Mogility: Mobile Social Networks for the Common Good

Recently I had the pleasure of getting together with Jothy Rosenberg (nope, not a relative), a legend himself, and Chairman and CTO of Mogility.

The product, LocalEyes™ is a compelling new take on community generated mobile alerts on public safety events. " It helps to build mobile social networks for the common good". After Katrina and other horrific recent events, this is becoming very relevant:

"The key is a simple applet called a Gizmo™ that is downloaded and run on a mobile phone. Mogility's patent-pending agile mobile application framework makes it easy for anyone to create, modify, and deploy Gizmos. Gizmos are transmitted over standard data plans or as SMS text messages making them work broadly across handsets and carriers."

The key message here is that everyone can report an event that would be relevant to their surrounding, and that message would immediately be shared across many mobile users using ubiquitous distribution mechanisms.

In terms of go-to market, seems like the first customer is the City of Annapolis. When considering technologies, cities are well positioned in that they can easily deploy masses of Nextel devices to their police/fire/... departments. Also if Mogility went to the enterprise department of any carrier, they would love to drive handset and account sales through this application. But that, IMO, is where the buck stops in the US, for now. reaching the mass public will require approval from operators, especially the CDMA ones, and mass effort in fitting the application on every handset.
Beyond that I think Mogility will do well overseas. Where handsets and networks are open. And there are, sadly, enough countries where the need for such applications is real.

Check out the video below; Jothy gives good coverage of the company, market and product. Good luck guys.