[Finland/Norway] UK-based MP3 music download service 7digital has opened two new stores in Europe.
As of today, music fans in Finland and Norway can download tracks from 7digital’s catalogue of over 8 million “high quality” (320kbps) MP3s. This brings the total number of countries where the company operates to 16.
7digital won’t be the only one to benefit as its various partners will also now be able to offer downloads in those two countries. One of those partners, of course, is the much hyped music streaming service Spotify, which conveniently counts both Finland and Norway as two of only six European countries where it currently operates. Perhaps this played a part in 7digital’s Nordic expansion? Other partners include Last.fm and AOL’s Winamp application.
[UK] There were some interesting panel discussion today at the NOAH conference – a new event in London aimed at presented tech companies to the private equity and banking sector – but the plethora of suited and booted attendees were shocked out of their chairs a little when Klaus Hommels, (one of the first angel investors in Skype, QXL and XING and recently a venture partner with Balderton (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe) spoke his mind.
The panel he was on had been beating about the bush on investing in tech startups, until he broke into the discussion to make some salient points:
“Whenever we want to grow we are too reliant on US companies and too reliant again when we want to sell.”
In other words, European companies have to use US platforms and ad networks like Google to ‘get out there’ and US companies to sell to.
At the first ever outing of the brand new (and quite high level) NOAH Conference in London a clutch of European companies, most mid-to-late stage startups, set out their wares to a broad range of European VCs, private equity people and bankers. Was it a pitch event? It was hard to say, but among them was a round-up from Shakil Khan, effectively Spotify’s consigliari, who wrapped up the company’s stats and opened the kimono a little on where it’s at.
The headline points from his talk were that we can, as we expected, see a US launch in Q1 2010 as well as a launch in Germany and China in Q1/2 (so no pressure then). Spotify will also extend from its existing handset deals into premium services on other platforms in 2010. They are talking to TV manufacturers about embedding Spotify into internet-enabled TV sets and Khan said they now get “a call a week” from games console makers which want to add Spotify to their service.
He also went through a round-up of its stats and model to date.
[UK] A-B-C. Always. Be. Closing. That’s about as far as my sales knowledge goes and it’s lifted directly from a Hollywood movie. But now London-based WeCanDo.BIZ offers a different approach. “Always. Be. Tweeting.” – my words not their’s – with the launch of a Twitter-based sales tool that lets small businesses generate leads through the microblogging service.
At its most basic, Twitter Sales Leads is a Twitter-based search engine that enables users to search Twitter for keywords describing specific products or services. However, where things get a little more interesting is that the service claims to be able to filter results to include only those tweets that indicate intent: “an expressed need, request for a product or service recommendation.” This potentially pits it against search engines like Google.
[France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short).
Allowing the LVMH perfumes and cosmetics to be purchased by Frenchmen on its French and UK website according to the ruling violated a prior court order to remove all such postings (June 2008), part of a €38 million verdict saying eBay had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeited LVMH items.
[UK] If the rumours prove true then Apple is on the verge of releasing its own Internet tablet – and a big part of its appeal will be news consumption. Some have even proclaimed that the device could save the newspaper industry. That’s bound to be music to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s ears, but one of his many media outlets, the UK’s The Sun newspaper, may have beaten Apple to the punch.
Described as the “must have handheld accessory of 2009″, the device features a 26 inch full panoramic colour ‘screen’ and 3D photo realistic graphics. No squinting at pages. No need to turn the device on its side for better reading. Sharing content is also possible, and to add to the fun factor, there’s 7 built in pen-friendly games. But perhaps best of all there’s “no waiting for downloads” in order to get your daily news fix either. Sounds too good to be true, right?
Check out the video promo after the jump.
[Finland/Sweden] Last week was somewhat of a roller-coaster ride for the Nordic mobile phone companies. It started with a hurricane of tweets and blogposts as Spotify was launched for Nokia phones with Symbian. There was also some confusion about whether or not Nokia would continue using Symbian or switch to Linux based Maemo. Nokia later denied that they are abandoning Symbian for Maemo.
[Croatia] Shout’Em, a startup from Croatia that lets you create your own microblogging network, has just launched their official iPhone app. While the Shout’Em platform was first intended to enable mobile social networking, the founders have since decided to ride the “microblogging wave” created by Twitter. With the launch of the Shout’Em iPhone and Java apps, they’re returning to their original focus on mobile.
The iPhone app has all the usual microblogging features, letting you update your status, add photos as well as add your location. The most important feature, however, is the support for multiple microblogging networks: Shout’Em, Twitter and StatusNet. For users that use two or more of these networks, the iPhone application could prove to be very useful.
One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.
Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.
In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.
The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect.
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[Germany] Ah, the Appstore approval process. It can destroy the news cycle. A week ago, our “Dear Leader” Mike Butcher started to ask startups on several occasions to come up with a worthy Foursquare competitor from Europe. Two days ago, I heard from a German company who said they might fit the bill. Dailyplaces sent a press release with Friday as release date. But when we fire up iTunes to install their app, what do we find? Nothing.
CEO Andreas Ebert says Apple still hasn’t approved Dailyplaces for the iPhone, although the app was submitted 4 weeks ago and approval normally takes only 14 days. But you know what? Screw Apple! We’ll tell you about it anyway.
If you’re anything like me – and let’s for all of our sakes pray that you’re not – then your first thought as you stagger back to your desk today, bloated and giddy after Thanksgiving, will likely be “what can I do to kill time until the end of the week?”
Actual work is out of the question, obviously. If you’re a PC person then there’s always Minesweeper, while Mac users can make a start on editing their Thanksgiving videos in iMovie. Linux fan? I suppose once you’ve finished your daily six hours of masturbation, you can just fill up the rest of the time pompously explaining to the rest of us precisely why what we’re doing is wrong. You know, the usual.
But, regardless of our OS allegiance, there’s one activity we can all enjoy together – and that’s taking a look back at the last seven days of TechCrunch. So let’s get started, shall we?
(And Linux users, please wash your hands before clicking. We all know where they’ve been…)
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So it’s been nearly 10 days since Foursquare launched its social mobile game ‘ground assault’ into 50 more cities, including a bunch of European ones. But what I’d like to know is who’s actually using it here in Europe?
Because, you see, Europeans are already quite well served by location based mobile applications like Qype, the various localised versions of Yelp, and other startups like Rummble. And there are increasingly new kids on the block like Flook.
What is clear however, is that only Foursquare and Gowalla (at least to my knowledge) have come up with this gaming approach to ‘checking in’ which has attracted so much interest from high profile blogs like TechCrunch and bloggers like Robert Scoble.
The question is, which will scale and ultimate prove the winner? Because – at least in this instance – we have two different approaches to the issue of social, mobile and location.
[Germany] How would you like to make money from your expert knowledge? E-Learning is a $53 billion world market that requires lots of technology and therefore is mostly tapped by universities and bigger corporations. But now a small startup from Munich aims to make everyone a distance teacher. Yesterday I ran my first online course using Conferendum, the product of a bootstrapped early-stage company that consists of only a CEO and two freelance programmers. Still they offer a fully blown platform for delivering online training via a web browser and phone.
Anyone can set up a training session in a snap, invite people and start charging. Interaction is done by screen sharing or the presentation of Powerpoint, Excel, PDF and Word documents in the learner’s browser. Participants can talk to their trainer and amongst each other by voice or chat. Conferendum also offers dial in numbers in 30 countries for people who want to attend by phone. Basically it’s a tweaked web conference tool comparable to WebEx, Genesys, GoTo Meeting or Dimdim, but with better monetization options.
We’ve been doing some more digging on the definitive moves by Microsoft to woo newspapers over to Bing and away from Google, a story we broke two weeks ago.
Since then there have been some follow-up by various media outlets, notably the Financial Times this week which confirmed that Microsoft had had discussions with News Corp to “de-index” its news websites from Google.
Who approached who first? The FT said the impetus came from News Corp, although our information is that Microsoft is also talking to a range of newspaper publishers in Europe as well, such as German publishers like Axel Springer.
So here is what our sources are coming up with.
[UK] Liverpool-based Little World Gifts wants to re-define virtual gifts. Only the company doesn’t use that word, instead preferring the term ‘digital gifts’ — these aren’t the typical tiny 2D icons that are gifted on sites like Facebook, they’re 3D, touch-friendly and yes, you’ve guessed it, they run on the iPhone.
Little World Gifts will launch in December with its Little World Gifts Christmas Store, a free iPhone (and iPod touch) app that lets you browse the store from which you can purchase those 3D digital gifts. It’s a great example of the kind of offering that wouldn’t have been possible before Apple introduced ‘in-app’ purchasing, although in the case of virtual gifts, this may or may not be a good thing. The screen shot we’ve been sent also suggests that each gift will be priced at £1.19, which seems to be a bit on the high side.
[UK] Business social network LinkedIn has hit a milestone in the UK, surpassing 3 million registered users in these parts. Kevin Eyres, Managing Director Europe at LinkedIn, announced the feat at a London event last night and on the company’s blog this morning.
LinkedIn founder and chairman Reid Hoffman attended the event as well, and told Reuters afterwards that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.
[UK] Startup Weekend is the 58 hour-long conference where attendees made up of “developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists, and more” don’t just talk, they actually build something. The projects, of which nine were completed at the London event last week, are developed over a very long weekend – presumably sleep is optional – and some go on to form actual companies.
It’s all pretty exciting stuff and makes me hark back to my days at university where we’d occasionally pull an ‘all-night-er’. But this seems much more real as it has the potential to create genuine startups and in turn possibly change lives. It sounds like a lot more fun too. On that note, here’s a quick run down of the projects that this year’s Startup Weekend London produced.
[UK] Is an iPhone price war about to break out? After Vodafone and Orange bagged the iPhone we learn today that Tesco, the UK supermarket leviathan, is to sell the iPhone on Tesco Mobile, its MVNO joint venture partnership with O2.
Both iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS handsets will be sold in Tesco Phone Shops and online through Tesco Direct in the UK. There’s even a pre-regsitration website Tescomobileiphone.com – but it’s showing a 500 Internal server error.
This week’s TechCrunch Europe Job of the Week is for a Lead Architect with ChannelFlip Media.
Remember, it costs only £20 to post *any* kind of advert on the CrunchBoard related to your startup/business, whether it be jobs, searches for office space or requests for new projects.
Every week we publish the Job of the Week here (14,000+ on RSS) and Twitter it to about 16,000+ more people. To apply to have Job of the Week featured, put up a job on the CrunchBoard and contact editorial.
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[Germany] Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more).
According to an article in today’s Zeit Online (poor Google translation here), multiple federal and state government officials charged with guarding over national data protection are convinced that Google Analytics is against the law in Germany and are mulling imposing fines on companies who use the service to gather detailed stats based on their website visitors’ usage patterns without the explicit consent of those visitors.
