« AdLink Pays €35M For Another Piece of Sedo's Domain Name Biz | Main | Tornado Insider Confirms Venture Capital Concentration »
November 24, 2006
Hot Betas - NAVX, Visuarios, WAYN
Image source: The Warning Sign Generator
We noticed that you like the alarm:clock euro's "fresh betas" posts, our super-short briefs on startups. The criteria to be in the list is pretty subjective. Either we've tried the product and liked it, or it's getting some coverage in the press and blogs, or investors are talking about it.
NAVX = One year old Navx, a French company that develops software and services that can be integrated into navigation devices, got some international press coverage this week for its contribution to a new mobile messaging service that monitors 120 parking garages in Paris and lists where the empty parking spot are on the cellphone or GPS display in auto. It is not a dotcom in beta, but we're briefing it here anyway. NAVX lets users change the voice of their GPS system or find out where the speed radars are located, among other things. NAVX's founders, Jean Cherbonnier and Florent Boutellier, previously co-founded ringtone and cellphone-wallpaper startup K-Mobile/Kiwee in 1999, which was acquired by AG Interactive in 2004
Read - Forget park and ride, try dial and park Wireless (IHT)
WAYN Where Are You Now = The blogs say WAYN is backed by UK-based Esprit Captial Partners. Our moles say that the founders are ex-Accenture guys, that WAYN has 6M members, and a premium membership that is used by about 3 percent of those folks. The user number is high - but with all of these community or social media sites - user numbers don't mean a lot. It's common for people to make multiple accounts within one community or even in rivalling communities and then leave them dormant. What really counts is how much these dotcoms are selling via subscriptions, or affiliate marketing schemes, and other money-making partnerships. And so far, that info for WAYN is not being whispered, at least not to us.
Read - What do you think of wayn (Brad Feld blog)
Read - Cool Startup Where Are You Now (pindrop blog)
Visuarios = Via the Museum of Modern Beta's Hot 100 list we discovered that Visuarios is generating some bookmarking activity (that's how you get into the Hot 100). It is a video sharing site that lets people show off what they can do (tutorials, "wetten das.." type stunts, and cooking how-to). It's from a multi-culti team based in Barcelona, Spain and launched a month ago in beta. The twisting ankles Yoga demo gave us the creeps - human joints are not meant to do that, are they?
Read - MOMB Hot 100 (Museum of modern betas - hot 100)
Posted on November 24, 2006 06:22 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2540
