“About eight out of ten of the most-used apps on mobile devices are communications apps. But not a single one of those is designed for kids,” said Ben, a graduate of the UK’s Imperial College Business School.
“That’s what we’re trying to do at Caribu – build a communication app for kids.”
The business, based in London’s Whitechapel, racked up 1,000 downloads within a week of launching and is backed by Microsoft Ventures. The company was founded by Ben and fellow Imperial alumni Philip Linnemann, Alvaro Sabido and Si Dhanak.
Caribu has already collected a bevy of awards, breaking into best-app-lists in The Sun and the Daily Mail.
Ben utilizes the expertise of 11 other start-ups at the accelerator, and Microsoft’s extensive contact book. The team will join another incubator, The Bakery, in a few months’ time. The next step is to become the best product development start-up in London.
“We get parents and grandparents randomly emailing us,” said Ben. “When our users like us, they love us.”
Mobile apps present start-ups and MBA entrepreneurs with the opportunity to push their ideas into a fast-growth market. Technology is a popular graduate career path and the sky is seemingly the limit in the mobile business.
Some successful companies began testing their ideas at business school before growing into hugely popular operations. “IE [Business School] opened a lot of doors,” said Euclides Major, who set-up MYGON with two co-founders. “You also develop a lot of skills and once you enter start-up life, you can leverage [them] and apply them in real-life.”
He graduated from the school’s MBA program in 2010. Today, the mobile deals business has more than 150,000 users. Euclides raised €550,000 in a seed-round of funding. The company now has eight employees, plus the co-founders.
MYGON operates in Portugal but Euclides plans to expand. He utilized his MBA alumni network to map-out a European strategy and has begun talks with Spanish investors. “And the IE network allowed me to contact and approach them,” he said.
Euclides draws inspiration from Groupon, the discount deals provider, and mobile technology has been crucial in his start-up’s success. “We tried to take the best parts [of the discount concept] in terms of daily deals together with mobile technology,” he said.
“So we built a platform which is a very convenient way for users to book any type of service, and for merchants to build a local, real-time deals platform.”
As managing director of Bibya Digital, a consulting firm which specializes in digital strategy, Yann Motte has seen first-hand the rise of mobile in business. He joined the firm from a media company within the NextRadioTV group, the listed French media corporation, where he was a deputy managing director. The firm’s associated members include news publishers Le Monde and Liberation.
“Many websites now see their actual usage, in terms of pages views and time spent, decrease in absolute value,” said Yann. “If this is not compensated by mobile usage that means their presence on the net is actually decreasing.”
“Smartphones are the interactive multi-media mice that people are going to use, to browse 3D-physical websites that we still call 'shops’,” he added.
Yann points to big companies such as Starbucks and Uber, the innovative taxi app, which are making mobile more mainstream. “It won't be long before most products in shops have QR codes or short text links allowing you to get more information or even talk to a sales assistant,” he added.
Research group eMarketer predicts that in the US time spent on mobile activities will surpass time spent online on desktop and laptop computers. Adults in the US will spend 43% of their overall media time on digital platforms this year.
Time spent on mobile phones and tablets – excluding voice calls – has almost tripled since 2011. “The shift from desktop to mobile, whether smartphone or tablet, is happening across a variety of activities, including social networking and digital video viewing – and tablets are key to the trend,” the report said.
When he graduated from AGSM’s MBA program in Sydney two years ago, Matthew Barnett wasted no time in launching Vimily. The mobile app enables users to create questions, film an interview and upload it to the web before sharing on social media.
Both Matthew and Katrin Suess, his co-founder, invested a combined $60,000 in the company. They have since raised an additional $230,000 from angel investors. Matthew credits the school’s location for much of Vimily’s success. “That’s where the opportunity will be in the next 20 years,” he said.
“It’s also a gateway into South East Asia. You can get big brands on board that would be hard to get otherwise…. surprisingly, it [Australia] has better connections with Silicon Valley than the UK,” he added.
Ashuveen Bhadal thinks there is plenty of opportunity for MBAs to make their mark in mobile. Drinqsmart, which she co-founded a year ago with Lukas Linsbichler, uses geo-location technology to offer a way for users to meet for drinks with friends and take advantage of venue promotions in London.
Ashuveen and Lukas studied EMBAs at Cass Business School and the business has swelled to seven employees. Drinqsmart will launch next month and the co-founders hope to net 25 venues by the end of May.
“We saw a lot of opportunity in the mobile market. The website trend was quite a few years back and we saw that apps are really starting to take off,” said Ashuveen, who graduated from Cass’s EMBA program in 2013.
Ashuveen thinks mobile is the only industry in which you can launch a start-up with very little capital. About £35,000 in private funding was invested in Drinqsmart. “It is the only industry where you can start a business from virtually nothing and get huge returns,” she said. “Other businesses… require a large upfront investment.”
Strategy was her biggest takeaway from business school. But Ashuveen says an MBA program can give you more. “Anyone doing an MBA [can] really make use of all of those skills and learn how to do something from nothing,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity to start a business with a lot of potential to grow.”
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