December 13, 2007
Arctic Startups - Finland Close Up
Arctic Startup is a blog for and about Finnish startups. Several startups profiled on the blog were not on our radar yet, so that quickened our interest. An article on whatamap.com suggests there is a niche market, picking up where GoogleMaps leaves off.
And there is news about Apaja, a startup that raised €1.75M from a PE firm specialized in media, Martinson Trigon.
Apaja is the company behind Playray, a games, avatars and community platform, it provides to large-sized Internet publishers. Founded in 2001, it counts Lycos and Ilse Media as recently signed partners.
If Artic Startup's authors keep up the pace of posting, it's definitely one to add to the RSS reader.
View - Arctic Startup
Posted at 06:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 06, 2007
eBox: Open Source Network Admin From The Desert
This week we have a Q&A with Ignacio Correas of CEO and co-founder of Warp Networks, a three year old Spanish startup that is launching eBox, an open source enterprise network administration platform.
Warp, which is likely to spinoff eBox, is self-funded. It cobbled together the cash for R&D for eBox from government grants, open source consulting work, and from a strategic partner (that pulled out before the work was done and left the founders on their own).
It has attracted several business advisors that know a thing or two about open source, and who are on board to help the founding team.
Those points and the fact that it's the only startup we know that is based in Europe's largest desert sealed it for us.
Warp's hq is in Zaragoza, which is also the site of next year's Expo2008.
Zaragoza about 80 minutes from Madrid.
Q&A with Ignacio Correas (center in image below) CEO and co-founder of Warp Networks
> Why did you decide to create the company?
For several reasons...The year was 2004 and open source technologies were starting to be considered as serious commercial alternatives to other closed products. We had managed to put together some of the most open source knowledgeable people in the area, which was giving us a very important competitive advantage.
We had gathered some interest from potential customers and public support for our venture, even before starting. And all the founders were in a stage of our personal lives when we could commit ourselves completely to the success of Warp.
So we started offering consultancy, development and training services on open source echnologies. So far things have gone pretty well: we have more than 20 employees now, our turnover will be close to 1M€ this year and we have become technology providers of some large corporations, such as Vodafone R&D.
At the same time we decided to start the development of our own product eBox Platform together with another company in the region, DBS (this company closed down a few months ago). From our experience we knew that there was no easy, open source solution for the administration of corporate networks, particularly for small and medium size organizations, so we started coding it.
Our idea was to integrate several network functionalities, such as gateway, resource sharing, email server, security and so on into a single unit, that could be very easy to deploy and use and that could rapidly extend to other functionality. As you can imagine this was a pretty ambitious project: you can see an estimate of the effort at ohloh, a web site that makes several metrics on open source projects. We are reaching the functionality and stability that we were aiming for and are now planning for the launch of eBox into the market.
> How did you fund your software development?
On a first stage, we split costs with DBS. The deal was simple: we did the work and they funded our direct costs (programmers' salaries), while with our consultancy services we covered the rest of the costs (administration, office space, hardware and so on). We shared the rights and the management of the project.
When we reached our first important milestone, the release of eBox 0.7 under an open license in December 2005, DBS dropped out from the deal and we were left alone with the development. We needed to look for other sources of funding if we wanted to continue with eBox, so we approached CDTI, an organization dependant on the Spanish Ministry of Industry which funds innovative start-ups. They accepted our proposal and granted us the funds that, together with the income generated by Warp's services, have allowed us to complete eBox functionality.
>How many developers out there are suppporting the platform?
I have registered over 300 contributors who are giving us feedback, reporting bugs, translating the interface (it has been translated into German, French, Turkish, Danish, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, ...), creating new manuals and documentation, developing new modules. But this does not count a bunch of developers who give their contribution directly in our IRC/Chat channels and who leave no trace whatsoever.
The most important contribution we are having at this moment is coming from the people at Canonical, as they are integrating eBox in Ubuntu. This integration is expected to be completely functional by their next release, Hardy Heron, in April 2008.
If things go right eBox will become one of Ubuntu's official tools for network administration, reaching over 10 million users and increasing the amount of contributions we get.
> Do you think this is software that will have international usage?
Well, it already does. eBox has been downloaded over 50,000 times from quite many countries. During the past month the top ten countries downloading eBox (accounting for 50% of the total downloads) have been US, Spain, Russia, Germany, Italy, UK, Argentina, Netherlands, Canada and France. And I can guess that once it is integrated into Ubuntu the internationalization will be
even greater.
> Do you have any business angels working with Warp?
Yes. We have created a board of directors that is helping us in the preparation and launch of eBox into the market. We consider that eBox is mature enough for the market and we are now separating it from Warp and creating a new company that will be focused solely on eBox.
The business angels are:
- Mikko Puhakka (Holtron): a pretty uncommon profile, Mikko was the first investor in MySQL and is a researcher on open source
business models at Helsinki University of Technology
- Stephen Walli (blog ): a well-known open source
consultant based in Seattle. Stephen has been Vicepresident at Optaros and
Business Development Manager of Windows at Microsoft
- Timo Teimonen: a very experienced professional having had several advisory roles in startup companies, Timo has been Vicepresident of Nokia and area manager in IBM.
> Who are the founders of warp?
The idea of founding a company specialized on open source technologies came from six guys which were probably the best Linux experts and most active open source advocates in the region. A year before that, I had left a good job in Finland to try to start the same kind of company in Zaragoza (Spain), so when they asked me to join in as the non-geek member of the team I could not resist.
Thanks for the taking the time for the interview. And good luck!
Posted at 04:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
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 at 03:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 30, 2007
Headweb : Legal Video Download To DVD Out of Sweden
We're seeing a few more examples of video downloading as a legal business proposition these days. For example, TIOTI, which supports downloading and streaming of TV and video recordings. It recently raised capital from early stage UK venture firm Pond Ventures, according to Techcrunch UK.
And News from Blognation Japan is that network operator KDDI is trying to make a business out legal movie downloads using watermarking as a way to protect copyright.
Sweden, the same country that brought us PirateBay and Kazaa, has another contender to add to the list, Headweb for legal P2P downloads to DVD
Development began in August last year and the team, along with two business angels, has invested about €1M in the venture so far. It is slated to launch this week. Read on for an edited Q&A we did with co-founder Peter Alvarsson by email.
Founded by 26 year old Peter Alvarsson, along with Ingemar Bygdestam and Pelka Hansson who all come out of the DVD and content indusry, Headweb got underway in early 2006.
Stockholm Style - Peter Alvarsson co-founder and COO of Headweb
Two things make Headweb stand out besides its use of Bittorrent.
1) it has a way to increase user numbers quickly. It motivates users to bring in friends by giving them credits to acquire free videos. The same system encourages users to make their PCs available to the network
2) It is legal and has a copy-protection system based on watermarking that could be more consumer-friendly than the alternatives in use today. The startup owns its watermarking tech.
What has been the reaction of content owners, studios and the like to your proposition?
Some movie studios have come further than others regarding legal movie downloads, both mentally and practically. Some companies embrace our technology with open arms and believe this really is what the market needs. Other companies are more conservative and protective but they also know that they need to change and open up to get any revenues at all. The music industry is starting to go DRM free now, the same thing will happen to the movie industry too, it's just a matter of time.
The team has done a lot in a relatively short time.
Yes, it is a lot in a short time, but more is yet to come. Your conclusions are very exact: it is a copyright protection system designed for people.
And with your own watermark technology, you have the basis for another kind of business in case this one flops.
True. We have already received propositions about licensing the technology for other ventures and services.
Do we have it right, you use a bittorrent platform for distribution of videos based on Xvid, an open source alternative to Divx?
We will soon also offer the movies in Xvid (MPEG4 format) so the users can choose which format they want depending on personal taste and bandwidth.
However, initially we will distribute an "electronic DVD", meaning we distribute what's on a physical DVD disc. That's why you can burn the movie and watch it in any regular DVD player in the world. The electronic DVD is based on MPEG2 compression.
The electronic DVD can be up to 4,5Gb in size while the Xvid version will be around 1 Gb.
Later, more formats will be introduced.
What is the client like?
Our client contains download functionality, playback functionality (Media Player) and burn functionality. The user shouldnt need any other software to use the service.
Tell us about pricing and how customers earn credit towards the purchase of titles.
There are several ways of earning credits. One is by being an uploader. Also, by being active socially in the community you can earn credits in different ways. Inviting friends is one way. Writing reviews is another.
… And there are no limits on how many credits you can earn.
We wont have one fixed price though, different movies will have different prices depending on age etc but be in the range of 6 to 14 Euro. There are different payment methods like credit card, pre-pay (load your Headweb account with money, good for parents wanting to give to their kids).
We are looking at implementing more payment methods too.
You have developers in far flung places, any tips for our readers on how you managed the team, did you use any collaboration tools or project management tools that helped?
Yes, this has been a fun part of the project, we work a lot with chat applications like Skype. Google Docs sometimes for sharing documents. And a developer forum where we discuss specific parts of the project.
One last thing, I can see parents telling their kids to use Headweb, but what about others. What do you offer that Pirate Bay or its alternatives, don't? Let's assume that a PB user doesn't care if the downloading is legal or not, what other reason does he have to switch to Headway?
There are many things with illegal alternatives that are problematic: You don't know what quality the files are in (maybe it is recorded from a movie screen), files might be infected with viruses, you dont know if the download contains what it says it should (spam files). And it could be problematic for users to know what kind of player and decoder they should use for playback.
There are also issues with subtitles that comes with illegal downloads, they are often translated by home users which means the quality can be so-so sometimes.
Headweb will always guarantee a good quality movie including surround sound and the real subtitles. Downloads are free from viruses and spam and it will be very easy to play it back on your computer and burn it since everything is included in one package.
We know that many people are not very technical and will want this "works from the box" experience (compare with the iPod and iTunes) and we believe that the market is much bigger than those using illegal services today.
So in a way the pirates are our customers but many "pirates" will continue to use illegal services so we're actually not in this game to convert pirates to legal customers but instead focusing on making the service available to "everyone".
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Thanks for the interview and for reading the alarm:clock euro.
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Other sources on Headweb
Read The Local : Feature on Headweb
Read Legal Bittorent DVDs
Read Latest on Bittorrent (the company)
Posted at 09:13 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 10, 2007
Hot Alpha and a Gamma: Moovement.fr, Comapping, and Wua.la
Our Hot Betas feature morphs beyone recognition, except for the fact that we are still reporting on new web-based services and applications. The ones we profile here all contacted us within the last week, or so. It is a diverse group, a French job aggregator service, a mind-mapping software startup out Copenhagen, and an online storage company from Zurich.
Moovement Version 2
Richard Menneveux let us know that Moovement just launched a new version of its online job aggregating service. It has about 70K jobs in it now and when it comes to usability, let's just say it makes you appreciate Web 2.0.
Menneveux said he's ramping it up now and plans to raise €2M from outside investors. Moovement is owned by its two founders and one private investor. A feature our readers might like is the Startupjobs feed. This version is dubbed a gamma. Saurier Duval may have trouble with classifying that one, but we're sure he'll find a way.
View Moovement
Global Brainstorming With CoMapping
Comapping is from Denmark and is not in beta, rather it is already commercial. It offers web-based mind-mapping tools, targeting the corporate market, although it does have individual users too.
Business is good, according to the firm's CEO Omar Ahmed, who also told us a bit about how some of the user organizations surprised his team with the way they use the tool, which also saves your data locally in case you lose the Internet connection.
A quick glance shows there's been time spent on design and usability.
Given the positive feedback from customers, he fears he may have priced the software as a service too low. "In terms of pricing we are the cheapest in the market at $11.99 for 6 months. In hindsight, we might have priced it too low because price was never an issue selling to our customers," wrote Ahmad.
The startup has an experienced team behind it and is the result of a Danish/Russian dev coooperation.
View comapping
Wuala's Disruptive Online Storage Model
A low-cost infrastructure enables this tiny startup to offer an online storage service along the lines of some bigger competitors. It is from Switzerland.
When he was a student at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), a project Dominik Grolimund was working on caught our eye, as its aim was to develop a distributed storage platform. We wrote to him at the time, and he responded that it was part of a Masters thesis and that it was too early to talk about it.
Almost two years later, Grolimund wrote back, telling us he has founded a company, and launched its first service in alpha, called Wuala.
Wuala offers users 1GB of storage for free, so do a lot of others in this category. We asked why do you think you will be successful?
"There are tons of existing online storage services, there's Flickr, there's YouTube, so that's certainly a justified question," wrote Grolimund, adding that there is Box.net, Streamload, X- Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive.
Wuala's advantage he said is that it takes "the power of p2p to make it fast" and to reduce his infrastructure costs so that he can "provide a better service for free".
It is free in the sense of you don't pay any money to use it, but you do have to share your PCs memory resources. It's like Skype or a Bittorrent application, you need a client, and it is based on peer to peer technologies.
We asked for a comparison to AllPeers, a VC-backed startup we've covered here. Grolimund said that Wuala is different from the "send semantic", that is "inherent to AllPeers, YouSendIt, and the like", and that if we are bringing up Allpeers, he said, then we might as well throw Pando in there too.
Apparently, others have compared his product to Pando too.
Grolimund give us a comparison of features and functionality with AllPeers, which uses the BitTorrent protocol to share files, but it required some knowledge of the usage and the technical details of the underlying platform - not possible for us to judge his evaluation. The essence of it is that Grolimund's view is that BitTorrent model has a weakness when it comes to sharing private files.
He sums up Wuala like this: "We've taken the P2P model, added encryption and persistence, and applied it to online storage. "
We figured we better put up our profile on this one quickly, before it gets acquired by Google (see our earlier post on Jaiku this morning). Not that Grolimund suggested that this was his plan. He's actually in Silicon Valley right now making some visits to journalists and 'early adopters'.
View Wuala
Posted at 12:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2007
Early Stage Money: Gamersprofile and Jobleads.de
The alarm:clock euro's reporter, Valerie Thompson, is still trying to get caught up with the news that flowed during her summer vacation, as well as interviews with Kevin Lomax, Misys founder, and Nick Ogden, Worldpay, founder. In the meantime, she has a couple of early stage news from Germany to report.
The HighTech Gruenderfonds has invested in Jobleads, which is launching a job and referral platform for executive types. It is in beta and only in German for the time being but HTGF sees a "scalable" business that has a good founding team. Two of the founders are former investment bankers and its chief techie hails from OpenText, the Canadian enterprise software company.
A Blognation Germany review of the startup suggests its competitors are Zubka and H3. There's also Experteer, which targets your better paid jobs too. It's also German and backed by BV Capital and Wellington. According to Clemens von Bergmann of the HTGF who let us know about the deal by email: "It is kind of like the Zubka model in the UK but much better," he wrote.
Read - Jobleads first round
View Jobleads
Munich-based GamersClub, which recently launched a social network called gamersprofile.de, raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Mountain Partners (an investment company majority-owned by former smartcard entrepreneur Cornelius Boersch) and Tiburon (an investment vehicle that belongs to getmobile.de founders Tim Schwenke and Daniel Wild).
gründerszene » Gründer-Rückblick - Interessante Themen der letzten Woche (Gruenderszene)
Posted at 05:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Cognimatics: From Face Warp To Face Counting
What’s a startup team to do when it realizes that getting its software into smartphones, despite the giddy predictions of market research firms and investment banks, is not the fast track to growth?
The answer, stay lean, don't raise VC, and try another market – at least that’s what Swedish startup Cognimatics is doing.
The four year old company was founded by the same team that founded Decuma, a handwriting recognition for PDAs startup, founded in 1999 that raised VC (probably from too many investors leading to unaligned interests, we can guess) and was sold off to Canadian company Zi in 2004 in an assets sale.
The founders learned a few things from that experience and run Cognimatics as a self-financing venture. A couple still work as professors at a Swedish university.
They first targeted cameraphones as a way to commercialize their cognitive vision tech, which is a geeky term for software that can do useful things with images captured by a camera's image sensors.
Its product, Face Warp, has a design-in win with a mobilephone manufacture and that business generates most of the sales. Its installed base is 50M terminals, Håkan Morän, told us in a phone interview, and the plan is to continue to grow that part of the business.
Face Warp Your Cameraphone Pics (image source: Cognimatics)
Moran is the sales and marketing chief, and joined the founders a year or so ago. In the interview there was no disclosure of the name of the phone manufacture, but your a:c reporter did a little research and learned that SonyEricsson sells its phones with face warp software pre-installed - we assume it's Cognimatics'.
Without the outside money, the startup is very customer-focussed and realized a couple years ago there's demand in retail, selling its patented tech to surveillance camera and display manufacturers for use by retailers that want to know where to position products, and how many people entered the shop or where they went, that is, people and face-counter applications.
This is the market opportunity it is now addressing. It already has signed up customers to apply the tech in electronic surveillance camera and into digital displays. But the company still has no plans to raise outside capital, despite offers, according to Moran.
"Self-financed and organic growth is the strategy for the time being," he said.
A Face Counting package from Cognimatics
Now a retailer can know how many people look at an advertisement for an instore special, for example, and match it with sales. By moving the display around, they can get some numbers to better decide the right location for an ad or what type of ad gets people buying.
We think it is onto a good thing with this retail application. We recall that last year Experian bought VC-backed FootFall for £35Mpre-empting a planned IPO. It was into electronic customer monitoring, which is tracking shoppers. The fact that the company was about to float and that Experian bought it beforehand, suggests that there is some growth ahead for businesses developing this kind of product.
Your a:c euro reporter has seen a lot of startup teams underperform with this kind of computer vision technology over the years, especially research lab spinoffs. But Cognimatics has avoided the security camera market boondoggle, entered the mobilephone one, and is now positioning its technology in another promising one.
Read – Axis camera announcement
View Cognimatics
Posted at 04:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 08, 2007
How To Hire For Your Bootstrapped Tech Venture
Famous founders know a think or two about hiring for their ventures as Marc Andreessen illustrates in a highly readable post on what to look for and how to identify it. One contrarian view of his is that super intelligence is not in the top criteria.
Today we also have some insights from some euro startups that we have on our radar:
Spotify:
Long ago, we learned a lesson by asking the first guy we knew with a driving licence to join our band (disaster!). These days we pick our team members very, very carefully. Most people we've hired ended up meeting us at least three or four times, but considering we see each other almost every day that's really not too bad. We enjoy each others company in and out of office, and social happenings are plentiful.
The fact that Spotify's founders are famous, as is Andreessen, must go a long way to aid recruiting the kind of talent required, but what about bootstrapped ventures that can't offer relatively big salaries and the founders might not yet be famous.
Once again, we have a couple of tips from some of our readers that are bootstrapping ventures and building good teams...
From the founders of struktur (the company behind spreed.com): We have hired engineers [after] having the opportunity to meet and talk at conferences. I also contact individuals directly when I find an interesting publication, a software or a blog. Recommendation can be also help a lot in finding good people. Social networks like LinkedIn can be goldmine in digging-out the personal background of a successful candidate. Before we contract engineers it is important for us to take a look of the past work and the quality of the software. Of course, this is easy for Open Source developers.
Andreesen also points out that once you have the talent on board, you have value the people so they stay.
Adoos, a bootstrapped clone of Craigslist out of Spain, has had success recruiting in Argentina, attracting early employees with a chance to experience two summers a year. And as it has grown the founders show their thanks by providing better gear to work on and by taking its engineers on holidays to the south of Spain. We'd say that Adoos is executing on the "valuing" part of the equation that Andreessen talks about.
Posted at 06:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 05, 2007
Beyond The Consumer Internet: 10 Ideas For Tech Startups
We've been moaning about the dearth of geeky, disruptive startups getting funded, even the kind with more TLAs than an afternoon at one of Jeff Pulver's VON conferences. (Image credit: skysails.info)
So we got inspired by the thought that climate change and reduction of greenhouse gases do not only present problems to be solved by cleantech startups - there are a host of other things that are affected by climate change where software, online exchanges, and engineering, for example, could be exploited.
And therefore offer some upside for smart founders.
It's in the nature of the entrepreneur to understand change as a chance.
We snagged that quote and these changes, ideas, and industrial problems to be solved from a presentation by ecolutions, an emerging alternative investment company, that might provide some food for thought.
Building industry
Trend of prefabricated houses build in factories, independent from weather conditions and then assembled in 4-6 hours
Strong demand for cooling and isolation systems - businesses that downsize their energy needs by applying advanced materials and techniques, e.g. façade engineering.
Managing power facilities and consulting large industrial consumers.
Transport & Logistics
Extreme weather conditions leads to increase in prices for transport and logistics
services (e.g. aviation).
Car industry
New models for new climate zones
New actuation techniques (hydrogen, natural gas...)
Development of hybrid-drive cars (combination of cumbustion and solar-electric
engine)
Weather manipulation
Techniques to influence weather
Agriculture
Harvest outfalls due to heat peaks in summer
Reduction of usable land
Strongly increasing agricultural commodities
And here are a couple more classical cleantech opportunities. If anyone is seriously investigating weather manipulation, we'd like to hear about it.
Waste management
Absorbing environmentally damaging gases, like methane, by sealing
Energy extraction from reduced greenhouse gases
Biogas
Value chain improvements due to increases in production efficiency and economic
utilization of fall-outs.
Chances for investors during consolidation of fragmented biogas market in Europe.
Posted at 05:55 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 04, 2007
Berlin Startup Fits City Tours Into Little Red Multimedia Box
A multimedia city tour guide in a little red (200 gram) box called Cruso is the brainchild of a Berlin based startup called Dreifach Einfach (Triple Easy). Its impressive startup story was in the German press this week as the firm opens its first guided tour in-a-box rental outlets.
The gadget and related services were three years in the making - the battery life thing had to be solved. It now supports buying etickets, as well as providing directions (GPS), and audio visual information about sights in Berlin.
It beats walking around with a Lonely Planet guide and wrestling with maps, says the Tagespiegel.
The startup employs 20 and has raised €550,000 in capital, as well as a strategic investment by Dorazil the company that manufactures the firm's electronic devices.
According to Tagespiegel.de the founders say their venture has an €8M valuation, priced by a US firm that recently tried to acquire it. The founders aren't selling... yet.
Read - Die Stadt In Einer Hand (tagespiegel.de)
Posted at 06:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
MyBlueZebra Building a VOIP Brand
One of our regular readers wrote in to alert us to mybluezebra, an Italian/US startup that's launched a couple of Internet-driven low-rate voice service. It has signed up Italy's yellow pages publisher PagineGialle, as well as a white pages directory, and a tourism site. They all use it for a click to call service to immediately dial the numbers you look up from any phone.
It is about to relaunch its consumer-oriented service. We note that this startup does not use its own VOIP infrastructure, it's using Abbeynet's, another startup out of Italy. The rationale for that move is that it should deliver better quality of service and competitive rate to end users.
We like the tagline: "call me social animal". And the corporate identity is cute, but maybe a bit confusing: are zebra's more sociable than other animals? Will a consumer associate the blue zebra with discount telephony. And since the startup does not seem to have much orignal technology, which would put up a bit of a barrier to competitors, will VCs back the company if it decides to raise capital?
Read- What's Click to Call In Italian (gigaom)
Posted at 06:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 30, 2007
The Dilution Specialists
Skype's angels and founders equity story is pretty amazing, as this graphic suggests. We snagged it from Equity Fingerprint a UK-based consulting company. Its site is worth a visit, even if it is just to ponder the many ways that the control of a tech company can go (as the thumbnails below suggest).
We have not met the people behind Equity Fingerprint but Robert Scoble's video interview with the firm's founder and principle, Philip Baddeley, suggests that startups get advice on managing equity in exchange for giving him a chance to invest, or in exchange for some shares, which seems fair. The sexy graphics it produces are more of a calling card than a product, it seems.
We like Baddeley's focus on equity. His pitch is that it might seem obvious and unecessary to make such a big fuss about a founding team's stake in the company - but talking about it and thinking about it will reveal a lot about how your business could evolve and what kind of entrepreneur you are - he calls it lifestyle vs tycoon.
Getting the equity thing right is often neglected. We've met enough demotivated founders, pissed off angels, and VC-haters over the years to vouch for that notion.
View Equity Fingerprint
Posted at 06:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 28, 2007
Tunz Of Ways To Make Money With A Blog
Person-to-person mobile payments startup Tunz just launched a widget that we’re betting will be popular with bloggers – at least bloggers in Belgium [via Web 2.0 In Belgium].
It is an SMS payment button that enables readers to send money to the bloggeur.
Tunz also offers services for web merchants and content publishers. It isn’t the first to offer a mobile micropayments service but it’s the simplest one we’ve seen. For blogs Tunz charges a flat fee of 10 euro cents per transaction. You can accept donations/payments under your own name or an alias.
We don't want to sound like an ad for Tunz, but we note that registration is fast. No client downloads, its operator independant (but it's limited to Belgian networks), and it works on antique handys like the one shown here.
Just one text message is enough to send the instruction to make a payment, the amount of money to send, to whom, and your security PIN code. For example, the following text messagae sends 5 euros to phone number 0475123456 with a message saying "merci" and the last four digits are the PIN code.
PAY 5 0475123456 merci 1234
Tunz was founded by two entrepreneurs now on their third venture together. Jean Zurstrassen and Grégoire de Streel founded an online trading platform in 1998 and then got a banking license. The two sold Keytrade Bank to Crédit Agricole last year. Before that, the two founded and sold Skynet, a Belgian ISP.
We thought at first that this is a competitor for Swiss startup Zong which is already international, but Zong is about making money with SMS traffic, the person to person feature is missing, and registration is more baroque.
We’re not sure about the international potential for Tunz. Cellphone manufacturers Nokia and Motorola are rumored to be entering the mobile payments market but that rumor has been around for a long time, and Paypal is already offering a mobile payments scheme in the US. It may decide to internationalize it, which would mean serious competition.
But we note that even with Paypal present in the market, according to a CNN/Money article about mobile commerce 2.0, a couple of US startups targeting micropayment niches have nevertheless launched in recent months.
View Tunz
Posted at 07:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 21, 2007
Esnaf24 Aims To Be MyHammer.de For Turkish Market
Frankfurt-based Cem Dalgic, an active reader of the a:c euro, told us last week about Socv.net and this week he has other news.
Dalgic is working on is soon-to-be-launchd Esnaf24.com. Esnaf means Handwerker (in German) or handyman (in English) - and it will (corrected text) mediate the service of handymen via reverse auction with built in service rating (corrected text). It's like MyHammer in Germany-- the future plan is to sell tools, nails, and d-i-y gear online.
It's "a premiere" in Turkey, he said, so much so that local TV covered the news about its formation.
Dalgic, along with business angels and private investors, has formed Istanbul-based LeVenture to invest in companies targeting the Turkish-speaking regions of the world.
As a Swiss/Turkish friend never tires of pointing out to us, there's a population of 205M with a common language reaching from Cyprus in Europe to China and Siberia and points in between, a legacy of the Ottoman empire.
We've reported that iLab Ventures, a local holding company, has invested in a handful of local web companies, including GittiGidiyor.com, a Turkish consumer online auction company.
Turkey itself has a very young population base.source: de.wikipedia.org
And there are a couple of other Turkish language sites that seem to do well out of Germany: Vaybee.com, a classic portal founded in Germany, and there's Bizimalem, a social network, which has more members in Germany than it does in Die Turkei.
Posted at 05:23 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 19, 2007
Dutch Entrepreneur On Chinese/Euro Seed Deals
A Dutch Internet entrepreneur’s diary of his expat life in China delivers some interesting tech sector Zeitgeist, as well as some profiles of startups he’s invested in.
Besides running theAsian operations of online games portal and games development startup, Spill Group, Marc Van Der Chijs, the 34 year old Dutch entrepreneur has started to make local angel investments. He writes about them, among other things, in his Shanghaied Weblog.
The 1bib team - Van Der Chijs (far right)
1bib.com is a Chinese used car sales platform, which is looking to raise a new round over the next months. The founder and CEO is Honglian Tan. Accordig to i-wisdom blog, the Shanghai-based businesswoman worked at DaimlerChrysler in Germany and she holds a MBA from the European School of Business at Reutlingen.
Read - Looking for a 2nd hand car?
Pioco is a Bluetooth advertising start-up. Like the recently seed financed Blue Cell Networks over in Germany, the Bluetooth channel is being exploited it seems for local events and promotions. According to Van Der Chijs, Pioco is looking for capital to grow its "already profitable" business.
Read - Shanghaied Weblog
Posted at 05:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Hot Betas: Latengo.com, Boober.nl, And eLolly
Image source: The Warning Sign Generator
It's beta season in Europe. A couple of startups are cloning Zopa - to one degree or another - in the Netherlands i'ts Boober.nl and in Germany it's eLolly. And over in Germany self-financed Latengo.com (beta) has launched a "digital life" platform to make it easy for users and special interest groups to share, trade, and look at each other's digital stuff.
More below the jump.
We established Latengo because of a problem. We wanted to know: which person in my entire social network has a special item. It is easy to explain this when using a DVD. I want to see that movie Terminal with Tom Hanks. But I don’t really wanna buy it. So we needed a website where we can find out „who of my friends owns „Terminal““. If I find someone I can easily ask him if he can get me that movie. I can discuss that movie with him or other people and so on… there are serveral possibilities to use Latengo. E.g. DVDs, Books, Youtube Videos, Links.. etc.
The startup, founded in September 06, launched in November. The founders, Ortwin and Dieter Kartmann, Thorsten Buss and Dirk Rudolf, are coming out of the of ePayment, online community, and software development sectors. Self-financed, the startup employs all but one of the founders work full-time at Latengo. Their site has signed up about 10,000 users.
Quite a few users - how did you do it so quickly?
We engaged some people to support us in the development of the community. Plus it's a cool website and offers a lot of interessting features to attract people to use it and participate in the planning.
Plans are afoot for international expansion. If it takes off in Germany, the founders will look enable international growth some outside financing.
Boober.nl
Our Dutch language skills are virtually zero, but we have enough to see that Boober.nl has launched a person to person loan exchange, much along the same lines of the pioneer of this fairly new category Zopa, which is now backed by Benchmark Capital and other Euro VCs. Boober does a credit check on borrowers with Experian and INTRUM JUSTITIA. It also distributes the loans over several borrowers. Boober takes a fee from the lender and the borrower, and charges for the credit check, according to the Prosper Group News blog.
Part of its publicity approach seems to be taking a poke at ABN Amro bank
eLolly.de
This one claims €5M in loans on offer. It's out of Germany. It does the matchmaking, but we don't see any information that it also does the credit-worthiness checks that Zopa does. That's an important and crtical difference.
Posted at 05:27 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 18, 2007
OnlineGameChallenger - The King.com For Clans
King.com is an early and successful example of how a couple of smart European entrepreneurs saw the boom in casual gaming and figured out how to make money on it. Now that several other categories of online gaming are
growing, other entrepreneurs are forming startups with similar business models.
There's PrizeFight (beta) in the UK, whose founders we've talked to several times in recent months, and they tell us that the startup is doing well financially with its focus on first-person shooter games. The founders have impressive experience.
View Prizefight
If You're Not Up To Speed on Call of Duty, This Clip From The US-Version of The Office Will Do
We've been chatting with Scholten over the past year as he got this thing off the ground and it has been an education in Euro bootstrapping and new online gaming trends for us.
In a remarkably short period of time, considering the small budget he had, Scholten has created a platform for virtual teams to play against each other on Call Of Duty2, Counterstrike, and EnemyTerritory.
Now he's rounding up the "clans" with the platform in beta mode. Besides tapping his own network of online gamers, Scholten attracts new members to download the OGC client and signon by teaming up with with the likes of German games portal, Tek-9 Networks, and other sites for promotional showmatches that encourage online clans (groups of gamers) to compete for prize fees of betwen €100 and €250 at the moment.
OGC takes a commission on the wagering, like King.com.
The winner will be the ones that can build the most trusted platform, the fastest, and since VCs don't target the segment until there's pretty big numbers, having a low cash burn is going to be critical.
View OGC
Posted at 08:48 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 15, 2007
Munich's Cosmotourist Raises More Angel Funds
Travel community Cosmotourist has pulled in Dr. Christoph Roeck as an angel investor. Roeck left the Pangora shopping network at the end of February and is will joining his former co-Managing Director and founder of Pangora, Constantin Wunn.
Cosmotourist runs websites in 9 countries including the US, Germany, France and the UK.
View - site
Posted at 06:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 06, 2007
Red Monitor Founder Readies New Digital Options Exchange
Austrian startup Red Monitor is a new online digital options exchange in beta that has a predictive markets appeal. Unlike other new web apps, this one doesn't want you to share your photos and video, rather share your predictions about the movement of a stock and make bets accordingly.
The a:c euro is no expert on derivatives and exotic investment products, but we ran it by one of our longtime industry sources, whose been running currency information and trading systems here for over a decade. He said that Red Monitor "fills a gap", an area of the online trading market that hasn't seen widespread take up yet.
The Demo At Red Monitor Shows The Predictive Market In Action
We think the startup is one to look at mainly because of the founder Hubertus Hofkirchner. He has already built two online brokerages for Austrian banks and as CEO he did an impressive turnaround of Austrian mobile operator, tele.ring.
When Western Wireless International acquired tele.ring in 2001 for €10 (yes ten euros) he was appointed as CEO of the unprofitable mobile network operator. Hofkirchner took the company into the black and it was then acquired by T-Mobile last year for €1.3B. He had shares in the company which contributed in part to his being able startup Red Monitor.
Hofkirchner plans to launch officially in April. The service operates under the eyes of the Austrian Finanzmarktaufsicht, the equivalent of the FSA in the UK and supports predictions for shares traded on several stock exchanges, as well as indexes.
Hofkirchner believes that it will appeal to both consumer (retail) investors as you can start off with a €10 balance in the account, and professionals. Leverage is available, up to 250 percent. Why would pros use it? The founder answered: "Apart from reducing trading cost and providing greater flexibility for trading strategies, digital leverage will reduce capital requirements and make risk more manageable."
The image below shows the flow of info at Red Monitor.
The big question mark over Red Monitor, is it unique enough to compete against banks that offer this kind of trading online and how big is the market for this kind of thing. The plan is to support multiple currencies and languages - next is English.
Given his track record, we think that Hofkirchner is in a position to figure out what it takes to make this a bigger business. Although we wonder about calling the firm Red Monitor - call it a knee jerk reaction but red isn't the colour you want associated with the balance in your online trading account.
Link- Red Monitor
Posted at 06:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 18, 2007
Smart Ball Startup From MyOrigo Founder
We just learned that Ball-IT Oy has raised funding from Finland's Aura Capital for its smart ball business. The deal actually closed a while ago but we only learned about it when we asked Johannes Vaananen, co-founder of the 15 month old company, to tell us a bit about his new startup earlier this month.
With an undisclosed amount of capital, Finland-based Ball-IT has developed a pingpong ball-sized Bluetooth-enabled remote control device for Windows and Mac applications.
Support for smartphone applications is next.
The Ball-IT device is not a direct desktop mouse replacement. "Rather it is a multi-purpose device," said Vaananen. Indeed, he sees consumers using it for motion-controlled gaming, interacting with 3D applications, surfing Internet and menus on Home Theater Personal Computers, and as a logging pedometer. It contains newfangled silicon accelerometers, magnetometers and pressure sensors (MEMS devices).
More details than these about the product were not provided as Vaananen said he is under NDAs with first customers. But products from an OEM should be available in the first half of the year, if it goes according to plan.
Readers familiar with the mobilephone market will know Vaananen as the founder and CTO of MyOrigo, a company that hit trade press headlines three or four years ago with its pioneering smartphone designs that enabled zooming, panning, and scrolling without a mouse, and simpler interactivity in general (see image left).
But innovative UI features have seen slow uptake by the world’s cellphone manufacturing companies -- just ask Tao Group, Surfkitchen and their peers how long it takes to win a contract -- and MyOrigo was acquired by US-based F-Origin, where Vaananen stayed unitl September 2005 when he left and teamed up Juha Rytky (CEO) to create Ball-IT.
The firm's business model involves both licensing the technology and its software to original equipment manufacturers (OEM), as well as manufacturing in partnership with an EMS partner for OEM's that in turn will handle sales channel logistics.
The Finnish startup has come quite far in a short time but making it big is going to be a challenge. We've seen companies like Anoto, also from the Nordic region, come to market with new ways to interact with computer applications, but it has struggled to get growth.
But unlike Anoto, Ball-IT is going beyond the PC. And there European startups have a better chance. The reportedly fast market uptake of France’s Nabaztag (also known as the WiFi bunny) from Violet SA (See Neteco link below), as well as the growth of TomTom on the back of GPS navigation gadgets, and Bluetooth gadget innovators, such as Parrot SA, has us thinking this way.
For techie a:c readers, you can get a software development kit that includes a Smart Ball to work with sometime in the first quarter from Ball-IT.
Read - Nabaztag doit montrer qu'il y a une vie après le PC (neteco)
Posted at 10:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 05, 2006
What Value Do VC's Add? One UK Startup's Answer
VCs always talk about their "value-add", but when you ask what they do in practical terms, it tends to get kind of fuzzy and vague. So we pounced on an article, found in the the Insitute of Engineering Technology's Engineering Management magazine, that describes in rare detail what one early stage VC did to get a semiconductor software startup off to a roaring start -- with the right buisness model and the right customers.
The VC in the spotlight is Pond Ventures and its portfolio company Transitive Corp. The article was a jointly authored investee-VC piece.
This kind of magzine article is very rare and there is really no excuse for that. It is true that based on our experience working freelance for financial and tech publications, there is not a lot of interest from our editors to write about European VC in action, but that is not a major hurdle. VCs have their own websites and can publish there whatever they want and there are pubs, like the one where we found this article, that will publish copy written by people in industry if it's written in an informative way. Check out the quotes we found most illuminating below the jump.
In case you haven't heard of Transitive, it's software is pretty disruptive for the chip market: it enabled Apple’s switch to Intel processors for certain products and it will also enable IBM to sell servers into the LInux/x86 market, while Intel can offer its Xeon and Itanium platforms to users that have been relying on Sun's SPARC products.
There are some good insights into Pond's modus operandi and the paragraphs that describe how it got Transitive it's first deal converts the value-add buzzword into a term we understand -- cashflow -- for the venture:
Irving and his colleagues at Pond had a completely different attitude towards an investment proposition... The other early stage UK venture capitalists said that, while the technology was interesting, he [Transitive's founder] should work to turn it into a fundable proposition, with a business plan, plus the target market and a management team. Then they would think about investing. Rawsthorne [Transitive's founder] had no idea how to do those things and had no idea which market sector would be the right first fit for the technology.
The quote shows what Pond did during due diligence, that is, before it had made a commitment to fund the company - which is certainly one way to help the startup tick another box to get "traction", another pet criteria that VCs typically require:
During the process of due diligence Pond set up a series of meetings with senior executives from all the major players in the microprocessor space and helped Rawsthorne put his pitch together, ensuring it was appropriate for the audience. It was during this process that Pond helped Transitive to secure its first customer with whom it arranged to do a proof of concept demonstrator deal with a significant price tag.
Read - Pick the right VC for you (iee management)
Read - Customer case study Apple (transitive)
Posted at 07:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 04, 2006
Alt Energy And Tech Pioneers - Nine From Europe
Since 2000, The World Economic Forum (the Davos confab that brings together the Bill Gates and Bill Clintons of this world) selects a few dozen "technology pioneers" each year - the ones that are going to be "changing the world as we know it", says the WEF.
The a:c euro doesn't know about the "world changing" part, which is probably more applicable to the bioscience companies, but Europe was the source for nine of the alt energy and computing- communications companies, which could end up to be great businesses.
Certainly, Ron Kok's OTB, a Dutch company whose products radically changed some parts of chip manufacturing, and now applies the cost-reducing know-how to solar cells, is already one.
Our impression from past years was that too many of the winners were from the portfolio of a single European venture capital fund or not very disruptive. This time some of the ventures have very original products and a few haven't been VC funded yet, such as Enfucell, a paper battery company, and Flisom, a Swiss solar cell startup. And a couple of others, Truphone and ClimateWell, are privately financed.
Regular readers will recognize a few some names from recent posts (see profiles below the jump), but also some that we have not covered, listed right here with descriptions from the WEF Technology PIoneers website:
A Russian Inventor And A British Entrepreneur Have Some Newfangled Electric Car Batteries (image of 3wheeler above is also from UMC)
UltraMotor Company - UK
UMC has developed an entirely new design concept for electric motors which provides high-end performance in a robust, low-cost solution. Ultra-motors are “permanent magnet DC motors. They consist of a steel stator disk with multiple permanent magnets attached and five U-shaped electro-magnets positioned on the outer rotor.
Dutch Startup IceMobile Delivers Up Sex And Sport Video Content To Mobilephones
IceMobile The Netherlands
IceMobile is a leading publisher of mobile entertainment content. In addition to publishing mobile video content on the portals of 30 European mobile operators, IceMobile launched its VideoCall2TV technology that allow viewers to make a video call from their third-generation (3G) mobile phone to a TV program and participate in the show with live spontaneous performances.
ClimateWell's Solar Powered Air Conditioners
ClimateWell - Sweden
ClimateWell AB is a supplier of highly efficient solar air conditioner equipment with the unique ability to store energy and convert hot water to cooling and heating. ClimateWell’s technology makes it possible to use solar energy for delivering cooling not only when the sun shines but around the clock.
Enfucell Ltd Finland
Enfucell, Ltd. develops thin and flexible power supplies for disposable micro electronic devices, such as smart cards, music playing greeting cards, micro mobile sensors, LED on paper, electronic paper, bi-stable display, and radio frequency identification tags.
Flisom AG Switzerland
Flisom, a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology spin-off, has a high-efficiency copper-indium-gallium-selenide solar cell technology that it plans to put on plastic foil—not glass—potentially opening up new applications like solar for cell phones.
OTB Group The Netherlands
OTB Group is a leading company in the design, engineering, development and manufacturing of tailor made inline production equipment. OTB Group operates through three units: OTB Engineering, OTB Display, and OTB Solar.Alfresco Software Inc UK Company Profile: Alfresco offers true Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging. Alfresco dramatically lowers total cost of ownership through open source distribution, working in the user's native environment, minimizing training and using low cost, loosely coupled hardware.Truphone UK/Germany
The company has developed a software infrastructure that allows mobile phones with Wi-Fi to make calls and send SMS messages using only Wi-Fi and the Internet. Crucially, when a Truphone-enabled mobile handset is out of Wi-Fi range it reconnects to the mobile network, allowing customers to roam between the two networks.DeepStream Technologies designs and manufactures digital sensors for three-dimensional packaging.This time around, over half of the Technology Pioneers 2007 are US-based companies, the UK has six and the Netherlands, India, Israel and Singapore two each; while Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland have one each.
Link - WEF Tech Pioneers 2007
Posted at 10:55 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 28, 2006
Pagebull Launches - Visual Search Results
Christopher Muenchhoff, one of the two founding team members of Pagebull.com, wrote in to tell us his firm has launched its new search site that instead of a page of text links, delivers up screenshots of hits in response to a search query - if the websites have been produced using standard web formatting (Flash pages are an issue, for example).
Search For the alarm clock And You Can Learn A Lot Before You Click Thru
Icons in the lower left corner of each "hit" describes the site's contents and a Zoom icon provides a larger view of the page. It's a search engine that you would use when looking for a particular website, or a company, or a product's homepage, not necessarily when researching a topic or looking for tickets to the next U2 concert.This is Muenchhoff's third venture. He co-founded Dealpilot.com in Germany back in the nineties, and subsequently sold a stake to Bertelsmann. Over the years it changed hands several times, finally ending up as eBay's Dealtime service. After that he founded a solar cell startup, but he closed it down in 2003 as he learned that a subsidies-driven business was not for him. He is also an angel investor in several German startups.
We asked a couple of our regular readers to take a look at the beta yesterday. (More below the jump)
The reactions were diverse. It takes about a minute to understand the search concept, especially if you have not been exposed to things like Ask.com's Binoculars feature. A minute or two can be perceived as a long time, we learned.
Another said it's great for finding out about a company - delivering an instant visual overview, displaying corporate blog, photos in Flickr, and the homepage, all in one page. But it is also clear that a broadband connection is required. A reader tried to access from China and had a slow response. And since he's a VC, he wonders how unique the underlying tech is and if a business can be built on the back of it without that differentiation.
We think it is a click reducing concept for the end user, and that it could also put a crimp in the traffic flow to sites that are set up to take advantage of people clicking through to them by accident. For the a:c that would not be a bad thing, actually - to lose some of the traffic from people looking for a "talking digital alarm clock" or a "rolling alarm clock".
As for the business behind such a tool, Muenchoff who is in the process of moving the venture and his family from Germany to Edinburgh, Scotland, says that he wants to see what kind of uptake it has, and then he can implement a traditional search biz model, such as sponsored links. The company is angel financed.
Posted at 12:51 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Whiskey-brand Has Scottish Startup's Display Tech On Tap
We picked up the news today that Glasgow-based Design LED Products has won its first commercial rollout with Scottish whiskey-maker The Famous Grouse, which will be installing point-of-sale displays in pubs in the UK exploiting the firm's innovative display technology.
We're reporting it because that kind of news usually presages a first round of financing.
One Display Has Many Ways To Animate That Logo
So far, the very-early-stage investor Braveheart Investment has been backing Design LED, which has patented the technology to make displays that enable mobilephone designers, indoor advertising display-makers, and even TV set manufacturers to add additional screen real estate to their hardware. It fits curved and 3D surfaces, something enabled by its getting rid of the rigid printed circuit board typically found in displays.It also has a "secret-until-lit" feature that lets viewers see only parts of the display, which is nice for animated logos, but really interesting when developing user interfaces for appliances or other types of consumer electronics, enabling icons only being backlit when appropriate to the programming sequence
Back in July, Braveheart invested about $400K in Design LED. It was a second tranche of capital for the almost two year old firm, according to an article in The Scotsman. Braveheart, which has nice digs in Perth, (image right) has a good track record in backing early stage electronics sector firms: it backed Wolfson MicroElectronics (one of the 10X venture capital exits in the European market since the bubble burst) as well as AIM listed MicroEmissive Displays.Read - Lighting up the Grouse brand at the point of sale (press rel.)
Read - Design LED is Braveheart's Alpha investment (The Scotsman)Posted at 07:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 27, 2006
Rounding Up Euro VC Dotcom Investments
How much money has gone into consumer Internet and media companies in Europe this year? That is the question that Paul Fisher, a corporate finance advisor at First Capital in London, is trying to answer. He is publishing his findings in his Coffee Shops Of Mayfair blog. The idea is to list 2006 Internet and media investments by the end of the year.
So far his research shows that the investment in the sector has increased, something he had predicted earlier in the year, as firms like Accel wake up to the sector, and US VCs put money into European firms in this category (part of a general interest in Europe by US VCs, the alarm:clock euro might add).
Fisher writes:
The type of companies are fascinating too: Far more online-offline models such as Moo and Spreadshirt, some of the filter technologies that excite me so much like Netvibes, PageFlakes and Last.fm, and also a new breed of online media properties like the wonderfully named DailyMotion.Posted at 06:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
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 at 06:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 13, 2006
Euro Rivals For Riya -> Pixsta and Polar Rose
Updated with Comment from Alexander Straub, who is a co-founder of Pixsta and an investor in Truphone, see end of this post.
At the a:c euro we like visual search, image search, anything to do with computer graphics, actually. Startups in these categories have the goods - like smart algorithms and brainy founders (in other words: Intellectual Property/High Barriers To Entry), and there just might be some new markets and applications emerging for these technologies.
We came across Pixsta this morning via Paul Jozefak's blog, which led us to Polar Rose. Pixsta is based in London, and Polar Rose, out of Malmo, Sweden. Both are developing image search products.
Pixsta, which has a demo site, is looking to apply its technology to online shopping, similar to the idea behind Like.com (an application launched this week from US-based Riya). Polar Rose, which is soon to launch in beta, is about finding photos of people and its commercial plans are not public.
These technologies can be applied to a number of businesses areas, online retailing as suggested above, but we guess they could also be used in search tools for developers of logos and corporate identity art, and possibly in search engines for stock photo and graphic art vendors.
Pixsta Helps Shoppers Find Similar Items
On Pixsta's demo site, Chez Imelda, we decided to look for some orange sandals and found a selection without having to enter a single search word. It delivered up the results without a click through, showing where to buy the new footwear.Here's how pixsta describes its software.
"Pixsta software reaches beyond the current text-based approach to search by automatically extracting visual content from images. we can organise large image collections into hyperlinked networks of visual similarity, so that users can browse the network to find images that come close to what they want, and also spark off new searches."
Our only criticism is the name of the company - maybe we're suffering from startup overload, but we find it hard to remember and the spelling tripped us up in our search for info on the company.Polar Rose's commercial intentions are not public. Right now it is aiming to find out what people do with the application when it launches in a beta pilot. We couldn't try it but got some screenshots. Its search engine plugs into your browser, finds the faces in a photo, asks the user to confirm, or select the face to be matched, and then seeks similar faces on the web or locally.
Polar Rose Finds The Faces
Asks You To Select And Label The Image To Search For
And Serves Up The Resuls With Some Information From Other Users
Alexander Straub of Straub Ventures and a co-founder of Pixsta writes in:
Just to point out you can click from the image on www.chezImelda.com to the retailers site. When above the button with a mouse two little logo’s appear, one to drag and drop the image into a depository (just if you like it) or click to the retailers landing page.Example of ChezImelda: You are looking for Crocs (the one Brad Pit wears – click on the orange sandal, you get an orange crocs, click on the crocs and half of the page is filled with the crocs in different shapes and colours. We basically offer 89 x 10 to the power of 10 = 89 trillion ways of shopping for 89,000 shoes. We need 89 trillion calculations to come off with the relative matrix of shoes all linked together by visual clues.
Update: VentureBeat has a thoughtful review of Like.com, and mentions Pixsta too.
Read - Visual Search Good For Shopping (venturebeat)
Read - Do I Really Like It (Paul Jozefak blog)
Read - Science Fiction News (Technovelgy)
Pixsta - visual browsing (Heiko's Blog)
Read - Suchmaschine erkennt Gesichter (DiePresse)
Read - Like.com Image Search Enging Launched (e-consultancy)Posted at 04:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 01, 2006
Cellity With Some Savvy Names
We keep up with what Spreadshirt founder, Lukasz Gadowski, publishes on his Gruenderszene blog and so should those interested in the startup scene in his part of Germany.He's been doing a series of video interviews, the latest of which is Cellity. We think it might be the beginning of something interesting, mainly because of where the people come from that are behind it, but also because of the size of the market it can tap.
Cellity aims to reduce mobilephone bills using a software-based least-cost router that has to be loaded onto the phone and then runs in the background.It works best with Symbian phones but it can also run on Javaphones, according to the interview with CEO and co-founder Sarik Weber. That is him with the megaphone above. He was formerly an exec at social networking startup OpenBC and at eProfessional, which was recently acquired by online ad tech startup Zanox.
Besides Weber, there is Nils Weitemeyer (who sold his last venture Elkware to Infospace in 2004 ) and Cellity just recruited the head of German operations for Skype, Tim von Toerne (picture right).
The founders have funded an R&D team of 10 since founding in June of this year and expect to launch mid-month.
Video - (Gruenderszene)
Read - Cellity Bekommt Prominente (Cellity Blog)Posted at 06:29 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 31, 2006
Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Videojug Are The Hot Betas
The Warning Sign GeneratorWe've been looking at the Museum Of Modern Beta's "The Hot 100" list, which ranks the "biggest" new beta-versions of applications in the "webosphere", based on the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us. It is updated weekly.
We think it's a pretty good way to measure popularity of new (mainly) Web 2.0 projects. So which Euro startups continue to place in the ranking over the past couple of weeks?
Netvibes (2),
Pageflakes (34)
CoComment (56)
VideoJug (84).These are just the ones we recognize and that have companies behind them. There could be others but we don't know them yet.
Link -The Museum of Modern Betas The Top 100
