Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is leading a $2m Series A round in biNu, an Australian start-up which works in an increasingly crowded area ‘ bringing smartphone-class applications and experience to featurephones via the cloud. This is a major focus of Mozilla’s mobile efforts, and others by players such as Opera and Myriad, as well as start-ups like the US’s Peek or Finland’s Blaast.
BiNu aims to bring Facebook, Google and so on to low end devices in emerging economies. In early 2011 it launched a mobile app that allows users of Java featurephone and low end Android devices to access more than a 100 apps including Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Search and others. Like similar initiatives by Opera and others, the app compresses the data in order to use only 10% of the usual bandwidth where networks are under-developed.
With the new financing, the start-up will build out the services and apps it provides, grow its user base and focus more on developers, who can also build directly on its platform, it said. So far, it has over 4m monthly active users, most in Asia and Africa, and that number is growing by 10% to 20% a month. It is also generating more than 800m page views a month.
In addition to popular apps, biNu offers a range of content such as holy books, news, sports, weather and book reading services. More recently, it has been evolving into its own social network for its users, recognizing the importance of two elements of a successful mobile web play ‘ localized content and a social aspect. The larger goal is to build a full cloud platform for delivering apps and to generate advertising revenues. Currently the main revenues come from content fees and its own virtual currency.