The Shiny Media debacle appears to have been resolved (although, given the track record, we’re holding our breath). Here’s what happened. Shiny Media Limited – a pioneering blog network many thought would be the start of a new era in UK-based online publishing – went into administration on Friday 17th July and was bought straight away by a “phoenix” company, Shiny Digital Ltd, composed of, what appeared to be, the previous Shiny Media directors. The future of the blogs Shiny Media published hung in the balance. But we’ve now been passed a statement by Dan Wagner – who’s Bright Station investment vehicle was the original Shiny Media backer – which says that Bright Station has now done a deal with Shiny Digital, acquiring several of the former Shiny Media blogs. Still with us?
Bright Station said: “As of today’s date and in settlement of the outstanding dispute between the various parties, Dan Wagner, through a newly formed Bright Station entity, has acquired several former Shiny Media websites and blogs from Shiny Digital that catered specifically to the fashion community.” Update: The new Brightstation vehicle is Aigua Media Limited.
These are: Catwalk Queen, Kiss and Make Up, Bag Lady, Shoewawa, Crafty Crafty, Dollymix, Trashionista, Shiny Gloss, Star Trip and Nollie.
Meanwhile all other Shiny Media titles will remain with Shiny Digital Limited, these include sites like TechDigest.tv.
MAXRoam, the Cubic Telecom-owned property aimed at undermining punitive mobile roaming charges, has sealed a deal with HostelWorld. The new Travelnroam mobile roaming service will carry a branded mobile SIM powered by MAXRoam which will be marketed to the people who book into Hotelworld’s 20,000 hostels and budget hotels in 170 countries every year. It’s a pretty good deal for MAXRoam, which gets even more distribution for its service. Not bad work for two Ireland-based companies.
As with all MAXRoam products, the SIM card lets you make and receive calls, text messages and use data for a much lower cost compared to using a normal network operator abroad. The Cork-based Cubic makes this happens by letting users leverage either Wi-Fi or GSM. A user’s phone switches to the cheapest network depending on where they are.
Vodafone UK is offering €150,000 to the top three mobile internet startups in its annual Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition to promote and accelerate innovation in the mobile internet sector. There are six finalists from the UK and the Netherlands in the running, all of which have of course been covered by TechCrunch Europe at various times in the past.
In the red corner, representing Routemaster buses, Beefeaters and chicken tikka half and half, we have: Read More
We last covered iDesktop.tv (formerly YouTube Desktop) in February, when they launched a new version of their player. But that was a relatively incremental update by comparison to this total relaunch of the service, the result of two years’ research and beta testing.
In case you missed our previouscoverage, iDesktop.tv is a web-based interface for YouTube that allows greater customisation and control. It also allows videos to be saved locally and watched offline in customisable players. Read More
A new start-up incubator called Springboard (@springboardnews) has “accidentally” emerged up in Cambridge. The guys at Red Gate have decided to officially share their facilities, free of charge, with other entrepreneurs. (They’ve been doing so already for some time, informally.) They’re offering food, office space, a three-month programme with weekly talks from tech luminaries like Ryan Carson, advice and even a place to live, should you need it.
They don’t want equity in your company and they don’t want seats on your board. They just want to be nice. “We think that getting to know smart people doing interesting things will, in the long term, be good for Red Gate,” writes CEO Neil Davidson. “In the future, we might end up licensing your technology, investing in your company or maybe even buying it. Or maybe we won’t.”
Davidson and the other guys are looking (ideally) for teams of two to three people working on a B2B product. They’ll give priority to start-ups working in markets adjacent to Red Gate’s. The deadline for applications is 1pm on Friday 28th August. Check out the Springboard blog for more info.
Prezi, the awesome collaborative flash-based zooming and storytelling tool, is plugging a gap in its feature set that we mentioned back in April. Prezi is currently testing a native embed function to allow presentations to be published to blogs and other websites without fuss (previously you had to muck about yourself with iframes). At the moment, the feature is in pre-release but can be found here.
If you’re not familiar with Prezi, here’s what Robin Wauters wrote about it when he first saw it: Read More
Leading Israel-based genealogy website MyHeritage.com has launched a new version of its popular Family Tree Builder. It’s more “colourful” than before and also adds photo slideshows and a screensaver that displays photos using tagging and face recognition technology.
The site has also launched something called “Family Chat” in a new toolbar. The toolbar adds search and social features to the site including a video chat designed specifically for family use, which includes birthday reminders. There’s also more sophisticated support for uploading and organising photos, videos and documents. Read More
This is a guest post by Andrew Scott, a serial entrepreneur in London, CEO Rummble, Non-exec UnLtdWorld.com, Founding board m.Love & and “lover of all things mobile”.
In 1901 a Swedish immigrant to America called Johan Nordstrom founded the Nordstrom department store. In 1975, by now a national chain, a Nordstrom customer walked into one of their stores to return a set of tyres he’d bought. The salesperson gladly took back the set of car tyres and gave the customer a refund. Nothing weird about that, right? Except Nordstrom has never sold tyres.
Many of you may have heard this story before; it’s one of many legendary tales of great customer service from Nordstrom and best of all it’s true.
According to a chap called Efraim Turban “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”
Like us all I have copious tales of despair dealing with corporate giants. I’d say the worst offenders used to be banks, but in today’s world of mobile everything, the mobile network operators have definitely claimed that crown. They whine about infrastructure costs while continuing to fleece consumers with roaming and data charges; and all while delivering a deeply inconsistent customer service experience which can drive grown men of good demeanour to the edge of sanity. I’m one of those grown men.
This got me thinking. As the internet envelopes our world, one of the biggest challenges facing online brands will be to avoid becoming the customer service dogs of the next decade.
Artificial intelligence company Siri has struck a deal with natural-language question answering platform True Knowledge to power direct questioning in its upcoming “next-generation personal assistant” app for iPhone.
Cambridge-based True Knowledge’s semantic technologies are built on an information repository (rather than documents and web pages), sourced from subject matter experts and combined with machine automation – so it’s a bit more like Metaweb than Powerset. Read More
Gigulate (@gigulate), the “musical radar” that scans music blogs, reviews and retailers to collect information about your favourite artists, just rolled out enhancements that allow you to personalise the service and to access it via Twitter.
Gigulate can now scan your iTunes library in addition to scraping your preferences from Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace and iLike to create your Gigulate Watchlist. Once you link your Watchlist to your Twitter account, Gigulator will ping you an update whenever a story breaks about one of your favourite artists. Read More
Arctic Startup reports that Finnish social gaming start-up everyplay has exited stealth mode and released a Facebook game called Kamu World. A “Kamu” (Finnish for “buddy”) is a little monster you can wander around the virtual world with, accumulating experience points called “sparks”. Interacting with the world makes changes to it that other users can see. It’s no Second Life, but it’s pretty impressive for a Facebook app.
A further feature is “real world missions”: you can print a PDF copy of your Kamu, assemble it, Blue Peter-style, and take pictures of it doing things “IRL“. There are sparks – and real prizes from everyplay – up for grabs for doing so.
But enough about the fun – what about the revenue model? Read More
Another day, another bit of news from hot property of the moment, Spotify. Today it’s the announcement that Spotify has struck deals with Absolute Radio and ShortList Magazine to launch what the marketing bods call an “integrated marketing campaign”.
Ads will send listeners to a microsite hosted by Absolute, where they’ll be asked to create a Spotify playlist “to reflect the various stages of romance” (a step in the right direction from the previous “YES! YES! YES!” campaign). Absolute DJs will be making their own playlists, too. The winner will take home a “Golden Ticket” giving them access to all the UK music festivals next year. Read More
Fred Destin, possibly the quintessential European VC (a Belgian living in Switzerland but traveling Europe looking for startups), has a must-read post on his blog about “the funding drought”. Here are a few highlights (quite a few, actually, since it’s so good):
Don’t believe the hype. Yes, it’s a nice environment to be starting the winners of tomorrow and seed funding has not dried up. And yes, Wellington and friends feel Spotify is the [Google][Apple] of media and pay (supposedly) €200m pre for the privilege of working with the excellent Messieurs Ek and Lorentzon. But do not let these facts distract you, for most companies are facing a period of extended drought. Read More
Silobreaker “finds and reads the news like a person does”. It’s part news aggregator, part search engine and part contextual relevancy algorithm, aiming to present news in a helpful and intuitive format that brings out the connections between different stories. Confused? Take a look at the site before you read on.
Silobreaker pulls content – videos, headlines, quotes and graphics – from about 15,000 sources. Its algorithm is designed to find the connection between all the content it scrapes, presenting the data like a print newspaper might. But now, Silobreaker is launching widgets, so content publishers can embed its smart news discovery service into their blogs and news pages. Read More
GigLocator, a live music aggregator, launches today in open beta. It promises to offer a large collection of gig listings worldwide, sourced from major ticket providers and a number of independents too. It enables users of keep track of their favourite artists and venues while offering a discovery mechanism to help you find more gigs you might like. It has a smart search engine which knows if you’re looking for artists, venues and so on. Enter multiple Last.fm, Pandora or iLike usernames and the site will keep you informed about your favourite artists’ upcoming tour dates. You can then share the dates with friends via your social network of choice.
GigLocator’s recommendation engine learns about your preferences from the gigs you attend and the stuff you’re listening to (for example, by scraping your scrobbled tracks from Last.fm) so it can provide more accurate and targeted recommendations. And if all that wasn’t enough, it can also connect you to people near you with similar musical tastes. Never again must you trudge, alone and shamefacedly, to a Girls Aloud concert: GigLocator will let you know who nearby might be interested in going along too. Read More
It’s been a while since Techfluff.tv last appeared on our screens but I’m glad to say the irrepressible Hermione Way is back with a more regular look at the tech scene in the UK and the rest of Europe. The US has Pop17 and others, why shouldn’t we? We were early supporters of TechFluffTV, not because it’s a hard news outlet for tech entrepreneurs (we do that bit), but because it’s a fun showcase of the vibrant, lighter side of the tech scene. This episode features a lot of news reading, but the site itself has ‘the meat’ with interviews conducted at noisy tech scene events, as they should be.
Everyone knows how hard it is to raise funding right now. But the European VC market has been even more abysmal than the US one of late, with first round fundings thin on the ground and down-rounds aplenty. So one startup has decided to jump ship from the VC merry-go-round and seek a ‘third way’ for itself.
Trampoline Systems , specialists in “social analytics” for companies, launched in the UK and the US last year but a search for a new £5m round after an initial £3m round in 2007 from Tudor Investments (the venture arm of US hedge fund Tudor Group) drew a blank after Tudor was hit massively in the credit crunch.
They’ve instead turned to “crowdfunding” to pull in lots of £10,000 or more from high net worth individuals around the world. They worked with lawyers for a month on how to structure the deal in compliance with UK regulatory rules, and aimed for £1m.
The efforts are bearing fruit. Two weeks after launching the initiative they’ve now closed £330,000.
The Spotify team just got one bigger with the appointment of Faisal Galaria (@fais) as Global Head of Business Development. Galaria was previously international MD of Kayak.com. He served as VP of global business development at Fon and once worked at Skype. At Spotify, he’ll be responsible for international expansion, partnerships and distribution.
This appointment will come as welcome news to Spotify fans in countries the service hasn’t (officially) reached yet, most notably the US and Canada. It’s a signal that the company is making international expansion a priority. Which is awesome. Our only reservation is Galaria’s taste in music… Read More
Seedcamp Week is rapidly approaching and you have only two weeks left to apply. The Seedcamp blog lists some of this year’s mentors. It’s a pretty impressive line-up, including Alex Ljung, Brent Hoberman, Charles Grimsdale, Danny Rimer, Dave McClure, Erol Damelin, Fred Destin and Fred Wilson.
Seedcamp is now in its third year, and has invested in 14 companies so far, including Zemanta, MyBuilder and Kublax. You can check out the full list of 2007 and 2008 winners at Seedcamp‘s website.
TechCrunch Europe will be running a series of afternoon talks during the week – along with the Seedcamp Week party, of course. More about that nearer the time. But for now, if you haven’t submitted your application yet, get cracking. Read More
Tweetmeme is receiving colossal amounts of traffic at the moment. And the numbers are still growing at an extraordinary rate: according to compete.com, Tweetmeme just saw 85% month-on-month growth: contrast that with Twitter’s own 1.25%. The service received 11.8m uniques in July, compared to Twitter’s 23.2m.
Maybe they don’t intend to. bit.ly is now Twitter’s standard URL shortener, which has led to rumours Twitter is planning to snap it up. Tweetmeme seems to be the de facto standard retweet service now, though it’s by no means the only service out there: Twitlinks, Quotably and Twitturly occupy a similar space. Surely Twitter would be foolish not to consider acquiring one of these services? Read More
Vodafone UK is offering €150,000 to the top three mobile internet startups in its annual 
We last covered 
A new start-up incubator called 
Leading Israel-based genealogy website 
This is a guest post by 
Artificial intelligence company 
Another day, another bit of news from hot property of the moment, 
Everyone knows how hard it is to raise funding right now. But the European VC market has been even more abysmal than the US one of late, with first round fundings thin on the ground and down-rounds aplenty. So one startup has decided to jump ship from the VC merry-go-round and seek a ‘third way’ for itself. 
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