Pitch & Berggi on MoCoNews

Start-up Round-up: Pitch TV; Berggi

• Posted by James Pearce
• Sat 25 Nov 2006 06:20 PM

--UK company Pitch is launching a mobile entertainment community that offers “instant messaging, photo and video upload and sharing as well as access to an exciting new online community”. Pitch offers fr*ee ad-supported mobile content—videos, games, ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers—and this service will run alongside it, also fr*ee except for data charges. It’s the normal social site thing, where users create a mobile homepage (with a PitchTag), send messages to friends and groups and participate in group chats, and of course upload pictures and videos to share. “Texting the tag to the Pitch short code (for example ‘Yourname’ to 87000) delivers an instant hyperlink straight to a specific home page.”

--Reuters is reporting on Berggi, which offers a simplified e-mail service for mobile phones. Rather than go up against RIM and Microsoft the company is targeting the lower two-thirds of the handset market where the big guy’s service doesn’t work. The US service begins on thursday ($9.99 per month) and the Spanish service on friday (one euro for 10-20 e-mails), and the service is expected to launch in Britain, Italy, Mexico and Turkey in the first half of next year. The target customer is the private e-mail or small business user. “Ozden said initial U.S. distribution partners are Blinko USA, a unit of Italian mobile entertainment company Buongiorno S.p.A.., and the America One Television, a Western U.S. TV network gearing up to launch its own mobile service.” The Houston-based company received $3 million funding in April, let by Adara Venture Partners.