Nokia doesn’t trust its Symbian mobile operating system any more and plans to equip many of its smartphones with the mostly open source Maemo operating system it uses in its Internet tablets, according to undisclosed Nokia sources speaking to the Financial Times in Germany (FTD). The Finnish company completed acquisition of Symbian just four months ago. So guys, that was €264m well spent.
FTD quotes a source close to Nokia saying: “Symbian is much too cumbersome to keep up with modern operating systems. We have to react.” Nokia hasn’t provided an official response; a Nokia spokesman only said that they don’t comment on industry speculation. But this is clearly dynamite stuff. If it is true, it would actually be a smart move; the investment in Symbian hasn’t yet borne fruit, and Nokia is steadily losing market share to former niche players RIM and Apple, and soon Android.
A first device, the Nokia N900 or “Rover” is expected for Amsterdam’s Maemo Summit in October 2009. Read More
“I suspect the femtocell has missed its chance,” wrote Charles Arthur in the Guardian recently. Not so fast. It seems the existing shareholders of femtocell manufacturer Ubiquisys beg to differ, because they’ve just pumped a further $11m into the company. The money will fund a range of consumer and enterprise products, to be deployed globally over the coming year. Ubiquisys’ investors include Accel, Atlas Venture, Google and the T-Mobile Venture Fund.
In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognised Ubiquisys as a “technology pioneer”. The company’s femtocells are manufactured using Sony technology and are available as standalone units or as part of a residential gateway.
“The femtocell industry is about to enter a phase of aggressive growth,” according to Ubiquisys CEO Chris Gilbert. “We have already seen the first major operator launches and the autumn will see a number of others unveiling their future plans.”
At the same time as announcing their new funding, Ubiquisys also announced that Alison Sparshatt will be joining as CFO.
Scheduling tool Doodle just launched a premium service allowing users to customise their theme, avatar and background and also take advantage of richer scheduling features. Those features include being able to request personal information from event participants, such as postal address, email address and phone number.
I can’t say that being able to change my Doodle avatar is quite worth £18 a year to me, but if you’re a sucker for personalisation or if you really need the advanced features, go right ahead. (If you don’t, the free service remains free and available for new sign-ups.)
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Be careful what you say about the Edinburgh Festivals on Twitter, because a little someone is listening… A bit like EdTwinge, which we mentioned yesterday, FestBuzz (@festbuzz) eavesdrops on your chatter about the festivals and creates crowdsourced reviews. The review site and API helps readers distinguish between reviews from professionals and comments from the man on the street.
FestBuzz claims it can determine which shows “critics” are discussing the most, even with abbreviated or misspelt tweets. And you don’t even need to use the #festbuzz hashtag (though using it will guarantee the service picks up your comment). FestBuzz will sniff out what you have to say and turn it into a star-rated review.
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Austrian social yellow pages startup Tupalo.com is clearly making good use of its strategic alliance and investment which we reported in June; as of today, they have a language and country specific site for the Netherlands.
This new site is part of a data partnership with De Telefoongids BV, a leading provider of local search and lead generation services in the Netherlands. This should allow Tupalo.com users in the Netherlands to review over 300,000 local business listings around the country. Read More
Did you know we have a crowdsourced start-up events listings page? Well, we do. It lives over here, but needs a little love at the moment. From the Europas to bootcamps, we want our events listings to be the only resource you need to find out what’s going on near you.
But for that, we need your help. To keep the list current, and packed with all the best start-up events from around Europe, we’re asking event organisers to visit the events page, join, if you haven’t already done so, and keep your events listings up to date. Together we can build an invaluable resource for the tech start-up community in Europe.
Check our original post for full instructions and more information. If you need any help, you can contact the group moderator.
Gostio.com is new Serbian startup which allows for online reservation of the restaurant tables. Service is available only for the Serbian capital Belgrade, but in the near future they plan to spread the service to all the major cities in Serbia. Gostio was launched on 3rd of August and is still in beta. It is very basic, but an it will help you to reserve restaurant table without too much hassle. Gostio is free for users, and it is charging a small commission to restaurant owners based on a number of reservations. Users can write reviews to help other visitors to make a decision.![]()
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Today Yellix, a self-funded mobile startup from Vienna hits the crowded mobile app market. Yellix offers an interesting way of connecting your Facebook friends with your mobile device. By installing the free Facebook application onto your cell phone your Facebook friends are being matched with your cell contacts – in real time. There are a number of apps out there that do this, but few pull real-time info from Facebook.
It’s not entirely clear how this is done technically but the app runs on Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian or Windows Mobile platforms. When you get a call the app syncs with the Facebook app and immediately lets you see who is calling, their Facebook profile picture and the last status update of that person.
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Darkfall is a MMORPG game that’s been in the making for about a decade. It was started by a 5-person strong Norwegian startup, Razorwax, that was later acquired by Aventurine, a little known Greek company with no other activities outside Darkfall.
Aventurine moved the Norwegian team to Greece to continue development, and hired more and attracted legions of beta testers. According to a presentation Tasos Flabouras, Vice President of Aventurine, gave a few months back to an open coffee meeting, it currently employs 30 people, mostly developers.
Darkfall is a fantasy game, much like World of Warcraft but with a few important differences: it is build around the concept of skill based advancement and focuses on Player to Player (PvP) fighting with full looting. For this reason, it appeals to a niche segment of players.
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Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape for good. Buildabrand (@buildabrand) could do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for your startup for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process.
Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users. Read More
One of the more interesting new companies I came across at Tomorrow’s Web on Saturday was eNovella (@eNovella), a new content sharing platform that gives aspiring authors a place to have their work commented on and rated by others. It also offers the promise of publication, presumably on-demand, if their work is sufficiently highly rated.
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EdTwinge (@edtwinge) is a new “Twitter-powered” review site that scrapes any tweets mentioning a show or festival and works out whether the comment is positive or negative. It then produces a real-time leader board of the highest-rated acts currently happening. You can nick this “Fringe Top 10″ as a widget for your blog or website.
It’s a beautifully-designed site, as you can see from the screenshot after the jump. One to watch and very useful for people into events like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is on, err, now. See what they did there?
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This is rather exciting, actually. Leading mobile app developers weComm and live TV streaming service Livestation have teamed up to deliver live TV broadcasts direct to smartphones. The offering will include Android and Blackberry handsets.
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Picture: Raoul Orozco
According to controversial “paid follower” service uSocial.net, Michael Jackson (or, more likely, his people) attempted to buy 25,000 followers for
his Twitter account before he died.
“I can’t admit that we dealt with Michael Jackson directly, though we were in touch with someone in his family recently who tasked us with conducting a Twitter campaign on an account relating to him,” said uSocial.net CEO Leon Hill. “It was exciting to say the very least to conduct work with such a big name.”
Apparently, they’re still working on delivering the 25,000: “For obvious reasons we’ll be dealing with his family from here on in, though it would have been great to conduct services for Michael Jackson in a different time, under different circumstances.”
This doesn’t mean anything, besides the fact that whoever was looking after Michael Jackson’s Twitter account was an idiot. But it does show just how far behind most of the world is with its Twitter literacy (oh, hell, let’s do it: twitteracy). The biggest star in the world wouldn’t have needed any help with follower numbers.
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Google recently introduced a new feature which created a lot of buzz – Anti Phishing Keys or email sender verification. However, it works only in Gmail. But are they gleaning ideas from a few startups out there?
SenderOK- a Ukrainian startup – has been offering this feature for over 6 months as its standard function. Moreover, it works not only in Gmail, but also in other popular web mail services such as Yahoo Mail, MS Hotmail and Live. The plugin extends the functionality of all widely used browsers, and also works in MS Outlook where it has the most advanced set of features.
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TechCrunch Europe is a media partner with the ChinaContact UK/Ireland Tech Tour to China as we think it could well be of benefit to UK and Irish startups to make more contacts there.
From their blog:
The plan is to get a group of 15-20 people travelling to Beijing, Tianjin, Xian, Hangzhou and Shanghai in late October. The group will get to meet innovators and leaders in China’s tech & internet sectors and visit some of the most exciting, fast growing companies in China. Social events will allow the group to get to know local entrepreneurs and investors better. This tour is planned around entrepreneurs who are thinking of China as their next big market and want to understand the environment first-hand and/or looking for local partners that can help them with aspects of their business development. We want group members to use this tour as an important step in their China strategy which will help them figure out the options available to them and the market potential.
The itinerary is here, costs are here, and you can apply for a place here. Having been involved with the Web2Asia/China 2.0 tour last year I can vouch that the people involved know the tech scene on the ground in China very well. TechCrunch Europe has no financial interest or otherwise in the tour, we just think it looks worthwhile.
This is a guest post by Jasper Westaway of OneDrum. Throughout the summer we’re running guest posts we like – exclusive to TC Europe – written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch. More info here.
I can’t find my phone. What are my options for locating it?
1. Look for it
2. Ask others if they’ve seen it
3. Phone it
I would probably apply those strategies in that order as each fails. Of course, what I really want is for my phone to magically appear in my hand whenever I need it. That would be nice.
Search on the internet today is somewhere between a technology-driven stage 1 (Google, and minor variations like Wolfram Alpha and Bing) and a people-driven stage 2 (Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Amazon recommendations). One might stretch the metaphor to argue that RSS, Google Alerts and the like are forms of stage 3; I’m not sure I would agree.
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As anyone who has read my critically acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book will know, I have not always been the paragon of honesty I am today.
Truth be told, in the past I have been guilty of prevarication on an Olympian scale in almost all aspects of my life. In business, in relationships, in friendships and even – during one epically drunken evening in a London pub a couple of years ago – in all three at the same time, leading to hilarious consequences, no small amount of heartache and the beginning of my journey of self-improvement. It’s a long story. You should buy it.
Given my past indiscretions, then, it’s both perfectly fitting and deliciously ironic how much I hate being lied to. Or rather, how much I hate discovering that I’ve been lied to. I really can’t put into words how furious it makes me; with the liar, the lie and with myself for believing them both. I could probably forgive you for cheating on my sister (I don’t have a sister) or running over my cat (I daon’t have a cat), providing you’re honest with me about it. But the moment you lie, and I find out about it, we’re done.
So you can imagine how I felt this week when I found out I’d been lied to multiple times by not one but two separate people, regarding two different stories I was trying to report. I won’t name names on this occasion, for reasons I’ll get to, but the details are important.
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Ad-supported music streaming service and MP3 store we7 now offers inline ticket sales thanks to a new arrangement with Ents24, which has deals with all the major ticket resellers. Music fans can check tour dates and buy tickets from we7′s artist pages.
As part of the deal, Ents24 users browsing for gig tickets will be able to stream music via we7 from Ents24′s website, thanks to we7′s “Play Anywhere” service. we7 now has media partnerships with the NME, Guardian, Daily Mirror, GQ.com and The Sun, which has extended the reach of their service from a million monthly uniques to 2.5 million. Those users can choose from 4m licensed tracks. Read More
“I’m a mobile phone expert,” writes Andrew Lim humbly, as he explains the concept behind his new venture with Jamie Harwood. Recombu is part fresh idea, part Shiny Media remnants (Susi Weaser, wannabe “Queen of London” and erstwhile editrix of Shiny Shiny, is on board as a freelance, as is TechDigest’s former editor, Stuart Dredge). But it’s not just his own considerable expertise that Lim is relying on:
Recombu is a portmanteau of the words read, compare and buy, and our site aims to help you with all three. We have a fantastic editorial team who will provide news and reviews, but the site is also designed to let users write their own opinions and to discuss phones too.
So the site is a mash-up of user reviews, price comparisons, recommendations and editorial content. It’s not the kind of tech company we’d normally cover, but it’s interesting if you’re into that whole ‘future of journalism’ debate, because it represents one of the new models of ‘flogging while blogging’: some content will come from staff and some from customers, but everything exists in the context of a site that basically exists to sell mobile phones.
Recombu isn’t the first company to try something like this, but it has launched with a strong team and an attractive website. Over the next few weeks, we’ll discover if the editorial content does it justice. The company is launching at a tough time. Let’s just hope that they go easy on the £80-a-sheet wallpaper.
