alarm:clock euro

Return To Main alarm:clock euro

March 06, 2009

Amsterdam's Myngle Raises €1M For For Site to Sprechen Zie Deutsch

e-learning startup Myngle has raised €1M from Rabobank in a loan is backed by the Dutch government through an innovation program. Its interesting to see Rabobank get active. In January Rabobank invested in eFresh. Myngle had earlier secured €800K seed investment from the HenQ fund.

The startup's founder, Marina Tognetti, was a regional manager at eBay. There certainly does NOT seem to be much in the way of tech development here. Myngle assembled a database of instructors for students to chose from. They then pay via PayPal and finally students use Skype video-conference for their courses.

If only learning a foreign language could be so saucy.

View - site http://www.myngle.com

Posted at 06:01 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

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".
--------------
Thanks for the interview and for reading the alarm:clock euro.
-------------
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.

Latengo

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 UK

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

Image source:
The Warning Sign Generator

We'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

Posted at 03:45 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 27, 2006

German Startup Offers P2P Syncing For Outlook Apps

Germany's High Tech Gruender Fund has invested €500K in yet another university startup. This time it is Snyncing.NET Technologies, which sells software for synchronizing multiple PCs and PDAs running Outlook apps. (This is something like the German fund's 25th deal since it started up last year. Its very early stage dealflow is impressive.)

This looks like a neat way to enable syncing without requiring a Microsoft Exchange server to manage it.

The startup is a spinoff of the TU Berlin, which is selling its software - kind of a refreshing concept these days - and tells users to use either Groove Networks or Foldershare for the P2P stuff. It has some customer case studies up on its website, so it looks like the founding team is not just innovative, they can sell too. The only thing is the company name. The way it is now it sounds like the firm plans on sinking .NET, which we are sure it's not. Besides, the pun potential is too rich.

A name change is probably inevitable as it will have to add more products in order to grow to a decent size, or maybe it is planning to sell software to synchronize other applications on other platforms. We didn't get a hold of the founders to find out.

Read - Berliner SYNCING.NET Technologies GmbH wird vom High-Tech Gründerfonds finanziert

Posted at 09:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Crowdstorm, Facebox, And Other Fresh Betas

Image source: The Warning Sign Generator
We'd have to give up our freelance journalist jobs to keep interviewing and profiling newco's coming out of Europe these days, so we hope you'll settle for briefs on what we think is hot. The criteria to be in the list is purely subjective. Either we've tried the product and liked it, or we think the founders are smart guys, or it's their backers who have been prescient in the past.

Incrowd, a Belgian bootstrapped developer of online communities, wrote in to tell us of its launch of Facebox, a new Europe-oriented online community platform targeted at young people. It is not in Beta mode so doesn't exactly fit with our title but we're pressed for time here. Like some of the other social networking sites out there, users make personal webpage, share video, music-likes, and photos with each other. It looks like it handles the Pan European traffic by reading browser setting for users that land on its homepage, offering up the appropriate country-specific languages. That will be important for advertisers. Incrowd claims it already has more than 15 million members throughout Europe on its other sites, namely Gentebox (Spanish market, 5 million members), Bingbox (English market, 3.5 million members), Redbox (Flemish market, 1 million members), Coolbox (French market, 2 million members). The company was founded in 2003 by Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert and is self-funded.

Alexaholic Says Its Traffic Is Getting Up There
Read -Facebox - A new online community platform (press release)

Crowdstorm - Newfangled shopping engine whose registered users recommend consumer goods. It is in Beta mode. Both of the founders were previously with venture-backed startups that were acquired by big Internet names. CEO Philip Wilkinson, founded Shopgenie, a comparison shopping engine, and then merged it with Kelkoo and built up the UK biz, and his co-founder is a former Ciao.com man. British.
Read - CrowdStorm goes live
Read - Philip Wilkinson On Social Shopping (econsultancy news)

Nooked - Selling software to marketing types at businesses to complement email marketing tactics. Irish. We know that email marketing technology developers are closely looking at RSS as a complementary feature to add to their software product lines. That means pioneering companies like Nooked will either expand and add email marketing to satisfy all the online marketing requirements of businesses, or firms they will be acquired if they are able to rapidly validate the RSS-for-biz market by winning some big name customers. Email marketing engine developers will likely be keen to do bolt-on acquisitions.
Read -Interview Fergus Burns (webpronews)

Posted at 09:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 22, 2006

This Time Around Europe Is Disruptive

When it comes to telecoms, finance, and Internet apps, Europe is more disruptive this time around. It is one conclusion that you can draw from a feature entitled, Disrupters: Eleven Companies Eleven Big Ideas That Will Change The World, developed by Business 2.0 journalists.

During the last big wave of investment in technology ventures, aka the bubble, we were writing more often about European followers that had innovated to serve the local markets here and companies that had a small part of new disruptive value-chain.

It is looking a little different this time around. Three out of eleven disrupters identified by Business 2.0 are European.

And in our pages here we've covered a few more in areas such as semiconductors, wireless voice and data, and ecommerce. The latest and one (which we haven't covered yet) is Zecco.com, a "financial community" startup founded by Dutch entrepreneurs that says it is going to offer free online trading for US stocks.

But let's get back to Business 2.0's list.

Internet: Netvibes
In the case of Netvibes, and its rivals, it should say "Yahoo's world".

Telecoms: Jajah (the founders are transplanted Austrians) Skype set the trend to shake up the telco voice world. Jajah is there, along with others like Rebtel out of Sweden, the UK's Truphone and Atelplus (Germany) in the mobile market. If telcos don't move really soon to offer competing services, they will be operating in a whole new, much smaller, world.

Finance: Zopa
A few more Zopa clones than Prosper, the only other one we know of, could indeed change the world of companies active in consumer lending.

Posted at 07:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 06, 2006

Everyclick's Eyeballs For Charity Pitch

The latest issue of Private Company Intelligence newletter, a free weekly publication from Library House, reports that the UK firm's database is getting a lot of traffic with users looking for information on Everyclick, a search engine that attracts users by offering to give 50% of its advertising and affiliate marketing revenues to a charity the user selects.

There's a list of 1500 charities to choose from.

Library House says Everyclick was launched in June 2005 and now handles about a million searches per month. Everyclick is currently finalising a second round of funding, the newsletter's editor pointed out.

Everyclick Delivers Eyeballs To Advertisers And Shares Sales With Charities
Read PCI Weekly Newsletter (library house)

Posted at 12:41 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Silicon Valley Move For Webwag, A Netvibes and Pageflakes Rival

Webwag, a new rival for Netvibes and Pageflakes that emerged from France, sent us an announcement today that it's launching in the US from its new headquarters in Palo Alto. Earlier this month, alarm:clock euro interviewed Franck Poisson, the company's founder, to learn more about the endeavour.

Webwag, like the other two mentioned, develops and delivers so-called personalized homepages, used by individuals to access web content, productivity and communications applications, as well as web services from a single place.

Poisson, who built up Google's business in France between '02 and '04 (he was employee number 270), started up Webwag earlier this year and launched it last month. He has invested his own money, and brought in some business angels -- no disclosure on who they are, except to say that some are former colleagues.

Before Google, he was with Looksmart in management and AOL in advertising sales.

The clue to Webwag is search advertising. Search is given a high priority on the Webwag default start page: a search form that offers Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Exalead searches is front and center.

It is an Internet application near to 39-year old Poisson's heart - it is his "passion", he said. And well it might be, as it has made him wealthy and has given him a great career. Poisson said he tried "early retirement" after Google went public [and some share vesting], but he got quickly bored, and subsequently did some business development consulting for Exalead, a French privately-owned search company that had been focusing on enterprise search until Poisson started to advise its management to move into other markets. Exalead is also part of the Franco-German search engine project called Quaero.

Now he's in Palo Alto with the goal of demonstrating to Internet users in the larger US market that they can "mix it up" between the various brands of contents and services on Webwag.

"We are going to show that you don't have to go to MSN to chat, Yahoo to email, YouTube for entertainment and other web sites. They can come to you," said Poisson.

Webwag's R&D will remain in France. The engineering operations stay here, according to Poisson, because "there are more skilled engineers available" for hire. It is not as competitive in France for talent as it is in Silicon Valley.

We asked him why the personal homepage is so popular in Europe (Netvibes and Pageflakes are also European) He answered: "Europeans are less addicted to the big brands - the users are more independent, less hooked on one destination," said Poisson.

We tried Webwag out a few weeks ago and liked the uncluttered look of it. It is almost too minimalistic. It was only after some clicking indiscriminately on the page with our mouse that we figured out that clicking the Webwag logo is what activates the menu to add and edit feeds, widgets (small applications that run inside the homepage) from Webwag's network of third party software developers.

Whether or not the personalized homepage will emerge as a real Internet business, or as a new category on the same level as a portal, search engine, or a browser, as some VCs are hoping, only time will tell. We agree that they can untether users from the big portals and also believe that these startups will likely find ways to generate revenues, but one basic issue we have with using these pages over a well-equipped and customized Firefox browser, for example (complete with feedreaders, cocomment integration, bookmarks and the like) is the response times for interaction. It is like having a browser inside a browser, which makes it slow.

We still think that what these applications do best is act as superior news and feedreaders. At this job, Webwag, Netvibes, and Pageflakes are excellent.

In the meantime, for some informed opinion on how online advertising can be leveraged for this type of application it is worth reading a post by Ads-Click CEO, Pascal Rossini, that a) drew our attention to Webwag in the first place and b) analyzes ways that such sites can exploit online advertising for at least one promising revenue stream.

Read - Netvibes, Pageflakes, WebWag, or how to monetise my “me” ? (Pacal Rossini blog)

Posted at 10:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 04, 2006

TVBLOB: An Italian Take On User Generated TV and Video Chat

This summer the alarm:clock euro interviewed Fabrizio Caffarelli, CEO and founder of TVBLOB, an Italian startup that has a new twist on the idea of user generated TV. His company is offering a video call service that utilizes any televison and a souped up set-top box to enable two-way video communications. It is currently recruiting Italian consumers to trial the service.

Anyone that has hunched around a webcam on their PC to call distant family members on MSN Messenger or Skype will like this idea. Personal videoconferencing on the PC has improved lately, but video quality still isn't great.

TVBLOB says it over comes the technical issues of video over IP and makes it possible to make the video calls in places people normally gather like the living room. “In fact, we’re offering people a new way to communicate with family, friends or anyone else, only it’s through televisions instead of computers," said Caffarelli.

TVBLOB is headed up by Caffarelli, 61, who made his fortune in the nineties. He founded Easy CD, a company that develped and sold CD-ROM mastering solutions for the consumer market, moved the engineering team early on from Italy to the US, and after several years of quick growth, he sold it to Adaptec.

Post trade-sale, the Italian entrepreneur tried the villa-and-olive-grove life in Tuscany, but was lured back to technology venturing when he came up with the idea for this company about 7 years ago.

So far the startup has been targeting niche video applications: broadcasting, corporate videoconferencing, and security surveillance operators, as well as licensing the firm's middleware to Japanese suppliers reference designs and set-top box manufacturers.

Caffarelli has invested about €4M of his own money in research and product development. He says TVBLOB’s box does the same kinds of things that boxes from Sling or Tivo do, plus it has server functionality, and most importantly, it handles the vagaries of video over IP networks.

"If you think that enabling broadcast quality video over IP networks is insignificant, know this: in a demo we recently presented in Taiwan, exchanging live video between Milan and Taipei, the signal passed through 25 different Internet service provider networks," said Caffarelli.

The quality of the video and the streaming technology is so good, apparently, that television broadcasters, such as Italy's RAI and CNBC, use it for local studios.

But now it's time to go from niche to a consumer market. The founder is betting that some of the new fiber network operators, such as utility companies in Denmark and The Netherlands, are going to take up his offer to co-market the service along with the hardware.

"The fiber operators need to find something compelling to offer potential customers. Right now, their subscribers are asked to pay a higher price for very high speed Internet, but most people don’t need this level of bandwidth to surf the Internet or download email, consequently, they don’t upgrade,” pointed out Caffarelli, who added:

“There is very little in terms of services that truly take advantage of the power of fiber and our video communication solution, TV-to-TV, is the first to do this.”

Indeed, the system works best with fiber to the home, or the fastest of DSL services, however, Caffarelli conceded that it could work over a 512K link, but it is a stretch.

Currently, talks are underway with Italy’s Fastweb about co-marketing the TVBLOB boxes to its 2 million fiber-to-the-home subscribers. Caffarelli also said that he is working on “a few more channels to market”, including retailers and ISPs that will offer service and hardware bundles.

We think that if the trials prove successful, this could end up being popular with fiber broadband operators, both incumbent and alternative operators. Video bloggers might also be early adopters.

But strategic partnerships with the likes of Logitech and Creative Labs would be good too, to make sure that there is a wider range of peripherals to go with the system, such as cameras, all-in-one remote controls, and microphones, ones that don't look to geeky in the living room or home.

Posted at 06:51 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Angels Back Hitflip's Cross Border Ambition And Growth At Home

Hitflip, an online DVD and CD trading exchange, turned down venture capital offers this summer in favour of raising capital from a syndicate of angel investors. The one year old firm, which employs 20 in Cologne, did not disclose the amount raised, but told us that it was a single digit million euro amount, enough to fund its expansion into Austria and the UK, to invest in scaling up its platform, and to take a bigger chunk of eBay Germany's DVD and CD business.

We interviewed by email Hitflip's 26 year old co-founder and CEO, Jan Miczaika (he's on the right here), about Hitflip's digital media swapping platform. Read on to find out what Hitflip is all about, its growth plans, and who its backers are.

He describes Hitflip as a website "rich with data, recommendations, and other peoples' opinions for finding and discussing new media products".

When a user "finds something interesting, press one button, and you receive the products hassle-free and without being afraid of ripoffs". The price is "almost free," he said, adding that listing an item on the exchange is free. When a trade takes place, the receiver of the item pays 99 Euro cents. The sellers' items are valued and exchanged based on a points system.

Hitflip's traffic puts it ahead of competing online service providers in its niche, both those that rent DVDs and those that provide an exchange platform, says Alexa, while Nielsen shows similar numbers for both DVD rental startup Amanga [now owned by Glowria] and Hitflip, Miczaika added.

To grow quickly now Hitflip will have to beat eBay in the pre-owned digital media niche in the German market. Miczaika says that eBay has 90,000 listings at any one time in the DVD area. His firm has about 45,000 titles.

The challenge is convincing those that would normally sell on eBay or similar auctions sites to use Hitflip's trading platform instead.

The idea of an online trading platform is not obvious to most consumers. "When someone wants a DVD or CD, normally one wonders where to get the best price for a DVD, probably Amazon or eBay. Trading is a latent demand, not something one actively looks for," said Miczaika.

He sees the new eBay Express service as validating his firm's alternative approach, that it shows that "eBay recognizes that the auction/fixed time model is not right for everyone".

But Hitflip will also have to do better with the number of sellers and buyers that find each other. "More of [eBay's] transactions close, but we are getting there. A key point is that it is not always to the benefit of the consumer to simply close the transaction regardless of the closing price" said Miczaika

In addition to directing his team's growing the market in Germany, Miczaika is launching in two other European markets, hoping to have at least one new country online by October.

He's looking at potential acquisition targets, but said that he would ideally like to acquire a "complete team with deep local expertise and networks", not necessarily one that is already running a similar company on another technical platform.

"We are tracking a number of possible acquisition targets. What we would be buying is traction [an installed base of users or customers]. But I don't really think buying another platform makes sense for us right now. Getting
consumers to migrate from one community platform to another is hard. So while we are open for discussion, what we are looking at is finding complete teams for new countries," he said.

Miczaika is counting on his private backers to face some of these challenges. He's already had help from Oliver Samwer, formerly of Jamba and Alando, with the marketing controlling system.

Some of the others, mainly successful tech entrepreneurs that made their fortunes either floating their technology ventures, or selling them in so-called trade sales, include Bernd M. Michael, the former European CEO and now advisor to Grey, the second largest advertising agency in Germany, Hans-Ruedi Heeb, a co-founder and early CEO of Esmertec, a developer of mobilephone software, Peter Schüpbach, CEO of Genevalogic, Gerrit Schumann, founder of element 5, an ecommerce software firm acquired by Digital River and Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Spreadshirt. Two companies, brains-to-venture, the corporate finance boutique and Net AG also took minor stakes.

Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 16, 2006

How To Be A Famous Incubator

European university incubators and science parks could learn a few things about how to market themselves from the recently formed Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. It gets regular attention in the business and tech trade press, which is bound to help some of its startups get noticed by potential partners, customers, and new hires.

Yes, it helps that there is a billionaire founder that is sponsoring the institute, one that a lot of journalists like, but carrying out timely and sensational launches, or demonstration of technical wizardry, is something that the HPI is doing right.

Take its latest press campaign, for example, demonstrating a 3D visualization software from one of its startup teams. It shows the outline of the Berlin Wall (in red) and No Mans Land in between, something it released almost to the date of the 45 year anniversary of the wall going up, and almost 17 years after it came down.

Read - Europe's Computer Genius (newsweek)
Read - Virtuell steht die Berliner Mauer wieder (spiegel)

Posted at 04:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 14, 2006

Early Stage Rivals: Bix vs BattleOut

Sister site, alarm:clock published a post last week analyzing Bix.com out of Palo Alto. It has a European rival doing something similar, called BattleOut. Both are early entrants into a new kind of online contest where users particpate in the creation of competitions and vote the winners. Both offer prizes.

Bix.com runs karaoke and photo contests, and has raised $6.78M in VC funding from firms like Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Stanford University. Bix founder and CEO Mike Speiser previously launced Epinions.

We tried BattleOut and believe that it has the better designed interface, but is mainly focused on offering contests between two challengers, rather than several the way that Bix does. At the moment it is focused on photo contests - winners are judged not necessarily based on the quality of the photo, rather the attractiveness of what is pictured, e.g who owns the nicest car or has the prettiest girlfriend.

Email notifications tell contestants when new "battles" starts and when they end. If you don't cancel, new battles keep getting set up by the platform. So it is sticky, as the web insiders say.

It also encourages contestants to get friends and colleagues to sign up to be a registered user as a registered user vote is worth ten times as much as a casual passerby vote. The Dusseldorf-based creators are currently looking to raise angel funding, we hear.
Read - Epinions Founder Raises (alarm:clock)

Posted at 03:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 10, 2006

FootieFox A Kickin' Firefox Plugin

SAP co-founder, Hasso Plattner, has started up an incubator in Potsdam, as we mentioned before. One of its prodigy, FootieFox, a very light (less than 100KB) plugin for Firefox that delivers news feeds, in this case football match scores, to the browser, has been getting some good press ever since the World Cup Soccer Finals earlier this year. Reports published in July said it had been downloaded 250,000 times.

Mr FootieFox The Dev Team's Mascot Recently Came Under The Hammer On Ebay - The Team Needed Some Cash

We are going to keep an eye on it to see if the team makes a business out of the code.
Read - DSLTeam.de - News - Mr. FootieFox unterm Hammer (dslteam)
Read - Review in Chip Online (chip c't)

Posted at 12:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 02, 2006

German Fund Seeds 8 Firms In 4 Weeks

Some VCs we know pan investments made by quasi-state backed funds, which is an attitude they might regret, if you ask us. We're looking at the latest investments by Germany's High-Tech Gründerfonds in Bonn (roughly translates as the High Tech Founders' Fund), and we'd say that at least some of them are worth looking at a little more closely.

The recently established fund draws down capital from the state, but also BASF, Deutsche Telekom, and Siemens, and it has been steadily publishing news about its latest investments (about €0.5M each) since mid-June. Some of the startups also received co-investments from early stage VCs and some famous founders. See our list below.

Scylab Media Makes A Handy Device That Can "See" Objects In The Path Of The Visually Impaired

- GILUPI GmbH, Berlin makes Nanosensors for pregnancy tests (co-investors private)
- m2p-labs GmbH, Aachen, Tools for biotech firms (co-investor Gesellschaft für innovative Beteiligungen mbH, Aachen)
- mimoOn GmbH, Duisburg makes newfangled antennas for mobile Internet access at xDSL speeds (co-investor enjoyventure Management GmbH, Düsseldorf)
- netCCM GmbH, Berlin Tools for developers of enterprise software (co-investors Humboldt Innovation GmbH and Stephan Schambach - famous founder of Intershop)
- PublicSolution GmbH, Dresden, Interactive electronic board games
- Product Value Systems AG, Dresden makes business software for product management. (Co-investors included IBG Beteiligungsgesellschaft Sachsen-Anhalt mbH and the PVS GbR, a group of investors managed by Dr.Arno Morenz and Vanessa Masing, Berlin)
- Scylab medic GmbH, Leipzig, develop sensor technology for use by the blind ( co-investor IVC Management GmbH, Aachen)
- Vanatec GmbH, München, Development tools for database developers (co-investor Seedfonds Bayern)

Read - High-Tech Gründerfonds meldet 8 Beteiligungen (vc on target)

Posted at 12:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 01, 2006

UK Startups Make CNET's Top Tech List

CNET Networks announced the finalists for its UK Technology Awards coming up this Fall. Although many of the firms that made the ranking are established companies, there is a surprisingly good showing for UK startups whose innovative products impressed the jury.

We marked with an asterisk * the names that we recognized because they have raised venture capital or private equity funding.

Enterprise Hardware Product of the Year - Azul Systems *
Networking Product of the Year - XenSource* and Zeus Technology*
Mobile Product of the Year - eCourier - eCourier.co.uk and Mazingo
Internet Innovation of the Year - Zopa *
Technology Partnership of the Year - Lagan Technologies* and CAPS Solutions;
CIO of the Year -- Phil Marnick - SpinVox

Read - CNET UK Tech Awards - List Of Finalists

Posted at 07:01 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 22, 2006

One Year Old Carbonite Gets Microsoft Money

3i-backed Carbonite says it has signed an agreement with Microsoft to bundle a year of free access to its online backup service with Microsoft Money 2007.

It says that packages of Microsoft Money 2007 Premium and Microsoft Money 2007 Home & Business will ship with a free subscription to Carbonite MS Money Backup. A renewal subscription will cost $14.95 per year, or potential customers upgrade to the full Carbonite Online PCBackup service for $49.95 per year.

Carbonite was founded in 2005 by David Friend and is one of several consumer-oriented online backup and storage companies active in the market right now. It's a 3i US portfolio firm since February.

Euro founders take note, the firm's marketing campaign is looking a lot more mass-market-friendly than some of the startups that we've seen coming out of Europe with almost identical services.
Read - Carbonite Online Backup Integrated with Microsoft Money 2007 (pr)

Posted at 10:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Groove-Clone Collanos Targets MBA Types And Angels

Since Microsoft acquired Groove a year or so ago, there have been a lot of entrepreneurs attracted to the collaborative software niche. The latest to launch is Collanos, which has a Swiss founding team and is based in Zurich and San Francisco.

Its first target market is consultant types and MBA students, based on the belief that this user group has the most pressing need for an application that can sync documents between users working for different companies or outside of a company context, as well as support working offline, recently recruited CEO Peter Helfenstein told the alarm:clock euro.

He also said that the startup is currently seeking angel funding.

Collanos, which runs on the three major operating systems, hopes for a network effect and rapid user uptake based on a free version and premium services that provide additional functionality and convenience, such as team synchronization servers, desktop integration, and custom functionality.

The company was founded in 2003 by software engineer, Franco Dal Molin who hails from Miracle, a now-defunct Swiss ERP software developer. He funded development via family and friends, near-sourcing some of the development in Bulgaria.

(a:c euro readers may remember Miracle. It was founded in the mid-ninenties and became one of the high flyers in Switzerland short bubble era. Its spectacular IPO made a few investors wealthy, its underwriting bank a small fortune, and some returns also went to the firm's management team, but the stock eventually plunged and the company flopped, due to a combination of bad press in Switzerland amidst tech stock bubble implosion. Software firms do not fare well on SWX as a general rule.)

Before that Dal Molin founded Object Solutions and sold it to GFT Technologies.

Based on consulting the expertise of some of our readers, the a:c euro believes that Collanos has as good an opportunity as any of the competitors in this hotly contested market. Its CEO has software industry experience but as with other web-based applications it is all a matter of who leads in the network effect and finds the best way to capitalize on the user base.

Read- Collanos Pioneers With Peer-to-Peer 2.0 Teamwork Solution (press release)

Posted at 06:24 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 04, 2006

Myvideo Seeks Network Effect And VC

Myvideo.de, a video portal for the German market launched in April, is gaining ground according to the firm's CEO and founder, Christian Vollmann, who told us that his website was the only German online video community to make it into the Nielsen Netratings ranking in May 2006 for Germany with 320,000 unique visitors.

Vollmann is aiming to build the "best video community in Germany with the most entertaining content" by partnering with the popular portals and movie rights owners.

The 28 year old founder hails from dating site ilove.de, a subsidiary of Jamba!, which he started up and managed. Jamba! is a mobilephone ringtone and games service that was acquired by Verisign, and before that gig, he was with Alando (which was acquired by eBay back in the bubble era). He was the third employee at Alando.

Both Jamba and Alando were founded by the Samwer brothers. Vollmann declined to say whether or not the Samwer's were financially supporting his venture.

MyVideo has three revenue streams in the works and is currently looking for venture capital, or a strategic investor. It is registered in Romania where the R&D is done, but Vollmann is based in Berlin, the startup's base for marketing, support, and editorial operations.

The founder said that 98 percent of myvideo's content is user generated. We can add some of this content is raunchy, judging by the teaser stills and the description of the video titles that were on the front page the day we eyeballed it. It's not for kids.

Its closest rival in the German market is Sevenload.de, which started earlier. On the competition Vollmann said: "The first one who hits the network effect will lead."

Posted at 08:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 27, 2006

Netvibes Founder Says Mainstream Adoption Up, Still No Biz Model

CNET has an interview with Tariq Krim, founder of personal "homepage" software firm, Netvibes, at Supernova a Silicon Valley confab.

Points he makes: Netvibes interface is to Web 2.0 what the MAC graphical user interface was to computing (ie. it opened up the computer to a whole new user group: graphic artists and designers). And so it is that Netvibes opens up RSS, blogs, and other Web 2.0 apps to mainstream Internet users - not just geeks anymore.

Netvibes has 4M users now, half are in the US, and the rest are distributed globally. He's still looking for a business model. Update: He actually said that he's still looking for the "killer" business model.

View - Netvibes corrals your digital world (cnet)

Posted at 10:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 26, 2006

French Linux Guru Starts Up Ulteo

As some people say, all it takes to create a new business is a resentment and a coffee-machine, or a case of Red Bull, if your under thirty.

And so it is with Ulteo, a French startup aiming to develop nothing less ambitious than a new open source approach to operating system software. Its founder is Gaël Duval, the key developer of Linux Mandrake, who was recently ousted from Mandriva, formerly known as Mandrakesoft, with nothing but a thank-you (he writes) and a "two-month standard" severance package.

NewsForge says that Duval is suing his former company, but more interesting is that he has formed Ulteo.

We're looking into the startup effort and can report that it is using the Kubuntu/Debian distribution (according to Wikipedia).

Duval created Linux-Mandrake in 1998 which was based on Red Hat Linux and it became known as being the easiest-to-use version of Linux. The company he formed around it was called Mandrakesoft, and later Mandriva.

Mandriva came close to insolvency several months after it floated on the lightly regulated Marche Libre in France in mid-2001, raising a meagre €4M. Our research shows that two investors, a US hedge fund and a French investment firm called Remote Reward stepped in to shore up finances.

In the meantime, it has changed its market focus and business model, in an effort to reach profitability. It has also acquired several other open source firms, namely Conectiva in Brazil, Edge IT in France, and Lycoris in the US.

Ulteo is based on an idea that Duval had brought to the Mandriva's management team back in 2004 that was ultimately rejected, he writes.

We think that there is going to be a lot more of this kind of thing in the coming 18 months due to the hefty number of startups that VCs have shopped to larger technology companies in M&A deals as they seek to exit bubble era invetments (as opposed to IPOs where it is more common for founders to stay on, that is if the founders are still with the company by the time it floats.)

As the post-merger key-man lock-ins end, and related non-compete clauses get lifted, founders are not retiring to Toscana to live the dolce vita, they are setting out to either repeat their past success, or make more money than they did last time around.

Examples abound, such as the post M&A activity of the founders of Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo, and Musiwave, acquired by Openwave, who have since created Wikio and Eyeka, repsectively.

There are also reports about departures at SUSE Linux (acquired by Novell in 2003). Our research show that several founders and early employees have subsequently joined or create new startups.

Although not all of them actually begin with a resentment, the trend for founders to become serial entrepreneurs is pretty clear from where we sit.

Read - Gael Duvall's Fired Message (personal web page of Duval)
Read- NewsForge | Mandrake founder Gael Duval to sue Mandriva over firing (newsforge)

Posted at 10:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Samwers' European Founders Fund: Interview

As regular readers know, from time to time the alarm:clock euro profiles early stage ventures. But we also want to cover those who work with and advise seed stage firms, and today it is the European Founders Fund getting the treatment.

We spoke to Oliver Samwer (m) who along with his brothers, Marc (l) and Alexander (r), are the "founders" named in the fund. This was the first interview the recently minted venture investment team has ever given.

In case some readers are not familiar with recent European venture history, the Samwers are so-called serial entrepreneurs. They founded online auctioneer Alando in 1999, which six months later was acquired by eBay for $50M during the bubble.

Subsequently, they established the mobilephone ringtone and content company, Jamba, which was acquired by Versign for $273M.

In business as investors for about nine months now, the European Founders Fund has enetered the equity of 7 startups, 4 in Europe, and 3 in North America, and is looking to add 5 or 6 more in the coming year.

Current portfolio firms include Hitflip.de, a Peerflix clone, e-Sport.de, a developer of browser-based games, and Myphotobook.de, a Berlin-based publisher of books based on digital photo albums.

In many ways, the setup and approach is similar to the Scandinavian early stage investor Lund/Kenner, which we profiled in April (See link below).

Both offer capital for early stage ventures, but what makes them different is the level of advice and industry contacts provided by the prinicpals.

Typically, venture capital firms tend to operate more or less at a strategic level, often interacting only during board meetings.

With this team, it's daily contact, and its operational rather than strategic advice, according to Samwer.

It does not insist on a board seat when investing. "We're not the board meeting types, and prefer to work at the operational level with founders," said Samwer.

For these reasons, the team handles 3 or 4 active investments at any given time. "We can help wireless and Internet startups, particularly those with a consumer focus but also B2B, to be more successful. We do that by building the business model with them, showing how to convert customers using free services to premium services, how to grow in the European online market, search optimization, help to meet the right people to make deals with portals, and matchmaking with partners both online and offline," said Samwer.

This business development advice is key. The three venture-backed US firms that have accepted an investment from the European Founders Fund did so because they felt it would help them to enter the European market, said Samwer.

It seems to be a formula that helps them close. "Every investment opportunity we have approached, we got into, and our offer was accepted," he added.

Because of that hands-on approach, the most important aspect in making investment decisions for Samwer is the management team of the startup. "If the chemistry is right, we will invest," said Samwer.

Chemistry, or an affinity between the founders and the investors, is important because the Samwers work closely with their investees during the early phase of investment. "We are in daily contact with founders. They come to us with ideas and problems. We help them address the issues," said Samwer.

The value of their experience is noted by venture capital investors as some are starting to bring in the European Founders Fund in order to help develop portfolio companies.

For example, about six months after Index Ventures invested in Oanda, the Delaware-registered company behind fxtrade.com which is managed by teams in Zurich and Toronto, Samwer's fund was invited to participate in the investment.

"We are helping Oanda with the development of the European market for its foreign exchange trading services," he said.

Established nine months ago, the European Founders Fund is called a fund, but its activity is more like a business angel. It is a partner for entrepreneurs looking to develop their business model and develop online and wireless services.

The Samwer's are investing their own money, rather than capital raised from a set of limited partners as VCs do, and they only invest where there is a potential to help at an operational level with entrepreneurs.

Since the firm does not have a website and has no plans to put one up here's a summary.

Quick Facts About European Founders Fund
- Deal Size = 500K to 2M
-Offer=advice and contacts on expanding and developing new markets for
online services.
-Sector Allocation= Software: consumer-oriented wireless and Internet
businesses, including exchanges, networks, and online services. Also open to
B2B.
-Geographic= North America and Europe
-Market opportunity= greater than €100M
-Stake size=Open to minority investments
-Board seats=Not necessary
-Liquidation preference=Yes
-Portfolio Companies: Oanda (fxtrade.com), Myphotobook.de, e-sport.com, Hitflip.de plus 3 other undisclosed ventures.
-Contact: oliversamwer @ yahoo.de

Read: Lund Kenner Stakes Out The Early Stage (alarm:clock euro)

Posted at 03:29 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Who Is Eutube, er Europe's Youtube

Updated: If you are looking for the European Union's new Eutube site, find it here.

Several startups are aiming to emulate the success of YouTube in Europe. It's early days to start calling winners but we wanted to get a handle on the development so far.

We picked four whose names have reached the alarm:clock euro's ears, and ran them through Alexa (which tracks users of the Alexa IE toolbar) and Urlfan (which tracks blog mentions) and it looks like Dailymotion, which comes out of Paris, has the lead. It probably helps that it has been online the longest. Time will tell if it keeps the pole position.

Dailymotion
Urlfan says ranks 359 out of 1,844,043 sites

Sevenload.de
Urlfan says ranks 8218 out of 1,844,043 sites

Myvideo.de
Urlfan says ranks 17817 out of 1,844,043 sites

vpod.tv
Urlfan says ranks 27367 out of 1,844,043 sites

Posted at 12:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Spotzer, Europe's Answer To SpotRunner For TV Ads

Dutch startup, Spotzer Media Group, launched this week an online service to make creating television ads more accessible to firms with smaller advertising budgets in Europe. It also helps to buy airtime on broadcast networks and regional markets. Additional services include placing video ads on mobilephone networks and public video displays (in airports for example).

Spotzer Applies Web 2.0 To Advertising Videos

The a:c euro asked Spotzer about the competition and barriers to entry and first mover advantage.

On competition

Unless we are totally off-target, we are certain to face many other competitors, from other start-ups to new initiatives developed by groups such as Google. (whose business development head recently said in a press interview that local video advertising was one of the biggest next opportunities) and Yahoo and perhaps even E-Bay (which recently won a contract to create an auction platform through which advertisers could buy and sell airtime.)

On the potential for copycats:

The barriers to entry, on the other hand, are pretty significant. What we are trying to do is not easy. We have to define an entire new genre of commercial that works for multiple advertisers operating in different cultures. The creative is actually very challenging and we are spending a huge amount of time with exceptional people trying to figure out what will work. Then, beyond the ads, there are the challenges of getting the message to local, small advertisers.

Is being one of the pioneer for this type of service provide an advantage?

We think being the first mover helps, since we are going to have opportunities to make partnerships with media companies who are looking for ways to enable local advertisers to purchase their inventory. If our efforts work, then the next guys will have to really out-do us before they get the same opportunities.

The company was founded earlier this year and is funded by private investors and the founders, namely, Thed Lenssen, who is a well-known European commercial director, and John Mezzina, former Young & Rubican creative
director and co-founder of Mezzina/Brown. Lenssen has directed commercials for Heineken, Philips, Volkswagen and many others and is the founder of The D-Films and Snoep Films, both based in Amsterdam.

Read- Industry Veterans to Pioneer New Media Model (press release)

Posted at 09:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 21, 2006

Uniqall Looks To Finance Its Challenge To Brooktrout, Intel Netstructure HMP and Co.

Makers of IP media servers, which are used for interactive voice response (IVR), voice mail, messaging, and conferencing applications, might be in for some competition from an unexpected place, in the form of a startup
coming out of Zagreb called Uniqall.

If, that is, Uniqall's founder successfully raises the capital required to ramp up sales and marketing.

Back in 2001, Uniqall founder, Boris Pavacic, decided to develop a software-only IP media server, counting on the fact that PC processors would be powerful enough to handle a software-only solution, and that VOIP was the
way the telecoms market was going.

He raised a relatively tiny amount of seed financing from local business angels and has since demonstrated that his vision was the right on the money. Pavacic says that Uniqall is generating revenues without having invested in sales and marketing, and continues R&D, having recently completed the third release of its software.

Croatia May Be Struggling To Get Ahead In This Year's World Cup, But This Team Is Doing Well In The IP Media Server Game

The Croatian startup's product is a good 20 times lower in price than the equivalent Intel hardware-based solution, according to Pavacic. Other competitors include Brooktrout, Audiocodecs, and Eicon.

To be sure, Intel is also developing a software-based IP media server product, called Netstructure HMP, which will compete with Uniqall's, but the startup's founder believes his agile and "legacy free" startup has a better
product and more incentive to drive market development.

The a:c euro is not an expert on IP media server market, but one thing we noted when comparing the two products feature sets that Uniqall's solution supports more operating systems than Intel's, including several Linux distributions and Solaris, for example, while Intel supports only Windows OS and an Intel modified version of a few Linux distributions.

Now Pavacic's next task is to find the right partner for the next stage of the firm's growth.

Posted at 10:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Lara Robot: A Vision in Pink

A team of students at Darmstadt Technical University (Technische Universitaet Darmstadt) have devleoped Lara, a humanoid robot that has some innovative metal alloy "muscle" and "foot" technology (pictured right).

She is 130cm tall and has 38 artifical muscles, which the developers say provides her 6 degress of freedom of movement in each leg and 3 in each arm.

They add: the use of muscles instead of servo motors (See Mr DD (left) and pictured below) allows a novel robot design based on a lighter and more flexible architecture.

She was on display at this year's robotic soccer championships, a geek's verison of the World Cup, which was covered by Wired correspondent, John Borland, who describes Lara as "a 51-inch-tall vision in pink that just might be the missing link". He adds: "I fall in love with her at first sight."

Compare Mr DD To Lara
Read - Androids Dream of Soccer Glory
Read - Lara's website (TU Darmstadt)

Posted at 06:55 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 19, 2006

Pitopia Flat Rate For Stock Photo Downloads

It might be tough to raise VC in Germany, but that is not stopping entrepreneurs from doing their thing. German royalty-free stock photo startup, Pitopia, is offering a flat rate price of €29.95 for users of its digital images, which is a change from some of the more complicated pricing schemes we've seen from its rivals. Besides the user friendly pricing, Pitopia's interface and search functionality is rich but simple.

Posted at 07:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 14, 2006

QuNano's Out To Disrupt Bright LED Chip Biz

Sweden's QuNano has raised venture capital to make high-brightness light emitting diodes (HBLED) on plain old silicon, rather than the more expensive substrates typically used for this type of semiconductor device.

It's modified CMOS process along with its own nanowire layering technology could be quite disruptive. The pitch is that within a couple of years Qunano could be mass producing LEDs, typically used as backlights and flashes in mobilephones, in long-life flashlights, and traffic lights (to name but a few apps), a lot more cheaply than the incumbents, such as Cree, Lumileds, Osram Opto, and Toshida.

According to its backers, Qunano owns what it calls a nanowire platform technology. The LED market is just the first that it is targeting.

Read - Qunano announces (press release)

Posted at 08:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 09, 2006

Zattoo= P2P + European TV + DRM

Looks like P2P streaming is attracting entrepreneurs and European broadcasters. We've been writing about Octoshape and now there's another entrant to mention, Zattoo.

The startup says it aims to deliver TV on the Web with the same quality as broadcast television, going for full DRM, authorized, and localized version of the service.

Based in San Francisco, with development in Ann Arbor and Zurich, Zattoo was co-founded by CEO Beat Knecht, a Swiss techie with management experience at UBS, McKinsey. Prior to founding Zattoo, he had been heading up marketing at Levanta (formerly Linuxcare) in San Francisco. Co-founder is CTO Sugih Jamin, an associate professor at Uni Chicago.

Zattoo debuts this week in Switzerland, broadcasting World Cup soccer matches for the national Swiss TV org Schweizer Fernsehen (SFI, 2 and TSR). It will be adding broadcasts from German, French, and Italian networks, as well as a smattering of news networks (Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, CNN etc)

We have an open question on the service - how does Zattoo know the location of the viewer? Is it based on the IP address or a virtual location based on email addresses? It must have some mechanism in place to restrict viewer access so that only those allowed to watch, based on the rights assigned the broadcaster, are given access.

Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 08, 2006

Nanofreeze Wants Its Chips In Your Fridge In 5 Years

Over the years, we've seen a lot of pitches to put new technologies into refrigerators. Remember the Internet-fridge (pictured right) that would remind us when to buy milk?

Well here's one that is a little more compelling. Nanofreeze Technologies, a freshly founded spin off from Lund University in Sweden, has developed coolling chips that it says are powerful enough to work as a heat exchanger, "effectively replacing" the compressors used in refrigerators.

More immediately, it is looking at integrating its chips in cellphones, PCs, and other electronics systems. It has developed semiconductor devices with 10 to 15 times higher performance than so called Peltier-elements, it claims. (such as those from recently funded MicroPelt in Germany?)

The startup announced winning a €30K innovation prize in Sweden last week.

Read: Nanofreeze wins Lund Innovation prize 2006
Read: Micropelt: cooling in a microchip (a:c euro)

Posted at 06:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 23, 2006

Ask Us Any Question As Long As You're In The UK

A UK mobilephone service startup says : Ask us Anything...

82ASK gamely offers to answer anything, except something illegal or offensive. Some examples:

Where can I buy a pink silk tie in Leeds?
In its interim results what was mmo2’s half year revenue and profit?

The service, only available in the UK at the moment, replies to users by text mesage. The answer costs £1.

Re5ult is the company behind 82ASK, and was founded by Sarah and Thomas Roberts, two former investment bankers. It is angel and founder backed. Business must be good because the company is hiring and has a few jobs on offer for what it calls "Textperts", people that sort through the questions sent in and answer them in a concise way, only 160 characters to work with, we note.

Posted at 03:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 28, 2006

MP3 Inventors Look To Fund Cinema Sound Startup

Karlheinz Brandenburg, who holds the main patents for the MP3 format popularized by Apple's iPod, is leading a startup called Iosono, which sells audio processing, mixing software, and speaker systems that afford cinema-goers (for example) a more realistic sound experiences.

Brandenburg is looking to raise €10M this year to fund the business, according to an article in the FT today.

Speaker arrays from Iosono are targeted at cinemas, concert halls, and theatres.

This is how the firm describes its product:

Speaker arrays ring the listening space and operate in a coordinated, phased fashion to re-create each individual sound wave. For example, a helicopter can slowly approach the audience, fly through the middle of the theatre, and disappear off into the distance. The audience hears the sound waves the helicopter would generate if it were actually flying this path.

Read - Germany's innovative streak

Posted at 12:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 07, 2006

Swiss VC Invests in Anglo-Czech P2P Startup

AllPeers has raised less than $5M from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. AllPeers has a an extension for Mozilla’s Firefox browser in beta that allows users to drag and drop files into an IM buddy list window for the purposes of sharing them.

The 7-person company is based in the UK but development takes place in Prague. The company compares itself to BitTorrent and Skype so it has big shoes to fill .

Posted at 07:10 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

February 05, 2006

Firefox, Safari and Co create opportunity for Trolltech spinoff

From time to time the alarm:clock euro profiles early stage and emerging startups. Today it is Froglogic getting the treatment.

A team of software engineers parachuted out of Norway’s Trolltech, the quick-growing embedded software and GUI development tool company backed by Index Ventures, to create Froglogic back in 2003.

Froglogic develops and licenses automated debugging and testing tools. Initialy it targeted users of Trolltech’s software and C++ programs, which gave them enough customers and cash (it is self-funded) to extend the its product features to target a much bigger market, namely automated tools to test complex web applications and make sure that they work correctly in all of the popular browsers.

There is indeed a growing number of browser out there. A quick look at our SiteMeter log for the a:c euro shows the diversity of browsers in use these days: Firefox, two versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, two versions of Opera, and Konqueror.

Froglogic, not to be confused with the German PC games publisher Frogster Interactive that is poised to float on the Entry Standard stock exchange in Frankfurt, has formidable competition in the form of Mercury and Rational.

CEO and co-founder Reginald Stadlbauer believes that the the startup cab compete given its cross-browser testing edge. He told the a:c euro that despite the existence of web standards, different browsers behave very differently, especially when it comes to the more complex and interactive web applications.

“We test with the same test script on different browsers and that's the niche we want to use to enter the market,” said Stadlbauer.

We think that the founders are onto a good thing. Judging by its list of customers, there is demand for its tools with the likes of Reuters and Siemens buying licenses, as well as electronic design automation (EDA) folks at Xilinx, Synopsys, and Gradient, and business software developers,such as Language Weaver and Selden Systems.

It targets a niche market today but web services are taking off and so are the number of browsers on the Net, so it just might have a chance to build a business with international appeal based on its newest product.

We are however a bit concerned about the company naming trend we are seeing in Europe. Is it a Shrek effect? Logical frogs, technical trolls, at least the monikers make it easy find them in Google. What is more, the names seem to reflect a certain self-effacing humor. At Froglogic and Trolltech amusing-software-demo is not an oxymoron.

Read- Trolltech’s Cute Product Launch
View the demo of Froglogic’s first product with funky sound-track

Posted at 10:01 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 05, 2006

Firefox, Safari, and co. create opportunity for Trolltech spinoff

From time to time the alarm:clock euro profiles early stage and emerging startups. Today it is Froglogic getting the treatment. A team of software engineers parachuted out of Norway’s Trolltech, the quick-growing embedded software and GUI development tool company backed by Index Ventures, to create Froglogic back in 2003.

Froglogic develops and licenses automated debugging and testing tools. Initialy it targeted users of Trolltech’s software and C++ programs, which gave them enough customers and cash (it is self-funded) to extend the its product features to target a much bigger market, namely automated tools to test complex web applications and make sure that they work correctly in all of the popular browsers.

There is indeed a growing number of browser out there. A quick look at our SiteMeter log for the a:c euro shows the diversity of browsers in use these days: Firefox, two versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, two versions of Opera, and Konqueror.

Froglogic, not to be confused with the German PC games publisher Frogster Interactive that is poised to float on the Entry Standard stock exchange in Frankfurt, has formidable competition in the form of Mercury and Rational.

CEO and co-founder Reginald Stadlbauer believes that the the startup cab compete given its cross-browser testing edge. He told the a:c euro that despite the existence of web standards, different browsers behave very differently, especially when it comes to the more complex and interactive web applications.

“We test with the same test script on different browsers and that's the niche we want to use to enter the market,” said Stadlbauer.

We think that the founders are onto a good thing. Judging by its list of customers, there is demand for its tools with the likes of Reuters and Siemens buying licenses, as well as electronic design automation (EDA) folks at Xilinx, Synopsys, and Gradient, and business software developers,such as Language Weaver and Selden Systems.

It targets a niche market today but web services are taking off and so are the number of browsers on the Net, so it just might have a chance to build a business with international appeal based on its newest product.

We are however a bit concerned about the company naming trend we are seeing in Europe. Is it a Shrek effect? Logical frogs, technical trolls, at least the monikers make it easy find them in Google. What is more, the names seem to reflect a certain self-effacing humor. At Froglogic and Trolltech amusing-software-demo is not an oxymoron.

Read- Trolltech’s Cute Product Launch
View the demo of Froglogic’s first product with funky sound-track

Posted at 09:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink