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The boys at Mobile Monday Toronto are hosting their second annual VC picth day for Mobile Monday on March 10th. By all accounts the last pitch event was a big success.


The (impressive list of) panelists this year will be:

• Ted Anderson, Managing General Partner, Ventures West
• Steven Bloom, CFO BrightSpark
• Marc Faucher, Principal, Summerhill Venture Partners (formerly BCE Capital)
• Martin Doane, Founding Partner, Ubequity Capital Partners
• Moderator – Peter Evans, Advisor, MaRS Venture Group

If you are an entrepreneur, there is still time to get your submission in, the deadline is Feb 29th. For everyone else planning to come out, WirelessNorth will see you there, at the Fort York Armoury on the 10th. Should be great.

Click here for all the info at the momotoronto site.

Last night was the latest installment of MobileMonday in Toronto hosted at the remarkably Tolkeinesque headquarters of Dunedain Multimedia (there were swords). I’d estimate about 60-70 people made it out, for everyone else, here’s our notes courtesy of your faithful scribes at WirelessNorth:

UrbanScavengerHunt

Kevin Keiller’s UrbanScavengerHunt.com is a product that does pretty much what it says on the can. They do scavenger hunts. The mobile component lets users/contestants use sms to get clues and text in when they have found or reached objectives.Kevin is looking for Brand/charitable/corporate clients to run a pilot event or two before opening up the platform in the spring to let the public organize their own “amazing races” or competitive pub crawls say. What’s not to like about pub crawls?

Intergig

It’s not often you meet someone who’s two passions are scrap metal and domain registration. Chris Boddy ( Intergig) runs an industrial recycling business by day and manages a few thousand .mobi and other domains. Crazy? Possibly like a fox?His message was that anyone can get in to mobile. If you are a webdeveloper, you are a mobile developer already, even if you didn’t know it is what he’ll tell you.

Xtreme Mobility Inc.

Next was Simon Law, someone who is cashing-in so to speak on mobile. Xtreme Mobility Inc. “designs and delivers secure wireless transaction software solutions for the consumer finance and payment processing industry sectors.” If you’ll forgive the payments industry jargon, they’re powering a pilot to let university students topup closed-loop prepaid accounts over the mobile. And they also have a toe in person to person mobile money transfers as well.Simon says they got their start through development work at UofWaterloo into mobile encryption and security – which is an awfully clever way to start any story about new and novel payment systems (Because you can always imagine what everybody’s first question is…). Anyway best of luck to Simon and Xtreme Mobility is a company to keep an eye on.

Jambo Mobile

Derek Colfer gave us the low down on Jambo Mobile . Jambo is probably what a lot of would-be mobile developers and marketers have been looking for. Rather than building direct to consumer apps themselves, what they offer are the lego bricks like sms tools, connections to the carriers, multi-handset compatible bits that let everyone (chiefly their clients) build mobile apps, campaigns, what have you. Sounds neat.

AdictiveMobility

Nussar Ahmad and solves what Alber Lai (in a serendipitous post yesterday that you should check out) the “personal mobile media syncing problem”. They make a facebook mobile client app that runs natively on (soon) many handsets. The advantage of this is they can 1) let users upload photos and notes etc. to facebook with a single click 2) not just connect to FB, but any network with an API (now MySpace, Orkut and OpenSocial too) –cool.[Incidentally] Adictive also neatly solves certain uncomfortable/unforeseen problems faced by their antecedents in the social/mobile photo-sharing space like the former Nakama.ca. Namely the issue that if the kids can take pictures of their own butt (or worse) and instantly send it to all their friends… guess what they are inclined to do. Clearly, with Adictive’s solution, this potentiality is Facebook’s problem istead. Clever.

Oh, and one could also mention something about… that by working with their user’s existing social networks instead of trying to re-create that wheel, AddictiveMobility gains a few other advantages such as instant access to huge economies of scale, network effects, viral growth possibilities etc. etc.

General Fuzzy Feelings

All in all some good content at Mobile Monday this month. Things are happening after all in the wireless north, and there is a pent-up entrepreneurial energy and ideas just waiting for day open access comes to the Canadian airwaves (another theme heard widely around the room last night).

Things we liked about the MomoCamp format: short, concise demos. Good quality demos. Great networking opportunity and the chance to meet industry folks. The psuedo-competitive aspect and getting to vote on the fight club “winner” (Nussar) btw. Free beer.

Things we’d liked see more of: A little more “campy” e.g. with open formats proposing talks and for registration. A few minutes for questions after each presenter (sometimes that’s when you learn the most).

Thanks to Jim and Alex and Dunedain Multimedia for making the event happen!