A local mobile marketing startup bubbled up to
the semifinals this month in a contest-like request by PepsiCo for promising new media communications technology tools.
MixMobi ended up losing its fizz as the field was narrowed from 40 to 20 companies, but founder Lisa Foote says their platform is gaining traction at home and elsewhere.
MixMobi has developed a light, versatile platform that lets retailers, restaurants, and other businesses create and send simple offers and promotions to customers' cell phones.
Unlike other mobile marketing platforms, MixMobi's promotions work on any phone with a web browser. They're delivered via tweets, short links, or, most recently, QR bar codes.
The company's technology is being used to run the QR code promotions in the July and August issues of
Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine. It's also the engine that powers the location-based advertising on the DriveAlternatives app,
which we wrote about earlier this month.
"We're the engine that helps them, but we're very happy being in the background," says Foote.
Foote says it seems like the company is getting more traction. The interest in mobile coupons and promotions is on the rise. MixMobi solves a lot of problems for agencies, which are getting more and more requests to push promotions on multiple different mobile platforms.
Foote started the company in 2008 with her husband, Brad Roberts, and chief technology officer Kelly Heikkila. The company launched publicly in February and has already earned positive reviews from blogs and analysts, including
Mashable.com and
Juniper Research.
The next step for MixMobi may be augmented reality, the new technology that layers visuals, directional signals, and other information onto digital images of the real world. The company was in talks with a major augmented reality developer about laying MixMobi offers into its augmented reality worlds.
Source: Lisa Foote, MixMobi
Writer: Dan Haugen