Flurry, the San Francisco based mobile applications developer, today announced that it has raised $3.75 million as part of its Series A round of funding. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Draper Richards joined initial angel investor Borealis Ventures to fund the round.
Flurry’s core product currently provides mobile email and RSS reader functionality. Setting up the service is quick and easy. You need to just give out your mobile number, email address and password, and your set to go. Flurry also provides widget code for Blogs/MySpace that enables your friends to send messages to flurry on your phone. Current service from Flurry is free and the startup will be introducing premium features sometime in future.
However Flurry is not really the first startup attempting this. Blackberry has perfected this feature set for the enterprise customers years back, while Google, Windows Mobile, Good, Berggi also have very strong products targeting mobile users. Comparing Flurry to Google’s offering there are couple of big issues. Flurry lacks the ability to sync/fetch contacts whereas Google mobile client brings up the contacts just as in the web counterpart. Automating the contact import and sync part with email service providers can help in this case. Also as you go through your messages with Flurry, the status doesn’t get updated on the email server. Again Google’s application works only on Blackberry while Flurry works on a wider range of devices that need a cheaper data plan(Blackberry $45 vs Cingular’s MEdia Net 5 M package for $9.99/month).
On the whole if you are a non-Gmail user shopping around for mobile service, Flurry seems to be a nice free option.
Links:
Flurry
March 29, 2007 at 1:29 am |
[...] Related:Flurry’s mobile email service gets fundedBerggi offers unlimited email+messaging for cheap [...]
June 12, 2007 at 12:16 pm |
[...] First comes the email widget that can quickly get you notifications of any new email you receive. Best part is that it can check email for several different email account. Currently supported email apps and protocols include - Gmail, IMAP and POP3. For complete text emails without Widsets, you can always use Flurry. [...]