The first is from FreshBooks, the number one online invoicing service. Many of FreshBooks’ customers are consultants, designers, lawyers or other professionals who bill by the hour, and FreshBooks provides them with lots of tools for tracking their time. But it’s very hard to keep track of your cell phone calls, especially when you are away from your desk. When the team at FreshBooks read about Skydeck’s APIs, they realized that they could help their customers track and recapture all that time automatically. You can find the FreshBooks/Skydeck mashup here. (more…)

My panel is entitled “Platforms, Monetization & Third Party Applications”, and includes speakers from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and the mobile application store GetJar. The full schedule is here, and you can register for the conference here.

When Mike Wells and I founded Skydeck, we were determined to work with investors who knew and understood the mobile market. Earlier this year we made a short list of VCs that we admired, and one of the names on that list was Craig Cooper at Saban Ventures.

Craig is one of those rare people who has been successful both as an entrepreneur and a VC. He co-founded Boost Mobile, one of the first MVNOs, and sold it to Nextel in 2003. He co-founded EBT Mobile Plc, the largest independent authorized retailer of mobile phones in China. As a venture partner at SoftBank and VantagePoint, he led series A rounds in mobile startups that we respect, including Thumbplay, YouMail, Nellymoser, and V-Enable. He recently formed Saban Ventures, the new venture capital arm of a well-known private investment fund called Saban Capital Group, and Skydeck is his first investment there.

Also joining our board following this round is Chip Austin. Chip is one of our angel investors and a co-founder and General Partner of i-Hatch Ventures, where he backed Thumbplay, m:metrics, WiderThan, and our first company, Vindigo.

Mike and I are delighted to welcome Craig and Chip to our board.

You can download the full press release here.

Last week I was invited to speak on a panel at Om Malik’s Mobilize conference. The topic was “What creates good mobile user experience?” and other speakers included Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku (now at Google), Jeff Taylor from the carrier “3″, and UX expert Rachel Hinman from AdaptivePath. Moderator Dylan Tweney from Wired wrote a great summary of the panel and you can watch the whole discussion at the Mobilize site. (That link doesn’t take you directly there; click “Thinking Experientially” in the column on the right of that page.)

My advice to the audience? Remember that in mobile there are lots of factors that are both outside your control and unreliable: the connection, the device, how your service is delivered and provisioned. If you want to create a superb user experience, you need to control every part of the process as Apple and RIM try to do, or you need to have complete confidence that the parts that you do not control work very well - which is why so many application developers are concentrating on the iPhone.

Can a startup emulate Apple or RIM? Yes, especially if it focuses on simple, single-purpose devices. Think of the Flip camcorder - not wireless, but mobile - or the new Peek email device, or even the original Blackberry.

Another approach is to build software and services for carriers and handset manufacturers to help them improve the user experience on their devices. Aricent is a very successful Valley startup that built the Celltop interface for Alltel, and Ontela makes cameraphones much easier to use.

Skydeck has so far dodged the problem of how to build great applications for your phone by building applications for the web that complement your phone. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the phone.)

What won’t work is building an application that has a gorgeous user interface, but that takes half an hour of work by a skilled technician to install on your user’s phone. Unfortunately, most mobile startups keep trying this approach.

The most interesting thing that I learned was how many more people are willing to experiment with applications on the iPhone compared to any other phone on the market. Skeptics like to point out that of the 3 billion mobile phones on earth, fewer than 10 million are iPhones; they account for only 2% of the phones in America. But Loopt CEO Sam Altman said that the iPhone already accounts for 25% of his users, even though his app is available on every Verizon, Sprint, and Boost phone. And Pandora CEO Tom Jordan claimed that more people downloaded his app for the iPhone in the first few days that the device was on sale than have tried Pandora on any other AT&T phone - and Pandora is pre-loaded on every other AT&T phone.

Skydeck is no longer restricted to Firefox either. You can use any browser running on Windows XP or Vista, in particular Internet Explorer. (Mac users still have to run Firefox for now. We hear the cries of Safari users and will get to you as soon as we can.)

We announced our public beta at last week’s MobileBeat 2008 conference, where Skydeck also won its first award: Boldest Idea.

Thanks to VentureBeat for organizing a great event, and thanks to the judges for recognizing that what we’re doing is very bold indeed. We want to help everyone in the world keep track of their phone calls, their text messages, and all the people that they call and text. As one of the judges pointed out, while lots of companies say they can help you to lower your phone bill, Skydeck wants to make every call more valuable - by making sure that you never forget a call, you know who you need to call back today, and you know who you really ought to call when you have time (hint: Mom).

And thank you - Skydeck beat more than 50 other companies to qualify for MobileBeat, because you voted for us.

As always, we wanted you to be first to know. Thanks again for your great feedback and support during this private beta. We’ll be announcing our public beta very soon!

Daily Data

You’ve told us that you love being able to see and sort your calls and text messages in Skydeck, but you’ve also asked us where are the calls you made yesterday, or last week? It’s our most requested feature.
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Of course, we like OCaml here, so we are pleased to announce the release of an OCaml binding to the API. You can find it on our developer downloads page.

As part of our API design we decided to use OAuth, so you can allow applications to access your data without giving away your Skydeck username and password. We are also pleased to announce the release of ooauth, an OCaml implementation of OAuth.

Ooauth implements both the consumer and service provider parts of OAuth (we use it in our server and in the API binding above), so you can use it to implement your own API or to consume the many APIs that use OAuth, such as the Google Data APIs. It is also available on the developer downloads page.

Skydeck is happy to say that we are a nominee for MobileBeat 2008: VentureBeat’s top mobile applications competition. Help us win!

If we get enough votes, we’ll be invited to speak at their upcoming conference on July 24, 2008.

VentureBeat is a top technology blog, and an appearance at their conference would give us a great opportunity to promote our service, bring more users to the site, and continue our mission of helping people get the most from their phone and phone bills.

Here’s what you need to do to vote for Skydeck:

1. Click here to register for a voting ID.

2. Once you’re signed up, click here to vote for Skydeck. Skydeck is listed under the “Infrastructure / Service Companies” section.

3. You get 5 votes, but you can only vote once every 24 hours. Please vote today and every day until June 24th, the cutoff.

Thanks for your support!

UPDATE: Skydeck has been selected to present at Mobilebeat! Thanks for your votes, we’re looking forward to the event.