Mob4Hire wins Red Herring Top 100 award

Calgary based mobile application testing platform Mob4Hire garnered a prestigious prize in taking a Red Herring Top 100 award.

To see all the winners and read about the methodology click here. Past and present winners include Twitter, last.fm, Salesforce, Youtube and Skype. 

The awards recognize “financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem,” and the winners get a Red Herring profile, the publicity (I am writing about it, aren’t I) and will have “the opportunity to present at Red Herring North America 2009 before an exclusive audience of C-level entrepreneurs, corporate strategists and over 50 venture capital funds.”

Paul Poutanen, president and founder of Mob4Hire answered some questions via email after the news broke.

What do you think separated Mob4Hire from the other 1200 applicants?

“I think that we have an elegant solution to a large problem in a massive industry. There is really no one else doing what we do in the same way. There are 3 billion mobile phones in use today and a massive amount of software being written for those handsets. The problem of fragmentation in the mobile industry is huge – currently estimated at $3 billion. There is no effective way to test on a foreign network unless you are on that network. It is a location specific problem which plays perfectly to the strengths of our crowd-sourced methodology.

I am sure that the judges were influenced by the plethora of mobile application stores (such as the Apple App store) that have created a tremendous groundswell of activity in mobile software, and Mob4Hire is on the leading edge of companies that are dedicated to solve this daunting task.”

What will award mean to your company?

 “Well, tonight we will celebrate, but tommorrow we will be back hard at work trying to make mobile software better. Ultimately, these types of awards are great to win and we owe a big round of thanks to Red Herring for our inclusion, but we can’t take our eye off the ball as we move forward.

That being said, the PR will be tremendously helpful as we begin our first round of financing to help grow our company. We are confident that it will also increase our business through general awareness on a global scale. I don’t know if you have seen the list of past and present winners, but it is awe-inspiring! To think that Twitter is on the same list as us this year is a wonderful accomplishment.”

We hope to increase the numbers and quality of our worldwide testers and we want to build collaborative tools to help improve our service. Mob4hire definately wants to market our Mob4Hire as a Platform to carriers, handset manufacturers and mobile developer communities such as we have done with our flagship customer –  O2 Litmus.

“We also believe that we have an excellent opportunity to play a significant role in providing market research to the mobile industry. We are seeing thousands of new mobile apps in the marketplace today, and we are confident that we can help provide mobile developers with timely and critical marketing information.

“At the same time, we are entering our first round of financing to help speed our rate of growth which we help us to accomplish these goals.”