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November 04, 2007
Hot Betas : Dopplr, Squace, and Trosjed
The hot betas column looks at some new applications from the European web/mobile world.
The Dopplr landing page is an airport lounge, an image that evokes mixed emotions for most businesspeople.
Dopplr - an online service that enables users to share travel schedules with contacts is taking an unusual approach to moving beyond the early beta, to the next one, which is still beta (!?) but involves inviting employees of 100 corporations to sign on. Otherwise you get invited by existing members. There's some web wizardry behind this one as its blog reveals. How it will make money has not been revealed but you could guess that serving up an audience of advanced Internet users and frequent flyers might be valuable, if it reaches a good sized user base. In the meantime, it is backed by Martin Varsavsky, Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman and TAG (from the UK's Saul Klein)
Mashable voted it one of Britain's best startups in July. Techcrunch profiled it upon its seed financing roundt. And more recently the Yourdon Report tried it and wrote a review.
Squace - just relaunched its innovate 'browser' in beta. The application is intended for mobilephones and is meant to reduce the need to key in URLs, or scroll through a list of bookmarks, and or information feeds. Click-and-keypad-use-reduction seems to be the net advantage. Works even on lame java phones (according to its website). It is still early days and some of the features are not yet available. You have to download it to your phone, which means the startup is not dependent on manufacturers or mobile network operators adopting its interface, but it'll take either a lot of capital, or magnificent marketing, or both to get this one to fulfill it's potential. Otherwise we can't imagine it being be a big moneymaker.
The venture is a spinout of iQube incubator and is privately financed. It gets some mojo here from one of the backers of iQube here.
Trosjed - is Croatian for sofa and the name of a locally-targeted social networking application that recently launched in beta, according to the Frantic Industries blog (written by journalist Stan Schroeder who discloses that he is also a web entrerpreneur).
We don't speak the local language but from the images posted it looks like football, sex, and politics are the hot themes (in other words it's typically European) .
The site also hints at some talented web design to be found in Croatia. Schroeder acknowledges that in his positive review. Trosjed is an additional feature for the users of one of Croatia’s biggest general purpose news portals - net.hr. Schroeder said that its artist-developed 'cute clay sculptures' which are used for 'visuals all over the site', combined with the usability features gives it an "unpretentious feel".
Posted on November 4, 2007 03:08 PM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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