Our latest guest blog comes from Jon Bradford of Springboard, startup accelerator enthusiast and general startup expert, talking about the opportunities afforded to mobile companies by Springboard Mobile…

With only 5 days to go before the close of applications, Springboard Mobile, Europe’s first acceleration bootcamp programme is on the look out for the 10 best mobile founders in any area of mobile services and technology.

The programme is founder-centric and will leverage the broad mobile ecosystem of platforms, operators, technologies and devices. Springboard Mobile is entirely funded by 10 angel investors, most of which have built landmark mobile companies.

But why mobile? There are now more ARMs (chips) than arms (human) in the world. We are on the cusp of the 5th generation of computing – mobile computing – the first four being the mainframe, mini computer, workstation and personal computer.

Where Bill Gates had the vision of a computer in every home, we are looking at the reality of a computer in every pocket. But the implications of this next generation of computing will be felt far beyond Silicon Valley. As developing countries skipped landline communications and have gone to straight to wireless communications, so these same countries will also skip desktops and laptops and go straight to mobile computing.

Whilst, mobile computing represents a massive global opportunity both in Europe and North America, it will also have an enormous influence in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America where it will have a profound impact on their economies and social fabric.

Springboard Mobile is backed by a collective of angels who have had direct experience in the mobile technology sector, and includes entrepreneurs such as Russell Buckley (Admob – sold for $750MM), Harry Dewhirst (Amobee – sold for $321MM) and Ben Barakas (co-founder Admeld – sold for $400MM) and supported by over a hundred kick-ass mentors from the TechCity community and also from overseas.

To provide context to the mentoring resource that the teams can expect to receive as part of the programme, during our last outting Springboard attracted 137 mentors to Google’s Campus location in Old Street – being limited to no more than 10 mentors per day, many of whom have returned for follow on meetings with the teams. This totalled 1,543 separate one to one meetings between Springboard’s mentors and teams.

Since the completion of Springboard 2011, seven of the ten teams have raised an average of £340k investment capital with more to follow.

Apply here for a place on Springboard Mobile – www.f6s.com/springboardmobile2012

Jon Bradford starts start-up accelerators and loves to help start-ups and their founders achieve their true potential. Over the last 2 years, Jon has helped to start 12 multi-company accelerators from Montreal to Moscow.

Since launching Europe’s first bootcamp accelerator in 2009 – The Difference Engine – he helped to re-launch Springboard now based in Cambridge and London. In addition, he has also founded ignite100 in the UK, Startup Wise Guys in Estonia, and TexDrive in Moscow. Finally, Jon co-founded Eleven in Bulgaria, a €12m Accelerator Venture Fund to help over 200 startups over the next 3 years adopting a 500startups model.