[UK] London-based Fingertips.net lets users create their own personalised online newspaper “from the publications they want”. Or at least that’s the claim.
The reality is that the RSS-driven service isn’t nearly as customisable as its many competitors, such as start page Netvibes or more similar aggregators like Meehive. Instead, Fingertips only enables users to pick from around 300 sources (50,000 articles) from publications such as The Times or Heat magazine, divided into traditional sections based on subject – news, sport, travel etc.
This is our third guest post written by a London-based VC. To allow them to speak plainly without jeopardising their fund or their career in the small village that is the London VC scene, I’m allowing them to post anonymously. FYI, LondonVC is a genuine VC and TechCrunch Europe has met them face to face.
One of the biggest challenges for any investor (regardless of the stage/type of investment they target) and founders alike is hiring great talent. In early stage investing the team may be the single criteria upon which an investment decision is based (considering how many times when that’s all there is to go by) and even in later/growth stages, while the founding team has been historically crucial, bringing someone new in to help “get the company to the next level” can be the difference between investing or not.
[Holland] This week we’ve got Rutger van Waveren, Founder of Spectives.com, doing an elevator pitch. Spectives.com allows people to use images to keep track of the latest news from their favorite sites. Think of Spectives as a visual RSS, Alltop, or as a kind of Netvibes for visual news.
Unlike RSS where you have to scan text headlines for information, you can scan images. Great for a lot of visual news like cars, fashion, design, photography, sports, funny pictures and gossip.
Thanks to Techfluff.tv’s Amsterdam correspondent Isabelle O’Kane for filming this.
[UK] This week Stephen Fry – British actor, journalist, celebrity ‘Tweeter’ and self-confessed technophile – appeared alongside Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn. They discussed the future impact of social media.
The discussion was not very ‘tech’ or ’startup’ oriented, but it did touch very much on the cultural and social impact of social networks, and Twitter in particular. Stephen Fry in particular mounted a robust defence of social networks as culturally positive, not negative.
I asked a question toward the end about what Twitter does when Skype and, perhaps Facebook, enable status updates to be as public and open as Twitter, but Biz Stone simply said they ‘don’t look in the rear view mirror’. Which was not exactly a fullsome answer, but hey.
The event formed part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK programme. The video comes from NESTA.
[Belgium] Earlier this week, 3D gesture recognition software developer Softkinetic and VUB university spin-off company Optrima, inventor of patented 3D sensing technology announced a joint venture offering what they say is the most complete 3D depth-sensing imaging and gesture recognition interface solution on the market. It’s available now, and is being offered to OEMs as an all-in-one product, capable of being embedded into a wide variety of consumer digital and electronic devices. One of the first to take up the technology is semiconductor giant, Texas Instruments.
As part of the deal, terms of which are undisclosed, Softkinetic-Optrima (the JV known as SKO to avoid confusion) will port its 3D gesture recognition middleware called iisu directly onto TI’s intelligent digital signal processors. It’ll also provide direct support for OptriCam, SKO’s 3D imagers product, to TI-based development boards.
So app developers get the tools and APIs they need to develop advanced gesture-based applications without having to muck about with the technicalities of the 3D depth sensing cameras.
Essentially, it’s an SDK offering a rich set of interfaces and predefined gesture-based patterns, letting TI’s customers focus their effort on the game play itself — or whatever 3D gesture-controlled app they’re building.
I recently spoke to Softkinetic’s CEO Michel Tombroff about the upcoming deal, and though he couldn’t at the time name the as-yet-unannounced partner, he was obviously brimming with enthusiasm for SKO’s goal of getting affordable gesture recognition apps into homes across Europe and the US by the end of 2010.
Which just happens to be when Microsoft’s much-anticipated Project Natal is due. Read More
A fairly pointless but fun survey asks: If the British could follow any figure from history on Twitter, who would it be? The top answer, apparently, is ex-war time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, a man who was renown for making speeches that far exceeded 140 characters.
Jesus, who isn’t short of followers outside of the Twittersphere, came in at a surprising second.
The poll, which surveyed 2000+ people across the UK, was carried out by YouGov on behalf of Prospect Magazine. It tested the views of the 11% of British people who are estimated to use Twitter, about 5.5m, and compared them to the rest of the country. The conclusion?
Here are some random upcoming events
• CloudStorm event in Paris, December 1
CloudStorm provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors. It is free for attendees to go to and it is paid for content – i.e. each sponsor/vendor pays for their 5 min presentation slot. These are not really startups paying to pitch, but it is actual larger CloudComputing vendors paying to promote themselves to an audience of probably startups and others. So from that point of view it could be useful. The presentations are followed by a panel discussion with visitors invited to a mini expo and networking party.
[UK] London-based Mendeley, which calls itself “the Last.fm of research”, has announced that its reached somewhat of a milestone today – claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.
That’s pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley’s database continue to grow at the current rate they’ll overtake Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the world’s largest online research paper database, in April 2010.
This is why I love this medium. You put something out there. Sometimes you have all the holes pluggged. Sometimes you don’t. But blog comments and latterly, Twitter conversations, can be just incredible, and go on to form a patchwork of great information around a story – even creating new stories.
That’s what’s happening on the comments on my post yesterday about the @Dinner_Guest Twitter user who is tweeting like he’s a murderer in Brighton. I figured it was interesting enough to do a quick post on it. Maybe I’ve been sucked into a dumb marketing campaign, maybe I haven’t – I’m not overly worried. I’d rather put something out there that I think is interesting than not, and I knew for sure that in this case the community out there would be great at looking into this.
German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING. Burda already has positions in Glam Media, the GameDuell startup and Zooplus.
Hamburg based business social network XING continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year. Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million).
