As we just reported today, Foursquare, the location based social game from Silicon Valley, launched today in London. I’ve duly signed up to check it out, and tweeted out my username to see who’s out there on the system that I know.
First of all the site has no setting to stop receiving emails when someone requests to be your ‘friend’ on Foursquare. That’s not a privacy issue, but it is incredibly annoying. This is possibly their version of a ‘viral loop’. I call it spam/ham. Yes, I can set up a filter, but it’s not an ideal solution. That’s not my main beef with Foursquare.
My main beef right now is the utter lack of sophistication in the privacy settings on location. Let me explain.
BREAKING: Location-based game Foursquare has just added London to it’s roster of cities. The news that the startup (which turns a city into one big game for users via an iPhone app) was poised to hit the biggest city outside the US came out on the company’s Twitter feed two days ago. Granted it’s already live in Amsterdam (the only other non-US city) but London is an order of magnitude larger. Paris is supposedly next on their list.
Foursquare is a location-based social network presented as a game where you “check in” at a location when you are out, thus turning the mobile app into a guide to the city and way to meet people. There is also a loyalty store card element.
I’m going to make a rash prediction about Foursquare in London, and particularly the Brit reaction: Either it will be a smash hit or it will fail miserably.
Brits have taken to points-based games on Facebook. But when it comes to location, most of the time, Londoners are more interested in piling into the nearest pub than worrying about who is the “mayor” of a particular physical space.
I’ve also been trying out Gowalla, which is similar. Now, since I have 12,00 followers on Twitter I thought I might find at least a few members there, but in fact I found hardly any. So whether Foursquare can beat this or not remains to be seen, but since they prep-populate their service with locations you can own, this may give them a head start. [Update: I just tried finding Twitter friends on Foursquare - sure enough, I recognised only three people in London. Still, it's only just launched].
It will be interesting to see how other local location-based players like Rummble will react to this move. They already have Tremors which ranks places by the number of Tweets coming out of a location, but this is not the same as a “game” in the way Foursquare is in terms of collecting points. IN that sense it may well lack virality.
Just before the Summer we launched the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a regularly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. The Index is focused on mobile and web companies (although cleantech and gadget companies have a presence) in the broad EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region. The index was created in association with Valley-based startup tracker YouNoodle. The scores and rankings are based on a sophisticated algorithm using information pulled in from thousands of online sources about early stage companies: traffic, mainstream media, funding information sources, the blogosphere, and other key factors.
And now we need your help. We’re going to re-fresh the Index, taking some companies out, putting some in and generally improving it. We’d like your feedback on who should stay and who should go. Leave your feedback in the comments. More after the jump:
So, good luck to all those startup teams attending Launch48 in London in a couple of weeks. What’s Launch48 you say? Here’s the schpeel:
Launch48 runs events for people who want to try to learn and launch a web business. On Friday the 16th of October we are running a conference with some of the best web entrepreneurs from the UK speaking about marketing, PR, business, technical, and design in regards to launching a web business. From Friday 16th Oct in the evening to Sunday 18th October we are running the Launch48 weekend – a 48 hour event grouping people into teams to create new web businesses. During the weekend participants network, build a new business, and learn from a range of experienced mentors from the web industry.
In other words if you have a startup you want to find out will work or not, then hot-housing it for 48 hours may well help you decide.
These deals where done via the Samwer’s European Founders Fund. But five more e-commerce investments have been dug up by the German startup website Gründerszene by sniffing through the stakes of the Samwer incubator Rocket Internet: Kolibrishop for streetwear and sneakers, as well as its branches sneakersWorld.de und graffitiStyles.com, are now 50 per cent owned by Rocket. The Samwers also bought 20 per cent of Internetstores AG which runs the successful online shops Fahrrad.de (bicycles) und fitness.de (fitness). Rocket Internet also raised its stakes in Betreut.de, a website to find babysitters, dog walkers or private tutors, in August to 46 per cent.
At an event I went to recently I asked the panel what book summed up the best way to startup. One of the panelists sung the praises of a new book aimed at startups: “Getting to Plan B”. I tweeted this out and, as if by magic, I was contacted by the authors offering a guest post. John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice and holds the David and Elaine Potter Foundation Term Chair in Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Randy Komisar is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in California. Their new book, “Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model,” was recently published by Harvard Business Press. It strikes me that their iterative model is better suited to the way tech startups operate.
If the founders of Google or PayPal had stuck to their original business plans, we’d likely never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical changes to their initial models, became household names, and delivered huge returns for their investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a business model that worked? Why did they succeed when most new technology ventures crash and burn?
[The Netherlands] Buma/Stemra, a Dutch collective rights society that represents the interests of copyright holders (some 19,000 composers, authors and publishers), is the topic of the day in the Dutch blogosphere and beyond. The association has managed to wield itself into the eye of the storm because of the introduction of new, exorbitantly high digital music licensing fees, and its stated willingness to fine bloggers up to €21,6 (roughly $31.8) per music video they dare embed on their websites or blogs.
Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here).
This is a guest post by Sam Collins, one of the team members of Loc8 Solutions, a finalist in Seedcamp London 2009. Sam founded TechMeetup (@Techmeetup) in Edinburgh which has brought together the largest community of Scottish tech enthusiasts and is now running in Glasgow and soon Aberdeen. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in June 2009 with a MEng in Civil Engineering and was awarded UK Graduate of the Year 2009 by the Institute of Fire Engineering. Sam joined Loc8 Solutions in April this year as Commercial Director, but left this year. He explains why below.
We went to Seedcamp, and spent three grueling days analysing our product. On the Thursday of the week we didn’t pitch for investment, and in fact, we completely sacked the product. That sounds bad – but this was a great achievement. If you don’t understand why, read on.
Back in December 2008 Reevoo looked like it was running out of time.The B2B customer reviews site hunkered down on staffing amid pressure from the downbeat economic climate in an attempt to play out both its venture investment and give its revenues time to power up.
In March last year it secured an undisclosed round of investment from Banexi Venture Partners, the French leading venture capital firm that originally backed Kelkoo, while existing investors, including Eden Ventures, also participated. It was doing £500,000 worth of transactions a month with partners like Tescos, Orange and Dixons and had launched a French portal. But its SEO was terrible and it was, in my opinion, treading water.
Well today it looks like CEO Richard Anson’s slower burn strategy has paid off.
Reevoo is announcing further partners for its service including Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba (joining Brother, Cannon, Indesit, Kodak and Kaspersky) to supply genuine, post purchase, customer reviews for their European e-commerce sites. Although there are plenty of sites that let you review products, like Ciao and Amazon, only Reevoo confirms you actually bought the product.
[Netherlands] Dutch Start-up Flogs has raised almost €2 million in a round of funding from private investors and the Dutch Government to develop its sharing and synchronizing of event calendars from most major platforms. CEO Toon Timmermans says they plan to expand the business worldwide, opening an office in New York and hiring more staff.
These include Ralph Manheim, a former IMG Media executive with experience in the world of Football, as the commercial director for Flogs International. Martijn van Egmond, formerly of Google, will become marketing and communication manager.
Sulake, the company behind virtual world website Habbo Hotel and the popular Finnish chat site IRC-Galleria are to lay off up to 40 of their staff members in Helsinki. The company will initiate negotiations with staff next week and plans to cut employees in Finland by 13 percent. Sulake has a total work force of 300 people worldwide and is based in 13 countries.
According to Sulake the cuts are due to tougher competition online. However some sites are asking where the company’s revenue is actually ending up. According to Arctic Startup Sulake managed to create a one million Euro profit with their €50 million revenue last year. Some bloggers are wondering where that €50m is now going to end up.
[Austria] Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world’s first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major upgrade which crosses that significant line between technology and its effects in the ‘real’ world. Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more.
This may well appear at first to be an unwise, and possibly disrespectful, idea. However, Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, one of Wikitude’s founders, was actually in New York during the attacks. He says the idea of reviving the World Trade Center within the Wikitude World Browser 3D was a personal one. He obviously feels it’s going to be received as a respectful remembrance, not as a slight on the memory of those who died.
The effect was made possible by upgrading Wikitude’s Android App to 3D and it’s newly released iPhone app, out today (here from iTunes in the US only). From now on anyone in New York, using an AR enabled mobile phone, has the ability to see a virtual World Trade Center through the phone’s display. Wikitude demo shows how a “Memorial of light” at Ground Zero could be the next-generation of ‘virtual’ memorials. View a full video demonstration of this after the jump.
[Netherlands] Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site Sellaband to finance their next album. Public Enemy is one of the first established acts to sign up to Sellaband’s new custom funding program and aims to raise $250,000 for the album in $25 increments. Public Enemy was incidentally also one of the first acts to release music on mp3.
Amsterdam-based Sellaband allows artists to request support from fans, or in Sellaband parlance “Believers”, who invest anything from 10$ up in an album. Funding music this way is not for everyone but it does add a novel and badly-needed niche to the music business ecosystem. Sellaband’s next challenge is to prove that fan-funding can work for artists at any stage of their career and that the model will transfer from Europe to the US. The Public Enemy announcement is an attempt to hit both of those birds with one stone.
[UK] PureSolo, a UK startup which has developed an online music store which lets people record and share their own versions of well-known tracks, will this week launch a special service with hit UK TV show The X Factor, the American Idol-like show. The branded version for the official website will let fans record themselves singing to all those cheesy tracks the show’s contestants are forced to sing for judges like Simon Cowell. There’s presumably little to stop PureSolo creating other versions for other shows in other markets.
PureSolo technically competes in the online karaoke space with others like MikeStar, an online-karaoke community for Europe. However PureSolo’s emphasis on actual music notation and recording sets it apart from the average karaoke games. The startup, headed by CEO David Kaplan, is bootstrapped and backed by private individuals.
[Austria] Controversial Vienna based people search Startup 123people (Which TechCrunch covered from it’s early days) just released their iPhone App. The App hardly differs from the Web platform regarding the core functionality. The basic idea is to get a static 1-pager of people related information. Starting from phone numbers to blogs and Amazon wishlists (which, by the way, can sometimes be more embarrasing than any Myspace Photo). Users get an overview of the person’s web reputation at a glance – assuming it get’s the right person of course. You can download the app here.
[UK] Something interesting is going on. North West Business Insider magazine reports (no online link, it’s in the printed title, alas) that Envestors planning to launch in Manchester to take advantage of “wider pockets of wealth”. It’s a commonly known fact that the North West of the UK has a cluster of millionaire business people who may well be interested in putting small amounts into an organised network like this.
Envestors started in 2004 offering high-net-worth individuals the chance to invest between £20,000 and £2m in early-stage businesses, also plans to expand into Jersey. In other words, it’s not necessarily going where a tech scene is – it’s following the money.
[FRANCE] TalentSoft, a French software startup which has SAAS software enterprise products has finalised a new round of funding with Seventure Partners to the tune of €1.6 million. The idea is to further develop its products which are designed to perform staff appraisals and something called “talent planning”.
Finding a movie to watch on a rainy Friday night can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.Jinni is a content discovery system, or as the makers prefer to call it a “taste engine”, for movies and TV shows which addresses this problem. The service has just gone into public beta.
Most of us choose movies based on rather amorphous criteria like mood or an association with another movie we like. Categorisations like genre are too wide; titles are too specific. Jinni approaches discovery in an intuitive way. You can search for movies and TV shows based on mood terms like “witty”, “stylized” or “disturbing” or plot elements like “unlikely couple” or “ambition”. The results are presented visually (we are seaching video after all) with more popular results getting bigger images. You can also tune results to request lesser known titles or faster paced content.
Following TechCrunch Europe events in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and London among many others, we’re heading to Munich in Germany next. I’ll reveal more about the event this week.
In the meantime, we’d like to hear from speakers and startups who have something to launch or just speak about.
I am looking for speakers to give short, fast presentations.
I am looking for startups to pitch.
The event will be in English and covered on TechCrunch/TechCrunch Europe.
To be considered for the pitch competition you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher, with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of your company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase (you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your business model, your competitors, your team and what you’re looking for (Seed funding, Angel funding, Series A round, etc). There is no fee for one person form the startup to pitch, as is our policy. Deadline for entry is ASAP.
It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of *NSync and Emmy-award-winning dick boxing fame – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Weird weird weird.
Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood – clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in. Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but had bailed on the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us, rather than US – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.
As we just reported today, Foursquare, the location based social game from Silicon Valley, launched today in London. I’ve duly signed up to check it out, and tweeted out my username to see who’s out there on the system that I know. 
BREAKING: Location-based game 
So, good luck to all those startup teams attending 
[Germany] The Samwer brothers, Germany’s most prolific startup investors, are on an e-commerce investment spree. While TechCrunch mourns the 
These deals where done via the Samwer’s 
At an event I went to recently I asked the panel what book summed up the best way to startup. One of the panelists sung the praises of a new book aimed at startups: “Getting to Plan B”. I tweeted this out and, as if by magic, I was contacted by the authors offering a guest post. John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice and holds the David and Elaine Potter Foundation Term Chair in Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Randy Komisar is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in California. Their new book, “
This is a guest post by Sam Collins, one of the team members of Loc8 Solutions, a finalist in 
Back in December 2008 
[Netherlands] Dutch Start-up 
[Austria] 
[Netherlands] Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site 
[UK] 
[Austria] Controversial Vienna based people search Startup 
[FRANCE] 
Finding a movie to watch on a rainy Friday night can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
It’s just weird.
