Last week I visited The Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam. It was a truly inspiring conference with speakers that showed great vision regarding the future of the web. Besides great speakers, the conference allowed twenty-four start-ups to show their five-minute pitch to the crowd. Among them were five start-ups operating in the mobile area. Some of them looked really promising, here you will find a short review of all of them.

Goojet: you had no idea your phone could do this

France based start-up Goojet offers a mobile widget application that looks really neat. Based on what I’ve seen in their pitch presentation and on their website the navigation seems easy. By the way, a Goojet is how they call the little widgetlike squares out of which the Goojet desktop is made up. Goojet uses the same interface for mobile devices as they do on their website, which makes it easy to understand. Another plus is that it’s a Java based application so it will work on almost all mobile devices. Goojet allows you to import things like RSS-feeds, a weather channel, Flickr-photo’s, a microblog application, polls, your resumé and notes. Besides these functions Goojet also has it’s own community where Goojeters can send each other messages and Goojets they made by themselves. The whole mobile widget system of Goojet seems pretty good, but I’m getting really tired of yet another community. How much communities can a person handle? I’m already having trouble keeping my Facebook up to date…Goojet is still in private beta now, you can sign up here.

eBuddy: web and mobile messaging, for everyone everywhere

Actually you can’t call eBuddy a start-up anymore. Firstly, they are way past the starting point, they’ve been around for a while now. But secondly, they already received VC funding twice! In October 2006 eBuddy received five million euro and recently they added another 6,5 million euro to their company. eBuddy originally is a web-based instant messaging application, but recently eBuddy launched a mobile IM-application, which works pretty good. That’s probably why they were among the start-ups. eBuddy’s philosophy is “keep it simple, stupid”, and yes, it is simple, even boring if you ask me. I used Fring before, which also integrated Skype. I liked that one more. But keeping it simple works out very well for eBuddy, worldwide eBuddy is used by 12 million users on the web and 1,6 million on mobile.

WauwWee: life from a mobile phone

WauwWee is a new product of Wauw.fm. WauwWee allows you to use your phone for blogging and social networking. With WauwWee you can send messages, photos and videos from your phone your blog or social network. The online version of WauwWee is a simple widget with an IM-like interface. WauwWee doesn’t use a mobile application but works directly from your mobile browser, which makes it considerably slower. A mobile application would also allow WauwWee to use smoother graphics and a better interface. Nevertheless, WauwWee is quite useful for fanatic social networkers that want to be able to post new content to their social network from anywhere and at anytime. For bloggers WauwWee is less suitable, because even as a mobile fanatic I don’t see myself blogging from my Nokia-keypad. Moreover, it won’t work, because WauwWee lacks Wordpress support.

Locle: will offer location based advertising

Dublin based Locle provides a new step towards the killer app in the area of location based services. Locle uses the Cell ID to trace your location and then provides you with information about the location of your Facebook, Bebo or MySpace friends. While still in closed beta, Locle offers a Java application, as well as a Symbian and Windows Mobile application. In the future Locle will offer long-awaited location based ads among lots of other stuff. Nevertheless, I have my doubts about the precision of determining location by Cell ID. Hyves, the biggest Dutch social network, offers a microblog functionality that determines location data by Cell ID and this doesn’t seem to work very precise. Maybe we’ll just have to wait until all phones are enhanced with GPS. However, more antennas will improve the precision of the Cell ID method. Don’t bother to visit the Locle website, you will be confronted with a logo and “we’re in closed beta”.

Soocial: No Hassle!

The Dutch start-up Soocial is by far the best mobile start-up I’ve seen at the Next Web Conference. Not only because their presentation was simply brilliant, but Soocial offers a no nonsense application. It only does one thing: synchronizing. Soocial syncs your adress book with your phone, computer, Gmail, Highrise and even allows API access. In a hassle-free way by using your mobile data connection. Soon Soocial will also offer syncing with Outlook. The funniest thing about the pitch presentation of Soocial is that they use David Hasselhoff as their PR-guy. Wonder how? See the short movie below:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

Also don’t forget to check the articles of the four start-up rounds that Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in-chief at TheNextWeb.org, wrote during the conference.

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