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November 19, 2007
Tech Tour Web Summit Review of Six Pitches
Here's some of what we heard and saw on Thursday at the European Tech Tour's Web & Communities Summit where selected companies were able to make their pitches for free to a roomful of investors from all over Europe. There are only six because the alarm:clock euro arrived late and only eyeballed that many.
We talked to pros from Silicon Valley Bank, SAP Ventures, Earlybird, Holtzbrinck, Wellington, Endeavour Vision, Sardis, and Highland Capital. There were others too but the alarm:clock did not get a chance to meet them.
Wikio co-founder Pierre Chappaz (above) demoed Wikio's news aggregation power, talking a bit about the relevance engine, but also about its revenue generation potential, which includes things like affiliate marketing, shopping channels, and advertising.
The a:c euro was skeptical at first about the content and power of the engine but we have been accessing Wikio lately and can report that it's French version has enough usage and content now to become a power-tool for us.
We expect to use the English version too, once it reaches the same level of development and usage as the French one. And it looks like Chappaz has the basics in place to turn the traffic growth, which he also demonstrated, into a moneymaker.
NEO- Stylish, young founding team developing smart algorithms (they call it a social discovery engine) for consumer-oriented online services. Insider nugget: if you have heard of httpool media network , then you'll be interested to know that its CEO Timotej Gala, has signed on as NEO's head up the online advertising and media operations at NEO. It comes out of Slovenia with German connections, targeting the high growth Eastern European market.
That is NEO's co-founder and CEO Andrej Nabergoj. This is not his first venture. And he's also got connections to httpool.
Xcerion - CEO Daniel Arthursson, gave a low key presentation, which belies this startup's disruptive proposition. He talked about the CloudOS concept his firm has in place. To be clear, he said, it is not a WebOS, rather the code executes inside the browser and taps about 20 percent of the host computer's OS.
Xcerion needs to attract developers to churn out XML apps for the platform and believes that big name software vendors will develop Xcerion versions of their software, or risk its ecosystem doing knockoffs. The company faces several challenges on the user takeup side, but also on getting developers to work on apps, plus there's competition and a lack of understanding (ours included) on what's the difference between a CloudOS and WebOS. But this is one startup and definitely an emerging market segment that we have to take a closer look at the alarm:clock euro.
Flashgames 24/7 - Founder Shazad Mohammed has speaking skills and chutzpah, along with an English accent that disarms North American ears (sounds like Amy Winehouse's). He would be a natural for a consumer-oriented pitchfest like DEMO, where dexterity with PowerPoint is a negative.
Although he was a bit over the top for the panel's moderator Morten Lund who criticized his financial projections, this young founder has built up a profitable casual games business that claims 7 million unique visitors a month, about $800K in turnover this year, with a half a million in profit expected, of which all but $120K gets invested back into the company. He's looking for venture capital to hire up, develop an MMO game or two, and to hire his own advertising sales team to 'cut out the middleman' to whom he is now paying 50 percent commissions for ads.
Goojet has not launched yet but we a saw demo of a user-friendly, and potentially useful new application. The interface reminds us of the Mac Book Pro. When it comes to software that claims to bridge the Internet applications and the mobilephone, it is unusual for it to look so friendly.
Goojet enables users to drag and drop applications, content, links, and messages from the web to your phone's memory. Although we could only see a simulated demo, the founder invited the audience to see it working on a mobilephone during the break. Goojet is meant for Javaphones, which is the largest of the installed base of application executable phones.
Insider's nugget: Goojet CEO Marc Rougier, founded and led Meiosys, which was acquired by IBM in 2004, and subsequently integrated into the US company's virtualization products, and Ludovic Le Moan, CTO, who also founded Anyware Technologies, a 70-person strong engineering company that developed the Joost backend.
COO is Guillaume Decugis held the same position at Musiwave, which was acquired by Openwave, which in turn is being acquired by Microsoft. The venture is backed by Elaia Partners and Partech.
Zyb - Stylish CEO and co-founder Tommy Ahlers made it clear that Zyb won't be offering its contact backup, calendering, and communication platform as a white label. He plans to keep this SyncML-enabled company independent, although he is looking for strategic investors. Despite insisting on promoting its own brand, several mobile network operators (such as home country operator TDC Mobile in Denmark, E-Plus in Germany and Smart Philippines) have signed on with Zyb. Ahlers said two global deals are in the works.
Posted on November 19, 2007 07:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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