How can you engage employees to come up with ideas and take ownership of corporate innovation? Usually startups don’t have that problem because ‘employees’ are part of the innovation engine. But plenty of other companies would like that mojo. So Nosco has built an online suggestion box to support Idea Exchange management within a company, and hopefully answer that question.
Italy, like a few other European countries, is way behind in the construction and creation of a “tech startup scene”. That being said, as of last Saturday there was almost no scene in Italy. Not because we lack the actual people, but because we do lack the sense of community and cluster of a place like, for instance London or Berlin.
There are different explanations for this.
Mobile Monday – a global network of Mobile industry professionals present in over seventy countries – is launching a Maltese chapter. In fact, Jari Tammisto, President of Mobile Monday Global will be delivering the opening keynote on this tiny island nation on Monday, 14th September. Madan Mohan Rao – a consultant in over sixty countries on matters mobile, and a close collaborator on the Mobile Monday Educational Project – and founder of the Bangalore chapter – will also be delving in detail regarding the Mobile ecosystems, entrepreneurship and value-added services.
I just goes to show how far the mobile tech / startup ecosystem has now spread.
After stirring up their own country, the German blogger elite has launched an international version of their Internet Manifesto in English. Fifteen authors of Germany’s most popular blogs have signed a declaration about How journalism works today. The 17 articles run down from statements like “the Internet is different” and “the Internet improves journalism” to sideswipes like “tradition is not a business model” and “the web constitutes an infrastructure for social exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media”. The manifesto is causing a lot of interest and briefly took the site out at one stage.
Coming along to give VisualCV and JobSpice a run for its money is new online CV builder CeeVee. It’s now opened up after being in private beta and aside from the cute sounding name, it’s aim is simple – to be the simplest CV builder out there.
But what is the point of CV sites like this when we have LinkedIn? Well, not everyone is into LinkedIn’s sparse, rather corporate presentation and so CeeVee – as it’s competors do – aims at the wide consumer marketplace with a simpler interface. Apparently Human Resources people aren’t keen on busy CVs (or maybe can’t cope with them?), hence this design approach.
According to one estimate the total data storage capacity produced by humans each year is expected to surpass 1 Yottabyte by 2013. Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months. And the mountains of content being produced by ordinary people as lifestreaming becomes more and more popular is only adding to that growth. So how are we going to deal with it – search it, store it? That’s the problem Silentale is planning to address, and the startup has just opened it’s private beta to start testing it’s platform. We have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers for the free private beta. Just leave a comment with your email address to get on the list.
Put simply, Silentale is aiming to store all your digital conversations in one place and allow you to access them from anywhere. Founded by Paris-based French Canadian entrepreneur Laurent Féral-Pierssens and his team, Silentale is going to set out with a very clear business model: We’ll aggregate everything you do out there: Twitter, Email and even SMS. We’ll store it and let you search it. Simple.
Ok, that’s not quite right – it won’t be aggregating your blog comments – that’s quite a different nut to crack. But the scale of its ambition in archiving all your messaging is quite large enough.
Tripwolf, the self proclaimed “social travel guide”, just launched their new and revamped version – tripwolf 2.0. Some new features have been added to the new version, and – at least at first sight – the usability of the site has been greatly improved, with an up-to-date contemporary look and feel. However, underneath the design and UI improvements, some substantial and beneficial changes have been underway.
We’ve covered tripwolf since launch last year and its investment round from Mair Dumont and Dieter von Holtzbrinck.
Manchester-based developer Martin Rue has just launched tweetdoc.org, a tool “to help companies produce documents that facilitate brand monitoring, competitor analysis and market analysis through the power of Twitter”. Uh?
Let me explain. Companies need to keep an eye on what their customers are saying, mainly so they can spot when things are going wrong and intervene before a PR disaster strikes. tweetdoc.org collects all the tweets around a particular brand, company or event and whacks them in a single document for you. Pretty useful for PR types struggling to keep up with the real-time stream, no? All you have to do is enter a search term or hashtag and tweetdoc.org will spit out a PDF containing the results. And very handy for brand monitoring and competitor analysis, too. tweetdoc.org has paired up with document publishing platform edocr.com to enable documents like brand monitoring reports to be uploaded and shared with a single click. Read More
StudiVZ founder Ehssan Dariani, who got booted from his own company shortly after acquisition, has finally unleashed what appears to be a tsunami of pent-up anger at the event, in an interview with German quality newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He tries to compare his genius to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, but the interview leaves mostly the impression of someone with plenty of cash but rather too much time to brood. Dariani sounds bitter and disappointed in what the “paperboys from Stuttgart” made of his once successful German Facebook clone with 6 million registered members.
Being booted from StudiVZ “was extremely rude and without any contractual base” he says. It happened after a week-long fight. Holtzbrincks managers made comments in meetings that he decided to correct, er, sharply. “They were such corporate careerists in their forties who didn’t like to be rebuked in public by a tween”, Dariani says. But he also had some bad press during that time with some embarassing Youtube videos…
Well, we’ve done TechCrunch Berlin, TechCrunch Nordic, and Paris among many others. So TechCrunch Europe is again (as we did last year) teaming up with Seedcamp for the official London Seedcamp Week After-Party on 24 September in central London. “TechCrunch London” will be in the style of our annual “GeenknRolla” conference – namely, short, fast presentations and pitches from startups and a lively panel discussion. Following that TechCrunch Europe will be hosting the official after party with the Seedcamp participants and mentors.
It looks at first glance like Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman’s PROfounders Capital has a new and unexpected bit of competition in the shape of “online Dragon” Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital. The latter has just announced a brand-new £20m fund, the Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund, that aims to invest in early-stage companies.
Meyer rightly points out that lower costs mean investing £250,000 to £1m in a start-up today is roughly equivalent to the £5m – £10m that might have been needed ten years ago. That’s the space her new fund is aimed at, which places her head-to-head with PROfounders Capital. Doesn’t it?
Shares in Austrian provider of online gaming entertainment bwin Interactive Entertainment soared in early trading this morning after the company confirmed that it was in the final stages of acquiring Gioco Digitale, one of Italy’s oldest online gaming sites.
According to the announcement, the boards of both companies and its shareholders have agreed on principle terms for the acquisition of 100% of Gioco Digitale, but did state that although the acquisition was progressing, there could be no certainty that a final binding agreement on the transaction will be reached.
Details on deal size have not been disclosed yet at this point. Daniel Stewart & Company analyst James Hollins told Reuters that he estimated the purchase price to be around 100 million euros ($143 million), and expected the deal to boost bwin’s earnings. Italian media estimate Gioco Digitale to be purchased for in between 90 and 95 million Euros.
Ok, that headline was a lie. Sorry, but we’re not going to review the Spotify iPhone app that just launched, because as far as we can tell it’s identical to the leaked beta we reviewed over a month ago (while every other media outlet was having to make do with an official Spotify YouTube video). Apart from one or two crashes we’re hearing about via Twitter, and the fact that it doesn’t yet work in Ireland (boo!) it’s the same. Let’s move on.
Instead we’re gong to point out that co-founder Daniel Ek has either the coolest taste in music, or the worst, depending on your perspective. Demoing the new app to Sky News, Ek played Madonna’s “Holiday” (WTF?!) and Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. We’ll just leave it at that.
Twestival, the global Twitter-driven charity event born out of this single event last year in London, stages another global event this week. TechCrunch is supporting Twestval as it’s all about using Twitter for good. Thursday 10th September will see 133 cities from Beijing to Beirut holding Twestivals for their own local causes. The London event will raise money for ChildLine, a service provided by the NSPCC. The 1,000 volunteers involved globally hope to raise $400,000.
London’s Twestival – recently Twitter founder Ev Williams described London as Twitter’s “capital” given it has the most number of users of any single city – will be at Vinopolis and is aiming for for 1,200 attendees. You can get tickets here.
Elizabeth Varley who heads up London Twestival has announced The Hours will be playing on the night, fresh from their tour with U2. They’ll be joined by OneTaste and The Parks Dept. and three DJs. I’m certainly going to support the cause and I encourage you guys to as well.
Streaming music service Spotify has launched on the iPhone and Android devices for its premium subscribers only. You can download it from Apple’s App Store here and the Android Market. Though plans to launch there are in play, the service is not yet live in the US, and it has already taken several European markets by storm. This iPhone app is basically identical to the leaked beta we reviewed in detail.
The mobile apps will allow you to play the entire Spotify catalogue and the ‘offline mode’ caches playlists so they can be played… when you are offline, like on a plane. Spotify has set up a special mobile section with more details.
The launch of this mobile version now fires the starting gun on their US launch plans. A large number of record labels have actually invested in the Swedish-born, London-based startup, which is now valued at €170 million, or about $242 million, with a post money valuation of around €200 million.
Glancing at TechCrunch late on Thursday evening, I immediately realised there was trouble afoot.
A few hours earlier, Sarah Lacy had published a post about the difficulties she’d had receiving her visa to Brazil to research her book and report on start-ups for TechCrunch. I’d read the post and sympathized with Sarah’s frustration. The problem, apparently, had been caused by an ‘upgrade’ of Brazilian embassy computer systems and the resulting havoc had affected everyone from journalists to business people to the coach of a national football – sorry, ‘soccer’ – team.
As Sarah wrote, it also meant that she would now not be able to meet any of the scores of startups who had hoped to speak to a visiting TechCrunch reporter. If I were one of those startups, I’d be pissed. I’d be pissed at my government for not getting their technology together, and I’d be pissed generally that I’d missed an opportunity to showcase my business on a foreign stage. I might even post a comment saying as much.
Glancing at TechCrunch on Thursday evening, then, I half-expected to see maybe a couple of dozen comments on the post. But no. There were hundreds. Almost 500 in fact, and just about every one of them was attacking Sarah specifically, and American visa policy, generally.
This is a guest post by Jon Silk. Silk was a technology journalist for eight years before moving into to PR in 2005. Now Creative Director at Lewis PR, he advises companies large and small on traditional and digital PR strategies. He blogs at Prgeek.net and Themediablog.co.uk and Twitters.
As a technology startup you will, at some point, decide you need some PR. You might not know what that really means, or how much it might cost, or even who could be able to do it, but you’ll want it.
Public Relations is one of those rare business services with no value aside from the amount people assign to it. Essentially, you’re paying for the relationship that someone you’ve never met has with someone else you’ve never met. That’s a tough thing to cost up.
This is a guest post by Tom Allason, founder & CEO of stealth startup Shutl. In 2003, Tom founded eCourier.co.uk – the online courier company with the purple vans and served as eCourier’s CEO from 2004 until 2008, overseeing the company’s growth to £7.5m turnover and 250+ staff (including couriers) and raising £8m in equity funding from angels and a VC. With a professional management team in place, Tom left eCourier in 2008 to found Shutl. Tom serves on the advisory boards of YumShare and BookingBug. Outside of business, Tom is a founding trustee of FoundationStone, a charitable trust that invests in start-up charities.
For my first startup eCourier.co.uk (founded in 2004), getting top senior talent was a long & painful process punctuated by expensive ads and extortionate recruitment consultants. Hiring a CFO cost us around £25k. Hiring a CEO (when I was moving on) cost at least twice that. And even after making the investment, results were far from assured.
This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a PHP/MySQL Developer with Parkatmyhouse.com.
Google has launched a new marketing initiative in the UK aimed at people starting new businesses. But unlike the tech geekery of Google’s usual world, this is possibly the most simplistic guide to starting a business I’ve ever read. Startupdonut.co.uk – sponsored solely by Google – contains phrases like “Most businesses now use information technology (IT)”. Yes, it’s really that basic. So, fair enough, there are plenty of people out there who need hand-holding in this brave new world. However, what is most interesting is that despite one or two discrete mentioned of “open source” there is barely a mention of Microsoft or Windows. I counted three, and one from a user in a forum. Here’s their advice on “Buying IT for your new business”:
Most start-ups don’t need hugely sophisticated IT. Typically, a mid-range desktop PC (ie computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, basic office software) is sufficient. For a reliable solution, budget for £500-£600 and maybe £80 for a printer. A reasonable laptop will cost £400-£500. Specialist software provides additional cost. If you’re concerned with how stylish your PC looks or want a cutting edge model, then you’ll have to pay for it, but you need to consider the impact it will have on your start-up budget.
Er, how about, different versions of Windows Vista? Or how about a mention of the Apple Mac maybe, just for balance? Nope, this guide just hates mentioning Google competitors.
