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March 30, 2006
Startup addresses vagaries of publishing docs on mobiles
We heard about a Finnish startup, Max Rumpus, this week from its Swiss seed round backer. It is the company behind Maxdox a software application used to publish documents on mobilephones. It looks like a product for an unmet need in the wireless market.
HP uses MaxDox to produce pint-sized documents for the mobilephone platform.
MaxDox screenshot with its functionality featured (Click image to enlarge)
It's offering a consumer and a business version of the application. The consumer, or personal version, is free to download.
Max Rumpus was founded in 2001, by Stephen Lee, who now heads up marketing, and Mika Huhtamäki, currently the firm's CTO, both of whom previously had gigs at Wapit! The firm's CEO, Tero Kalsta, worked for Jippii, a mobile content developer, whose European business was acquired by the UK's iTouch in 2004 for up to €30M.
The Leningrad Cowboys' hairdos are as pointy as their shoes
Wapit! you may recall was one of the stars of the hype that surrounded the launch of the Wireless Application Protocol (aka WAP). It was VC-backed and got a lot of press attention -- mainly because its flamboyant PR exec, Mato Valtonen, was a member of the gimmicky Leningrad Cowboys -- but because WAP was crap (for mobile Internet access), its business ultimately flopped.
Max Rumpus has financed software development, its first product was a mobile messaging alert program, targeted at businesses, by providing consulting services. It then launched in 2003 the first version of Maxdox, and brought in seed investors.
In January it raised an undisclosed amount in a first round of venture capital, led by Innofinance, a Finnish VC, after being backed by seed investors prior to that. Today it is focused purely on developing the Maxdox Mobile Publisher software business.
If things go right for this startup, it could do for the mobilephone what Adobe and its free readers do for PDF documents on the desktop. If that doesn't happen then it has a chance to develop a smaller sized business making its software availalbe to brand marketing agencies as part of a set of tools that would enable publishing to the mobilephone platform.
Read - Innofinance assists Max Rumpus to strengthen its sales
Posted on March 30, 2006 07:19 AM | Posted to Advertising | Business software | Venture Capital | Wireless | Permalink
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