the next Twitter or at least a nice quick exit.
Zipiko is a SMS based social intention broadcasting application. I believe that Zipiko has potential since it is build from simple enough elements which potentially make it easy enough to use by anyone in the larger public, unlike many other web 2.0 services which just dazzle you. Having said that, when it comes to predicting success, how I go about it is by trying out something at least a couple of times and if after a while notice myself using it, even every now and then it can be a success at least for a niche. I don’t use Zipiko even after having tried it out a few times, which is a sign that it needs more work. Twisting the service and letting the users decide which variations work and which doesn’t might do just that, since the right elements are there.
Have you tried the service? What did you think?
