The Europas, the European Startup Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
Alertme
Amee
Dopplr
RouteRank
SpeedSell
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
The Europas, the European Startup Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
BlueKiwi
FreeAgent Central
Huddle
VideoPlaza
Zendesk
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
The Europas, the European Startup Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
Aleveo
Amazee
Decisions For Heroes
Mendeley
School of Everything
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
The Europas, the European Startup Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
BookingBug
Doodle
Mixcloud
Soup.io
Struq
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
Babbel
IRL Connect
Songkick
Spotify
Wonga
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
The Europas, the European Startup Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, will be held on July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.
Here are the shortlisted nominees in alphabetical order:
Amiando
Babbel
Dopplr
Jimdo
Spotify
(While you’re here, subscribe to our Twitter feed and RSS feed).
Following the recent reshuffling of Yahoo’s global marketing executive team with the appointment of Elisa Steele as CMO, the hiring of Penny Baldwin as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management and most recently the promotion of Kristof Fahy as international marketing VP, it was apparently time for Yahoo Europe to get a new marketing chief as well.
We’ve learned former consumer marketing director at Yahoo James Tipple (pictured in the middle) will take over the role of European senior marketing director, effectively replacing Fahy.
Paris-based online media group Hi-media has announced its acquisition of AdLINK Media, the display advertising unit of AdLINK Internet Media (also the company behind SEDO and Affilinet, which are not being sold), itself a part of Germany’s ISP United Internet. Still with us?
The acquisition comes about 18 months after the latter assigned Morgan Stanley to assist in the sale of the European display advertising power-broker.
At that time, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report citing anonymous sources indicated that AdLink Group expected a three-digit million euro sum from the sale of the unit, adding that AdLink’s valuation was nearly €400 million. That’s a far cry from today, with AdLINK Media getting valued south of €30 million.
I was kindly interviewed by the tech video site Intruders.tv last Friday about The Europas Awards coming up this week and the European tech scene in general. The 15 min video is here , or embedded below, in case it’s of interest. (Click on the video to stop and start, and here’s the embed code).
Web applications and services are all the rage right now and Twitter app creations are even hotter. So, not soon after SimilarWeb launched its website, their sister project SimilarSites, which is basically SimilarWeb’s search engine, presented an interesting twitter integration that brings most of their core functionality to twitter.
What is their core functionality exactly? SimilarWeb essentially provides a user-driven site suggestion and rating service, by accepting any website name a user enters, and yielding a list of related sites and data.
The usual protocol is to install SimilarWeb’s tool and to have it docked on the side of the browser. The dock displays suggested sites as thumbnails or as a list, while the user gets to set the display to his liking, submit new sites, and vote a suggested site up or down. Now, with the addition of SimilarWeb’s Twitter integration, a user can get his related (or “similar”) sites to any site in the world, with a simple Tweet. For example, if you wanted to search for all websites that are similar to Youtube, you would simply Tweet “Youtube” with the hashtag: #similarsites. SimilarSites will then send you an @ reply with a link to the search results page on similarsites.com. The service recommends all the sites to you, based on all the users’ votes. Or Offer, CEO of SimilarWeb, says “By offering this service, we hope to allow the user to get more information quickly and efficiently wherever they are; web, desktop client or mobile. This is a prime example of how companies can use Twitter and Social Media sites to expand their reach, increase their user-base and communicate with their users.”
I agree that the idea of the service is pretty cool. In theory. However, is this a feature that you as a twitter user would actually use? Would you want google to allow you to search Google by tweeting to @google? By tweeting regarding similar sites on your stream, you disclose to everyone what sites you’re looking at (something you may not necessarily want to do) and you get zero value from Twitter’s network effect. Wouldn’t you just prefer to use the SimilarSites Website for these queries?
SimilarWeb soon hopes to offer other “similar content” to users, such as “similar articles” or “similar products.” I think all these services can bring users a lot of value but not necessarily as a service integrated with twitter. Even though twitter is all the rage right now, not everything today has to be somehow connected to twitter.
Well, it’s shaping up to be an awesome week in London this week for tech companies. Here are just a few of the events going on:
SUNDAY (today)
At 5:00 PM: Traveling Geeks Tweetup: Welcome to London!
NESTA and the SYmbian foundation welcoming the Traveling Geeks to London! This is a Tweetup to welcome Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, Sarah Lacy, Howard Rheingold, Meghan Asha, JD Lasica, Tom Foremski, Sarah Austin, Susan Bratton, Jeff Saperstein, Renee Blodgett, and Sky Schuyler. The venue is the fabulous JuJu in Chelsea. Fees are just covering costs of the venue, food, and an open bar (until the money runs out!) Register here.
MONDAY
Reboot Britain
A one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges the UK faces and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them. Punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services. At Savoy Place.
TUESDAY
The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.
WEDNESDAY
The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.
THURSDAY
CloudCamp London
Evening: 6pm-12pm
The Europas: Teh TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009
The Traveling Geeks will be on hand at this big awards show and social event. Bring your Flips and camera phones!
FRIDAY
The Traveling Geeks are on their own private schedule of meetings but I daresay something is going on. Let me know and I’ll put it here.
It’s not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It’s a wonder why they didn’t exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites.
So what’s the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that’s how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?
Using hashtags in this way can also be a double edged sword. Plenty of people are wondering about the bizarre #moonfruit phrase and searching on the term. Plenty of others might well be annoyed by the hastag suddenly filling their stream as their friends rush to try and win a free Macbook. So the campaign could end up having diminishing returns.
A similar tactic was used by Lenovo to run a discount promotion offering a big discount off a new laptop. But these tactics raise the issue of hashtag spam – something Twitter is probably going to have to address soon with some kind of feature for people to vote something as hashtag spam.
However, the Moonfruit promo not putting everyone off. London-based twitterer @gecko84 won the first Macbook and the Moonfruit hashtag doesn’t look like going away.
That’s one way to breath new life into a web site concept – easy to build web pages a Flash interface – which has come back into fashion recently.
Webnode and Jimdo are more recent startup entrants, but they use an Ajax interface for users to build sites. Indeed, I recall writing a piece trashing Moonfruit 10 years ago for it’s – at the time – heavy-weight download interface for web site building. Flash was used to make their websites more design focused but it wasn’t ubiquitous in those days and not enough people had broadband. However it has proved to be a USP today, as the site has a drag and drop interface because of Flash and Flex. Moonfruit users tend to be ‘design aspirers’ and want to customise their own site styles. Clearly they were 10 years ahead of their time – again, another double edged sword.
Moonfruit also had some pretty damn patient investors. At its height the now defunct Europ@web, part of LVMH, had a portfolio of 52 startups during the dotcom boom. With a couple of decent exits, and the rest closed, they continued to back Moonfruit and then gave the founders the choice of buying the site back and managing ongoing customer liabilities. Other investors Macromedia and Bainlab supported this move too.
Moonfruit’s Weny Tan White and co-founder/CTO Eirik Pettersen were tenacious entrepreneurs. They cut the staff from 65 to just them, ran the site from a garret in Soho and hired freelancers.
In the early days of Moonfruit it was ad-supported but with the dotcom crash they had to be open with customers and ask them to pay. A loyal base said yes – and that’s pretty much kept them going since. Moonfruit also has a sister company, domain registrar Gandi.net, run by Stephan Ramoin (CEO), Joe White (Tan’s husband) and lead designer Kevin Foster.
What of the competition? Weebly and Yola (recently rebranded from Synthasite) are their main US competitors. While Moonfruit has been profitable for 6 years on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and focused on a free, no ads model. Sound familiar?
But with the latest downturn they’ve tried to monetise with premium features, even as Moonfruit is moving in the opposite direction towards a freemium model of its own, with a premium upgrade path for users. For instance Weebly recently added storefronts – something Moonfruit has had for some time.
So where now from here? Tan says Moonfruit has grown 70% since last year and the build rate has increased by 40% since a new software release recently. That Twitter promotion should help.
Local reviews startup TrustedPlaces has partnered with Northcliffe Media to power the regional newspaper publisher’s experimental hyperlocal web strategy. News of the deal comes six months after its founders stepped back from speculative sales talks to focus on building revenue and cash flow.
LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month.
The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform.
Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development.
As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities – for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley.
Following the success of AudioBoo, 4iP has unveiled another investment with the potential to completely change the face of mainstream media – though this time, it’s all about print. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The site’s in private beta, with a public launch planned for late summer.
Newspaper Club will let users tag online content, collect and curate the content they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The team behind it, Russell Davies, Ben Terret and Tom Taylor, started development earlier this month, and are charting their progress in their hilariously frank Newspaper Club blog.
The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. Ben Terret was instrumental in this last project, which could be considered as a prototype for the Newspaper Club concept.
The business model is based on taking a cut off the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to corporate clients such as the internal newsletter it produced for its first customer, the BBC. 4iP is also keen to combine Newspaper Club with its other initiatives such as Talk About Local to give communities a more effective voice both online and offline.
It looks like 4iP’s onto another winner with this model, which combines the collaborative lifting power of digital with the accessibility of a non-threatening tangible product. It also means that online content could find newer audiences among the 30% of people in the UK who don’t yet have access to the web, or the multitudes more who live by their RSS feeds but still take pleasure in handling printed paper.
Content junkies who live to bookmark, tag, annotate and share might see this as a retrogressive step — but until we have networked electronic paper as standard, Newspaper Club seems like the next best thing.
In a sign of the growing importance of micro-blogging in communication, and let’s face it Twitter is the daddy of this, the icon of Middle Eastern TV network Al Jazeera is now integrating Tweets from its viewers into its output. During the popular Minbar Al Jazeera talk show, Twitter users can now send comments and feedback about popular topics. This may sound like old news to those of you in Western Europe or Silicon Valley, but let me tell you, this is radical stuff in the Middle East.
Minbar Al Jazeera is a weekly show on Al Jazeera Arabic that covers various topics of interest to its audience. During the show, viewers call in or send e-mails. Now they tweet as well, using the show’s official Twitter profile. Since the show already enjoys a lot of interaction, Twitter and social media seem to be a natural fit.
While Al Jazeera leads the way in the Middle East, Al Jazeera English, launched in 2006, is one of the three largest English language 24 hour news channels available worldwide. The other two are of course CNN International and BBC World.
The integration of Twitter into Minbar Al Jazeera is not, however, their first effort in social media. The Riz Khan Show, a talk show on the english channel, mentions Twitter and Facebook. The show’s host, Riz Khan, actively receives questions from both sources. And perhaps they got turned on to the idea by their below report about the TwitchHiker:
On Twitter Al Jazeera now provides:
While CNN might not use Twitter very well lately, Al Jazeera’s new media team is trying to lead the way and help its network embrace new platforms. Safdar Mustafa, head of the Mobile Media Unit, told Techcrunch Europe:
For Al Jazeera, it’s not about Twitter, Facebook or YouTube as such, it’s more about engaging with our viewers and actively involving them in our shows. Yes, Twitter is very popular at the moment and a great medium for quick communication with our viewers. It makes for a great tool for shows such as Minbar Al Jazeera. However, nobody is quite sure what the new and popular platform will be tomorrow.
With a global reach, dedicated new media team and very popular branded YouTube channel, Al Jazeera is trying to hold its own. Will the network recognize new platforms in the future remains to be seen, but judging by what Al Jazeera has accomplished in the last couple of years, it’s a good bet they might.
(Thanks to the familiar sounding ArabCrunch for the heads up).
comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time – once again – confirming Vkontakte.ru‘s leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors.
To put that level of ‘engagement’ in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.
Italian internet giant Dada.net has acquired 51% of the assets of online gaming startup Fueps in a deal worth €1.36 Millions. Fueps launched in 2008 and grossed over €600k while total ebitda was €750,000 in the red. Seems more of a rescue than an acquisition to me.
Dada decided to take over the 51% stake of the company that belonged to RCS Digital. The other 49% is owned by Digital Bros group.
Fueps develops online gaming channels, and is planning a new online poker game. It has a catalog of over 100 games and a half-a-million community of gamers. A big part of the business consists in developing white label solutions for third parties such as Virgilio.it.
Dada Group is likely to continue its moves into the casual & skill games market, married to Fueps tech platform.
Dada.net one of the few internet companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. Dada is also one of the most acquisitive companies, buying Blogo.it, the biggest Italian blogging network.
Public voting in the The Europas, the Europan tech startup awards, will close today, Wednesday July 1 at 11.59pm London time (GMT/BST). So best get your vote out now. This public vote will be mixed with voting from our advisory board of European tech luminaries to produce the final shortlist. The awards will take place on July 9 next Thursday, with over 300 people attending from all over the European tech scene. There is more information about the awards here. You can also get breaking news about the European tech startup scene by subscribing to our RSS and Twitter feeds.
A huge thanks to our sponsors for supporting this inaugural event: Thanks to the UKTI for sponsoring the pitches; Viadeo for sponsoring the Best Design category; Bootlaw for sponsoring Best Bootstrapped Startup; Quick.tv for sponsoring Best European Investor; Zendesk for sponsoring Best New Startup; Moonfruit for sponsoring Best Social Innovation; Latitude and Parklane Champagne for the Awards Prizes; oneDrum for sponsoring the drinks party and Mixcloud for sponsoring the DJ.
PITCH SPONSOR
UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business. UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.
AWARD CATEGORY SPONSORS
Sponsor: Best Design Category
Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 8.5 million members (as of June 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to:
• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts
Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com
Sponsor: Best Bootstrapped Startup Category
Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. Its brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com
Sponsor: Best Entertainment Application or Service
Skimbit helps website publishers monetise their content in ethical and user-friendly ways. We love the internet, and want good websites to be able to sustain themselves. Display advertising alone may not be enough, and can be intrusive to users, and affiliate marketing can be difficult to do well. We want to help publishers earn incremental revenues from their editorial and user-generated content in a way that doesn’t compromise editorial integrity or interfere with the user-experience and adds value to publishers. Our flagship product is Skimlinks which aggregates more than 7000 international merchants across 18 affiliate networks to make affiliate marketing easy, Skimbuzz is an innovative community builder aimed at forums, while Good.ly and skimthat work to monetise Twitter. Skimbit has recently been recognised by some of the major authorities in the affiliate marketing industry; with three gongs at the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards 2009 for Innovative Publisher of the Year, Best New Entrant in Affiliate Marketing and Best Use of Technology within Affiliate Marketing, two trophies for Best New Business and Technological Innovation at the NMA Effectiveness Awards 2009, as well as runners-up awards in the Technology Genius and Best New Publisher categories at the US Linkshare Golden Link Awards 2009. Our CEO Alicia Navarro has also been shortlisted for the National Business Awards Entrepreneur of the Year 2009.
Sponsor: Best European Investor Category
Quick.tv is a web-based ‘Video-as-a-Service’ platform, allowing the injection of dynamic and interactive features into online video clips. Aimed at business users, productions created through Quick.tv transform the viewer experience by prompting them to click on items within the video.
A full range of intuitive drag’n’drop tools include hotspots for e-commerce, real-time voting and graphs, RSS feeds for live data,
forms for viewers to apply for offers, hyperlinked text and image overlays, chapters for ease of navigation and more.
The end-to-end service delivers file transcoding and storage, player and play-out options and detailed analytics both on the video itself and the viewers’ use of the interactive features. It even has an editing tool to re-cut video clips online.
Templates and style sheets make the deployment of large numbers of interactive videos easy, leaving users free to monitor the increased monetisation and viewer engagement benefits the service has to offer.
Sponsor: Best New Startup, Summer 2008 – Summer 2009
Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk – customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk SaaS to a company’s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. This is unusual, because most SaaS helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on the backend helpdesk and treat the Web as an afterthought. The system also leverages Web 2.0 ideas on the backend, such as tag based categorization throughout instead of the usual pre-defined drop down lists, RSS feeds for every customized view and a complete REST/JSON API for virtually every entity in the system.
Sponsor: Best in Social Innovation
Moonfruit has been providing tools for people to build ‘Beautiful websites, simply.’ since 1999. To date 2.1m+ websites have been built by small businesses, communities, families, designers, crafters, freelancers and individuals who just want to express themselves. Moonfruit is passionate about creativity and simplifying technology for everyone. The Flash and Flex based platform provides our users with a unique drag and drop interface and ability to quickly design and customise their sites. The latest release of Moonfruit offers a free product with no ads as well as excellent premium packages for those who require extra bells and whistles e.g domains, shops and space. It also includes Moonfruit ‘People’ which supports businesses and communities who want to manage their customers or members more easily, plus social media integration with Facebook and Twitter. Moonfruit is part of Gandi Group which includes sister company Gandi.net, the ethical domain name registrar and virtual hosting provider.
Sponsor: Awards Prize
Latitude is a leading digital marketing agency who deliver their expertise in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, online display, affiliate marketing and conversion analytics to clients including Tesco Personal Finance, Bet 365 and The Independent. Our whole approach is built on performance. Our conversion analytics expertise ensures that, once visitors get to your site, they convert from prospects to customers. We are confident that we can demonstrate a significantly better ROI on marketing spend. In fact, we’re so confident that we offer many of our clients performance-based pricing, so you only spend money when you’re making money.
Sponsor: Awards Prize
Park Lane Champagne: bringing the ability to source single bottles of champagne, personalised as you like, through their new online site at www.parklanechampagne.co.uk . Check it out and if you like what you see, do blog about it and tell the World.
Sponsor: Drinks & Party
oneDrum is a free, lightweight desktop application that can turn any application into a rich, collaborative environment. The first release of oneDrum, available to the public from July 2009, is the only platform on the market that takes the compromise out of collaborating in Microsoft Office.
It enables:
* Simultaneous, multi-author document creation and editing in PowerPoint, Excel and Word
* Effective communication, coordination and control of change
* Secure, synchronised file sharing and version management.
oneDrum is headquartered in London, England and was founded by Jasper Westaway, CEO
Sponsor: DJ
Mixcloud aims to be the YouTube of Radio. The company’s vision is to be the definitive platform online for on-demand radio shows – from music to talk and everything in between. Mixcloud describe themselves as re-thinking radio, building a platform that connects radio shows (or what they describe as Cloudcasts) to listeners much more effectively. The unit of value for Mixcloud is the show rather than the song or the station. Mixcloud provides radio content creators with a toolkit to host, promote and distribute their content across the web, solving the frustrations associated with file sharing services or the complications of Podcasts. For listeners, Mixcloud helps them filter the content easily to find what’s relevant to them – e.g. what’s popular or what their friends are listening to.
The wave of investments in “realtime” is continuing with today’s announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.
The company will use the investment to accelerate development and build clients for the product. Chad Raube, Investment Partner at Dawn Capital, will join Cognitive Match’s Board of Directors.
Founder CEO Alex Kelleher previously co-founded leading analytics and data mining company Touch Clarity (which sold in 2007 to Omniture), and prior to that was Founder CEO of London-based web agency Vivid Edge (sold in 2000 to Framfab). He thinks that “with the ever increasing volume of data generated by the activity of individuals online, there is an incredible opportunity to make the internet more relevant and more responsive.”
Esther Dyson, an advisor to the company, says “Cognitive Match automates what a person could do with unlimited time and attention, and allows best possible use of scarce online real estate”.
Haakon Overli, Managing Partner of Dawn Capital told me Cognitive Match uses similar mathematics to Wonga (which Dawn also invested in last year alongside Balderton et al in early May). The technology will enable website owners to to make a something he calls a “3.0 statement” such as: “We believe this is what you are looking for” – as opposed to the more 2.0 statement “People who bought this also bought that” which is somewhat passe these days.
Of course Cognitive is not the only player in this field right now. Silicon Valley Angel Ron Conway and New York-based VC Fred Wilson are both heavy proponents and investors in realtime startups, so expect many more such deals.
