Vodafone buys mobile social network Zyb

This is the kind of story that we would love to cover more often: an innovative european startup gets a successful exit, being acquired by a large player (the latter being Vodafone, a european global player, for a change of the Google, eBay, or Yahoo acquisition stories).

Danish company Zyb started out as a backup service for your mobile addressbook, syncing it up with a repository “in the cloud”. And one must recognize that they have a true expertise in configuring the sync, depending on your mobile phone model among hundreds of makes (although some were very dissatisfied with the service).

Only in the past year did Zyb take advantage of all the contact information thus gathered, to become a social network of its own. Zyb was indeed “smart in how they built their service“: many analysts agree that the closest approximation of our true social network is the contacts we have on our mobile phone (much more than our “friends list” at Facebook or MySpace).

So Zyb introduced the “social phonebook” in February.

Then less than a month ago, Zyb acquired Imity, a three-people startup active in the shorter-range, bluetooth-based social networking, described as a “pocket radar“.

All this apparently makes a lot of sense to Vodafone, who acquired Zyb for €31.5M (all cash), to buy itself a social mobile strategy. The question remains if Zyb has not sold too early, when the social mobile market is barely nascent (a couple of percents of use in 2007, but still expected to grow tenfold to 800 million users over the next five years, according to this eMarketer report)

In any case it probably made sense for Zyb, who had only raised €3M (from Nordic Venture Partners) back in fall 2006. They boasted the 16 million contacts that have been uploaded… by 250.000 users (that number is good for a startup, but small compared to what mobile social networking is poised to become). Anyway, congrats to the team, the investors (and to the amazing Morten Lund, who was there as an early angel).

Because there will be more moves and innovation in this space, we’ll keep watching it closely.