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A pair of Babson College start-ups could make your life better. Fetchmob will let you go online to find someone in your neighborhood who can, say, pick up your medicines at the local pharmacy. Modapt will display web pages in a way that works for your mobile device.
Alisa Boguslavskaya and Chrisson Jno-Charles, Fetchmob's co-founders, worked together at hedge fund, D.E. Shaw. They got the idea for Fetchmob after a friend in North Carolina desperately needed someone to pick up some Tylenol at a local pharmacy but did not have a way to get there.
The pair developed a skeleton of the web site in May 2010 and launched it on the Babson campus in November 2010. It recruited about 13% of Babson’s on-campus population to test and refine the Fetchmob service.
Since the site went into private beta, Boguslavskaya and Jno-Charles have had requests from students from "more than 30 other colleges" to open Fetchmob to their schools. About 40% of Fetchmob users return every day.
Fetchmob has gotten useful user feedback. Boguslavskaya believes that Fetchmob is similar to all peer-to-peer services in that its users' two most prominent concerns were:
- How do I avoid creeps and dangerous people?
- Will this actually work (considering that there is no corporate guarantee behind it)?
These questions dominated Fetchmob's approach to developing the site. In so doing, the co-founders looked at the different ways that prominent sites have addressed these questions. According to Boguslavskaya, Craigslist does little. Users can report spam and flag deceitful posts, but that is the extent of it. Some companies pre-screen users and others rely simply on feedback.
Fetchmob does not believe any of these solutions in isolation will give users the confidence they need to "embrace peer-to-peer services." User feedback has "been extremely positive" to Fetchmob's still-stealth approach to this challenge.
Beyond that, Fetchmob received "really positive feedback about the user experience." Users tell Fetchmob that it is so easy, "their grandmother could use it." Also, most of Fetchmob is a direct result of candid user feedback and its "teasing out" their unspoken concerns (“when someone says X bothers them, what is she really saying?”).
Fetchmob now lets askers put a request for service out on the site to buy and deliver requested items for a fee. The site is designed to maximize the level of trust among both the askers and senders.
For now Fetchmob is "bootstrapped" and the co-founders are working on getting the system to serve the Babson community effectively before they start to think about geographic expansion.
Modapt
CEO Mark Lederhos told me in a May 10 interview, that he and Melbourne, Australia-based Joe Barber co-founded Modapt because when people visited web sites using a mobile device, the quality of the screen image was poor.
Lederhos and Barber saw this as a problem of navigation and ease of use, rather than screen resolution. Modapt recognized that mobile devices are likely to replace PCs as the web browser device of choice -- yet few websites are optimized for the mobile world therefore making their user experience a negative one.
Market growth estimates underscore this transition to mobile devices. According to ComScore, 109 million U.S. mobile subscribers (46.7% of the total audience) accessed mobile media (browsed, accessed applications or downloaded content or accessed the mobile Internet via SMS) in December 2010, up 7.6 percentage points from the year before.
However, this rapid growth does not mean that providers are doing a good job of giving mobile consumers a compelling web experience. Those mobile users are fickle and if they cannot access the page they are targeting or if it is hard to navigate, they quickly quit any browsing.
This is where Modapt comes in – allowing companies to "make a great first impression on any mobile device." To accomplish this, Modapt has a database of 19,000 mobile device profiles that convert images and other objects to the specific screen and interface specifications of each device, “on-the- fly.” Modapt's goal is to provide users with the "best possible experience."
Modapt launched in April 2011 and received seed capital from its co-founders along with hundreds of thousands of dollars of private equity from an Australian private equity firm that should give it an 18 month runway to sign up resellers who will develop the market for its service.
Fetchmob and Modapt both point the way towards interesting new businesses. Fetchmob needs to develop a compelling business model at the local level and expand it. Modapt will succeed as it adds enthusiastic resellers as partners.
