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May 02, 2007
Hot Betas: sMeet, Trivop, and Ekaabo
Today we're feeling sociable and are profiling a couple of online community-type startups that seem interesting: Ekaabo out of Germany, and sMeet, out of Berlin, both of which will be at the upcoming Innovate Europe confab in Spain next week, which means they are probably pitching to VCs. The third is Trivop, out of Paris with a new video guide to hotel and lodgings in Europe.
Ekaabo is a Weinheim, Germany-based startup founded in 2006 by Marco Ripanti. Its specialized in developing and designing online communites for special interest groups in Europe (so it's not really a beta). It has eight of its own, and has done almost twice as many for its clients. During the last venture cycle, it was great to be a website design firm- maybe during this one it is great to be a community design firm. (Image source: Ekaabo blog)
sMeet - Billing itself as a reality communications community, sMeet already has a staff of 25 and was founded in September 2006. It runs an online community that lets members create avatars and switch to their own phones for voice. It was all the buzz at the recent Red Herring European confab. It is not a beta, it's an alpha.
Trivop - France's Videoagency which is specialized in the production and publication of online hotel videos, has launched Trivop. Reviewed on Mashable, as a great resource for travellers, we think this one sounds good. The founder is Thomas Owadenko who is a 32 year old Parisian. According to one of the startup's board members in his blog, Owadenko is a serial Internet venturer and has sold at least one of them to Lycos in 2000. It is obviously made by someone that knows how difficult it is to figure out which hotel to book when you've got business meetings or a conference to go to in a new city, even with the plethora of travel sites on the Internet today.
Posted on May 2, 2007 06:21 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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