Mob4Hire update on BNetTV.com

Last spring, www.BNetTV.com interviewed Paul Poutanen at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas. This latest video at BNetTV studios updates the Mob4Hire story ... Stephen King speaks to Michelle Sklar at BNetTV: http://www.bnettv.com/player.php?id=1996

Mob4Hire starts Developer and Tester Community Survey

Hey:

Over the next few weeks, we'll be sending surveys to both our Developer and Tester communities.

As a mobile developer, how you test and what you need from Mob4Hire is very important to both your future testing success, as well as how we guide the development of our Mob4Hire community. Click here to take the developer survey.

As a tester, we want to make sure you can easily understand and execute test plans, and provide good results to the developers. And, of course, make sure you are paid appropriately for your time!

And, while helping shape the community that is changing the way mobile application developers test (making it less expensive and faster!) should be reward enough, there’s nothing like a couple contest prizes to give you a bit more incentive.

Details coming (and thanks in advance for your support!).

Trust in the Mob,

Stephen

Mob4Hire Appoints Stephen King as CEO

After a couple "sipping from the firehose" weeks in my new job as Mob4Hire CEO, we decided to start this blog, and what better way to start it than my official announcement as CEO of Mob4Hire.com. The press release hit the wire yesterday, and the auto-blogbots went to work and posted my announcement all around the place. This is my favorite:

http://www.physnews.com/comment.php?nid=5182

:)

Anyhoo, this blog is about Mob4Hire.com ... an online mobile application testing and market research community. Most of the team will be posting here over time about stuff that's going on. We took a bit of time to backdate some of the more important post's at the Mob, like our O2 contract. If you so desire, you can subscribe to the RSS feed on the right.

I'll exit this inaugural post with 5 words posted in my office to inspire my day:
Passion, Persistence, Performance, Purpose, Play.

Thanks for reading!

latah,

Stephen King
CEO, Mob4Hire.com

Mob4Hire highlighted in MotoDev's Fast Track

MotoDev is Motorolla's Developer Network, and we couldn't be more happy to be a partner with them in their Fast Track program.

Read about it here: http://developer.motorola.com/fasttrack/mob4hire/

And ... this is a good article from MotoDev's online magazine in November that explains who we are:

http://developer.motorola.com/fromfasttrack/November_08/

Mob4Hire wins Award at Under The Radar out of 400 competing companies

Calgary, Alberta, Canada—November 14, 2008—Mob4Hire Online Mobile Testing and Developer Community, today announced that it has won Under the Radar’s Audience Choice award for the "League of their Own" category at Dealmaker Media’s Under the Radar event held on November 12, 2008 in Mountain View, CA. Mob4Hire was named winner over other early stage companies based on its technology, market opportunity, and unique value proposition, by a panel of judges comprised of media; corporate development executives from leading mobile/wireless companies; VCs; and audience members.

Mob4Hire was handpicked by the Under the Radar editorial team and advisory board based on its review of over 400 companies in this space. A total of 33 companies presented at Under the Radar.

Participants hailed from Verizon, Motorola, QUALCOMM, Microsoft, CBS Interactive, T-Mobile, BlueRun Ventures, KPCB’s iFund, VentureBeat, AT&T and many other leading players in the industry.

“The standard of presentations was extremely high. These are the companies which are truly innovating and getting rapid traction in the enterprise space,” said Debbie Landa, CEO of Dealmaker Media “These emerging companies are the ones to watch and most likely to enjoy breakout success.”

Stephen King, CEO of Mob4Hire, says "Paul [Poutenan, President] and I both agree that the Under the Radar conference was run really well, and it was very valuable to us especially from a networking perspective. Getting the award was very cool ... we appreciate the recognition that our business is an innovative and unique way of solving a real big problem ... as corny as it sounds, we're gonna put it on our shelf."

Mob4Hire to Power O2 Litmus Crowd Sourced Application Testing and Market Research

We got quite a bit of mileage from our press release regarding our contract with O2 Litmus in the U.K. ... we're the testing community backbone of their new Developer Network. Read the press release.

Interestingly, the press release in conjunction with our trip to present at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco gave us our highest traffic day yet on the website. :)

Alberta Venture Magazine: Mob4Hire helps businesses sidestep the pain of mobile deployment

A great article explaining why Mob4Hire rocks! From Alberta Venture Magazine, October 2008 "The Next Wireless Wave."

"Here’s a quick look at what it takes to play in the world of mobile technology, via snapshots of four homegrown companies working to change the way the wandering world lives, works and spends.

Challenge one: make the mobile application work. It’s tougher than it sounds. Let’s say you code a nice little game of hangman and want to get it out to every hip on the planet. There’s not a carrier in the world that will let HangHip (patent pending) on their network unless the application has first been strenuously beta-tested – a mind-splitting process of testing and tweaking that every piece of commercial software must undergo before deployment.

Challenge two: there are more than 1,000 different mobile devices worldwide, two or three times that figure if you include regional model variations.

Think of Calgary-based Mob4hire as a beta-broker to the mobile world. Paul Poutanen, president and founder, explains Mob4hire’s technology as a “crowd-sourced mobile application-testing platform.” Basically, Mob4hire acts like an agency, collecting revenues to manage the delivery of beta-testing services provided by subcontractors. “You can’t really test code on one carrier’s network if you’re logged in on another, so you either have to send people there or find someone qualified who’s already in the right place to test,” says Poutanen. It’s a useful service offering to mobile applications developers because writing, compiling and deploying mobile code across a labyrinth of technology, regulations and grey-area market share ain’t easy, though Mob4hire is making it look that way. “We incorporated in September 2007,” says Poutanen. “Now, we have resources in 36 different countries and are working with eight major carriers.”

So, on the continuum of mobile applications commercialization, Mob4hire is building a home where it can help businesses sidestep the pain of mobile applications deployment."

Backbone Magazine Picks Mob4Hire to be one of Canada's top Web 2.0 companies

We placed #14 on the BackBone Magazine top 20 Web 2.0 firms, and the only one on the list in the Wireless industry!

http://www.backbonemag.com/Web2/default.asp

"A crowdsourcing site that came out of Cambrian House, Mob4Hire is a bidding system for mobile application testing. Testers bid on various projects and developers choose the testers they require.

Trgovac said she can “totally see the business value, as there is huge competitive advantage here both for the parent company as well as any application developer that uses them.” Both Moffitt — “It’s a great model if they can find customers and build enough testers” — and Geist — “It’s a cool idea that could take off as the mobile market grows” — are positive but are looking for numbers."

Sony Ericsson Interviews Paul

Sony Ericsson Developer World talked with Paul Poutanen, Mob4Hire's President and Founder: click here to read full article.

...and a little snippit from Paul ... "Where did the idea come from and what is the story behind Mob4Hire?"

"The idea for Mob4Hire began in 2005 when I was launching the first location-based game in North America. While the software development was going fine, I could not believe the hassle and the expense of testing the application on various networks and handsets. I had to fly to the US with a small team of developers and purchase handsets so they could test their application on a US network.

Initially we couldn't even buy the handsets and subscribe to the mobile service because we didn’t have a US address. Eventually the tests were completed successfully, but I realized testing was the most difficult and onerous component in the whole development process.

We were all exhausted, sitting in the airport waiting to board a flight home, when I saw a guy chatting on his cell phone. He was using a handset identical to one we had just purchased and tested on. It dawned on me that if I knew him I could have just sent him our application and have him quickly run the test for us. I'd be happy to pay him for his trouble and it would save me a load of time and money.

That was the light bulb moment. That's when Mob4hire was born.

I had experience with a crowd-sourcing company in Calgary that had a mandate to nurture business ideas using the power of the Internet "crowd". That's exactly what Mob4Hire does."

Cool ... we're on a German language site ... Mobile Zeitgeist

I thought this was interesting ... here's Mob4Hire being mentioned on a german wireless industry website, Mobile Zeitgeist:

http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/2008/05/13/crowdsourcing-plattform-mob4hire-enduser-testen-mobile-applikationen/

Die Entwicklung mobiler Applikationen für unterschiedliche Endgeräte

Paul video interview with BNETTV

In April whilst in Las Vegas for CTIA, Paul gave this video interview to BNETTV:

http://www.bnettv.com/player.php?actionLogin=fail&id=1406&title=Mob4Hire

A new and innovate look at this whole wireless industry