iPhone app that provides text-to-audio for reference and services. Multimedia content "that enriches your experience in the moment." Aggregates content from different sources such as tour guides, Wikipedia, enabling different voices. Integrates with map functions, coming out on Android shortly. Looking to aggregate and distribute broadly. Nokia, RIM, feature phones targeted also, looking to target navigation companies. In top 50 iPhone apps in 2009. Content is personalized, an "army" of voice artists. Monetizes through freemium downloads, ads, sponsors, partners such as Starbucks, OpenTable, CitySearch. Not an unusual model overall, but the audio is an interesting angle, audio is hot right now and others are lagging in services and content technologies (my Nexus One excluded, natch :-). If you're developing mobile apps, here's a content partner that can help you to enrich your tool rapidly.

Physicians are videotaping their medical procedures, they provide a community that collects and organizes this content, partners such as Elsevier, some content is developed by ORLive, others are submitting directly. Audiovisual-equipped operating rooms, branded channels available. Not a high-volume model, very targeted distribution, but still 2.5 million uniques and 85,000 registrants. Helps to drive patient volumes (equals sales), increases procedure adoption rates, improves training on new equipment. Claims ROI exceeds 1000% regularly. An excellent, focused product that makes the best of content, community and online distribution models for professional markets. "Operationally funded." Kudos.

Mobile apps services, ex-OmniPoint/T-Mobile networks, average movile site gets only average 2 uniques per month (this is a key point, search and social media not available to expose these apps effectively, can't "tweet" them easily). Carriers "lock down" users, similar to aggregators locking out publishers from database discovery stats. Snac offers a customizable dashboard for mobile discovery. Downloadable app, alternative home screen, integrated search use environment. Has won awards. There's some potential on the top end of the market, especially since there's still a lot of platform and carrier balkanization, but I'd say that feature phones are the most likely target. "Walled Garden" approach offers promise for content producers trying to devise their own strategy for telco networks that's more consistent across carriers and platforms. Not on iPhone, they exclude, of course. Cross-platform approaches are key, interesting tool towards that goal.