An e-startup company, formed by a team of postgraduate students from the University of Kent, won the Most Innovative Application prize at the Microsoft Mobile Incubation Week, held in London in June 2009. During the week the team developed their novel product to run on a Mobile 6.5 platform. Microsoft made the award for the most innovative use of available Microsoft technologies.
The company's product, called Comufy, is an innovative web-based platform for controlling multiple communication channels. In today's busy world, people are losing control of their communications because of the increasing number of accounts they have to manage such as Social networks, Instant Messengers, email messaging and phone communications. Comufy tackles this problem by enabling both the sender and the receiver to configure how a communication is received. The project was started more than a year ago by Pulitha Liyanagama, Sebastien Marion and Philipp Mohr.
Sebastien said:
" People loved the concept of being able to change the way you receive your communications on the fly, in a few clicks using your phone.
We can now do from a mobile things like: My battery is dead, send to my wife's phone; I don't want to talk to him, send to my secretary or my voicemail; I'm on the train, send me SMS.
Now that we have a Windows Mobile App we can start receiving a lot more recognition. We will also be put in touch with the "Live" and the "Office Communicator Server" divisions at Microsoft to see if we can work with them. "
The Microsoft Mobile Incubation Week provided an opportunity for selected startup companies to work with key players from the mobile industry including mobile operators and handset manufacturers as well as technical and business experts from Microsoft. The Comufy team spent the week developing the software, meeting fellow startups and networking with the resident gurus. There were several opportunities for them to pitch their product to expert audiences and to incorporate the feedback into the development process. By the end of the week the team from Kent had developed a Windows Mobile 6.5 application for Comufy. Microsoft judged it the most innovative application.
Comufy has already received acclaim. In April this year, Comufy was named one of the best e-startups in Europe by Seedcamp 2009, an organisation which helps early-stage e-startups by putting them in touch with experts who can help them realise their potential.
Sebastien is currently working towards his PhD which focuses on applying data mining techniques to improve memory management performance for the programming language Java (supervisor: Richard Jones). Pulitha's PhD focuses on non-functional aspect-based transformations in model driven engineering (supervisor: Peter Linington). Philipp was awarded a PhD in 2008. His thesis focused on detecting and learning user behaviour on mobile devices (supervisor: Nick Ryan).
The Microsoft Mobile Incubation Week took place at the Customer Centre of the Microsoft London Victoria Offices in the week 1-5 June 2009 .
Published 12 June 2009
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk