Coming out of Ireland (alongside CloudSplit, also here) is VidSchool, a site which shares revenue with teachers that upload videos about the course they teach. Here’s Sean Fee to explain:
VidSchool from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
Israel-based Trollim has won the best International startup category at TechCrunch 50. Here’s the skinny on what they do:
Trollim has created a competition platform and social network for programmers that assesses their coding skills through coding battles. Users are identified as “trolls” on the platform and once a user signs up, he or she fills out a profile that includes their age, location and coding language skills (C++, Ruby, PHP etc.). Trollim then gives the user 3 to 6 pieces of code, or a “test,” to fix to asses their baseline level of skill and based on the results of this test, the user is given a skill level of 1 though 5. Once a user has been assigned a skill level, he can then start challenging other programmers on the site to one on one battles, where trolls have to fix different pieces of code, or “rumbles,” where multiple programmers participate in a battle. As you win battles, Trollim’s proprietary algorithms will evaluate your skills and increase your coding skill level. Trollim says that you can search for users by country, skill level or age, letting users battle a variety of other programmers. Users can also see statistics and metrics on their skill level and improvement. You can also publish your ratings as a widget to a blog or web site.
Joe Drumgoole PutPlace has been busy. He and Eamon Leonard have teamed up to create CloudSplit to allow tech companies to monitor their cloud computing expenses. It turns out they’ve had some awesome feedback from VCs and – indeed – Amazon itself so maybe going to TechCrunch 50 was a good idea after all, as they explain:
CloudSplit from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
Dazzboard, the consumer service from Finnish startup Linkotec, lets you plug a wide range of mobile devices into your computer and transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music to its web-based management interface. After that you can organize all your files and share them across social networks. Got that? Ok, so meanwhile, Nokia is a large mobile handset maker you may have heard about. You may also know they recently launched an App store, the operation of which was something of a failure. Ovi was supposed to open up Nokia’s handets to more social apps but its performance has been pretty miserable.
So today Dazzboard has achieved for Nokia’s handsets something Nokia itself couldn’t. It’s added ten of the latest Nokia mobile phones to its list of supported devices. This means users can push-and-pull data from mobile to PC, or put content like video onto the social media Web much more easily. Dazzboard can also be accessed through Facebook and iGoogle with their newly released app and gadget.
When Seedcamp, the rolling European startups programme, runs its week-long event in London we like to turn up and cover the startups pitching the mentors and judges during the week. Seedcamp is built around its network of mentors and tends to attract a lot of CEOs and VCs, so we hate to waste the opportunity. Thus, with their collusion, we’re piggy-backing alongside their week, running an afternoon event [tickets here] of our own (as we did last year), and throwing their official party [tickets here] to boot. We’re calling the event TechCrunch London.
We’ll be putting on an afternoon featuring pitches from early stage startups selected from the sector right now, alongside startups which have been tutored on the free pitch-training programme run by the UKTI, which we’ve been supporting for a while now (see below for details). We’re also featuring some great presentations by a bunch of speakers. It’ll be on 24th September in central London.
TechCrunch 50 is very much a different kind of conference. Most conferences are thinly veiled pitches by the speakers disguised as content. At TechCrunch 50 they’ve removed the veil, told everyone to launch, pitch their heart out and then have their companies torn to shreds (or praised) in front of 2,000 people in the room and another 30,000 watching the live online stream.
This is real hard-ball stuff. But listening to 50 pitches across two days can have it’s casualties. One of those has increasingly appeared to be Paul Carr, TechCrunch’s in-house satirist, who’s tweet stream during the conference started out reasonable enough (for him) but has lurched from the reasonable to the not so reasonable. This would be of little significance, other than his increasing irritation with a prominent American flag placed on stage during day one of the conference (which is billed as a international platform featuring participants from across the globe, not just the US). His irritation reached the point where he created his own web site: Is The American Flag Still There.com.
GyPSii, which bills itself as a “mobile digital lifestyle application” centered around geo-tagged content today launches an app for Android phones [get it here]. While there are plenty of other companies doing similar things, Amsterdam-based GyPSii is bit like a supermodel prior to her discovery by the talent spotter: the bone structure is there but not the surface gloss (witness the assault on the eye that is the corporate web site – apparently due to be upgraded). But like any supermodel worth her salt, GyPSii has the potential to generate solid revenue from multiple sources.
What does it do? GyPSii allows you to find places close to you, create places and add content to them, find friends who are closeby and share information with social networks like FaceBook. Currently the content is mainly user-generated but curated 3rd party data is being added. There isn’t a lot of content yet in Europe since the majority of users are Chinese. The Android application supports photo and text content only but applications for other phones also covers audio and video.
Interestingly enough, the only UK entrant into the TechCrunch 50 final 50 list is a new company called The Swop. You can read more about it here but the skinny on it is that it’s about startups swopping services instead of paying for it. They got a hard time on stage at the conference (judges tended not to like the idea of barter) however I can see this very much as a recession-powered idea. Although there are obvious issues to address. Here’s COO Jonathan Morris to explain:
The Swop from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
Kooaba, running out of the Zurich tech scene, links real-world objects and digital content via camera phones where you sending a picture as query to its service. That means being able to “click” on objects your camera sees. It’s creating interest amongst magazine publishers right now, as Herbet Bay told me:
Kooba from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
Shout’Em (from Croatia) is a “roll your own” hosted mobile social network which has an Android client already. You can start your own co-branded microblogging social networking service on it and they are going to be at Seedcamp in London next week. I caught up with CEO Victor Marohnic:
Shoutem from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
Problemator is a startup hailing out of Moscow which I caught up with in the Demo Pit at TechCrunch 50 today.
The site is basically designed to “share problems related to organizations, products, persons, regions”. Essentially it seems like a “Twitter for bug-tracking” for, well, just about anything, as Andrei Pavlov explains below. Personally I wonder about how this competes with Twitter itself or more specifically for Yammer. The business model is premium services and white label.
Problemator from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.
I’m at TechCrunch 50 Mon/Tuesday this week and bumped into two British startups attending the conference: Michael Smith of MoshiMosters and Alicia Navarro of Skimlinks. I asked them about their impressions of the morning session at TechCrunch 50 where several startups launches in the ‘youth’ category. The upshot? Toonstunes (more here) seemed to be their favourite:
TechCrunch 50 is rocking and rolling this week in San Francisco, but it’s easy to for European startups to miss out on the opportunity to hang out together amongst all the Valley buzz.
So we’re putting on a special TechCrunch Europe networking event this Wednesday night. We’re teaming up with DrinkTank, the London meetup event organised by Huddle, and Susan Mactavish Best of Best PR.
So, everyone has been wondering for some time what the hell was going to happen to 3i’s portfolio when it announced it was pulling out of private equity last year.
There’d been whisperings that 3i and top-tier European VC firm DFJ Esprit had cooked up a deal. But now it’s been announced that Coller Capital and HarbourVest Partners, together with DFJ Esprit will acquire a significant part of 3i’s European venture portfolio for around £130 million ($217 million). At the same time DFJ Esprit has announced the launch of two funds totaling $500 million.
Huzzah! It’s that time again! Time for TechCrunch 50: where thousands of struggling entrepreneurs spend three grand they can barely afford to watch fifty of their peers dancing like malnourished bears for the approbation of Jason Calacanis! It’s like Christians and lions meets Satan’s own version of speed dating, with added Scoble! What’s not to love?
I’m sorry – you’ll have to forgive my cynicism, it’s just that I have to prove to you that I haven’t gone native.
You see, one of the main reasons I was hired by TechCrunch was for my traffic-driving habit of hurling faeces at unsuspecting industry conferences. Conferences like Jeff Pulver’s inexorably ill-planned 140 Characters in New York or Loic LeMeur’s très froid ‘Le‘ in Paris – both of which saw the sharp end of my tongue when I was at the Guardian. I learned there that no-one cares when I talk about interesting start-ups or noteworthy trends – but when I textually assault a hard-working event organiser, the page impressions flow like gravy.
It’s ironic that on a day when voice-to-text transcription company SimulScribe signed a – potentially – $17 million exclusive deal with Ditech Networks to resell SimulScribe to its carrier customers, it’s now emerged that competitor Spinvox may in fact be up for sale. However, the difference between the two is marked.
Simulscribe raised only $5.7 million and says it is is already profitable on sales of about $4 million. It also only has 7 employees for it’s Phonetag service. ( It reminds me of Vox Sciences). And Ditech already has voice processing software and equipment inside every major carrier’s network. Ditech has noise canceling technology, so combine it with Simulscribe – which also supplements its transcriptions with humans – and you have a good combination.
Seedcamp – the closest thing Europe has to a Ycombinator style startups model – has announced its list of the 21 teams that will be competing for funding during the Seedcamp Week in a fortnight’s time in London. They are:
* Advertag – London, UK
* Boxed Ice – Bromsgrove, UK
* Brainient – Bucharest, Romania
* Codility – Warsaw, Poland
* Comufy – London, UK
* Erply – Estonia
* Joobili – Budapest, Hungary
* Kukunu – London, UK
* Loc8 Solutions – Edinburgh, UK
* Patients Know Best – Cambridge, UK
* Petsicon – Berlin, Germany
* Plug in SEO – London, UK
* ShoutEm – Zagreb, Croatia
* T27 Systems (Pearl Systems) – Bristol, UK
* Talasim.com – Amman, Jordan
* Teachable – London, UK
* Vooices – Wigan, UK
* VouChaCha – London, UK
* Wondergraphs – Leuven, Belgium
* World on a Hanger – London, UK
* YubiTech – Ramat Gan, Israel
Along with the 21 finalists, they will also have Kwaga from France and Platogo from Austria. These teams are winners from the Mini Seedcamp program earlier in the year.
Liquida, an Italian user generated content based blog aggregator owned by RGB srl, a Banzai Group company, has acquired one of the most popular memetrackers and blog directories in Italy, BlogBabel, for an undisclosed sum.
BlogBabel was put up for sale on August 30th by its founder and CEO, Ludovico Magnocavallo, who set up an auction on Ebay starting at €4999,00 (approx. $7300 USD), that would have given the winner the domain name, exclusive ownership of much of the code, and most of all more than 30Gb of database content (that is more than 3 years of indexed posts).
Seedcamp – the rolling European startups programme which started out as an annual competition and which has morphed into a pan-European network of mentors, investors and startups – will today announce it’s list of startups that have made the cut for Seedcamp Week in a fortnight’s time in London. But at a press conference in London CEO Reshma Sohoni and Chairman Saul Klein also gave out some fascinating data which (and I checked) we can share with you now, prior to the list announcement shortly. [Update: Here's the list].
The data points are interesting because they show the trends in how tech companies are being formed from the primordial soup of Europe’s startup scene and which trends are emerging.
Facebook and StudiVZ have reached a settlement in the alleged plagiarism case, with the German social network operator paying Zuckerberg and co an undisclosed sum as part of the deal. Both companies will be withdrawing their respective claims both in the United States and Germany and continue to operate their business as before (statement in German).
StudiVZ and Facebook have agreed not to disclose any more details about the settlement.
