[UK] Anything that makes the form-filling associated with claiming a refund less tedious is a win for consumers. But it’s also a potential nightmare for governments and companies that provide the services we rely on. Les paper work, more claims.
Enter Tube Refund, an iPhone app that aims to significantly reduce the time and effort it takes to file for a refund for a delayed train journey on London’s Underground (metro).
[France] French start-up Regioneo launched a participative investment program yesterday to help the company raise the €200,000 it needs for development. The company has already raised more than €20,000 by merely turning its users into investors and allowing them to invest directly on their site.
Regioneo’s e-commerce platform provides local producers a marketplace to sell their products online. Thus, the once inaccessible independent foie gras producer can now sell directly to consumers, by opening an online boutique with Regioneo. And for producers that don’t have internet access, Regioneo offers to take care of the boutique and simply relay online orders to the producers.
[France] France’s MyERP has just announced a partnership deal with Google, in which the company’s platform will be one of the first available in Google’s new Apps Marketplace.
MyERP, which was founded in 2000, provides an all-in-one cloud-based business suite for small and medium-sized businesses. Aiming to substitute for a patchwork of business applications – like Salesforce, ACT! and Quickbooks – the platform includes modules for CRM, sales, projects, purchasing, inventory and accounting.
[France] France-based eXo has just raised a €4 million series A round with Auriga Partners and XAnge Capital to expand their business in the US.
The company, a provider of open source java middleware for cloud-based services, first set-up shop in San Francisco in October 2009. The opening of their US office followed a partnership deal they made with Red Hat, which led to the joint-development of GateIn. eXo’s new round of funding will go towards sales, marketing and R&D efforts, as well as establishing additional partnerships throughout the US.
Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.
At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.
“Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Always use a condom!”. Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace ‘shoes’ with ‘sandals’ and ‘condom’ with ‘sprig of silphium’).
This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi’s to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year’s event. And here it is…
Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.
[Finland] This is exactly the type of distribution that Spotify needs to achieve the kind of economies of scale that should reduce the cost to end-users with regards to its Premium offering. And of course, generate much needed revenue. The music streaming startup has signed up telco TeliaSonera as its exclusive partner in Finland to market and sell Spotify Premium. The two companies already have a similar arrangement in Sweden which started at the end of last year.
[Germany] Team Europe Ventures, the Berlin-based VC firm, has launched a new €6 million fund for early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet space. The fund is mainly targeting companies in Germany and Europe, but also in the USA, and the focus will be on the seed stage, with 4-5 startups being invested in per-year for a maximum of €500K per company.
This is bound to be good news for startups in Europe, and particularly in Germany where seed funding is seen to be a problem for early stage companies in the Internet space. Pawel Chudzinski, one of the partners of Team Europe Ventures comments:
[UK] Now this is getting a little silly. Snippa, another UK-based Groupon clone launches today, this time from two experienced entrepreneurs: Tim O’Shea, founder of Blurtit, and David Hobart, founder of PureContent. The company is self funded by O’Shea and Hobart from their existing businesses, operating with a six person team headquartered in North Walsham, Norfolk.
Snippa, which is focusing on London initially, pretty much follows the usual group buying model: Each day various deals are on offer for things to do in the city, with a minimum number of buyers required for the deal to go through. If not enough people sign-up within the allotted time period then the offer is withdrawn and no money changes hands. The idea is that those interested will spread the word via email and social networks so as to increase their own chances of getting a bargain.
Although it’s here where I’m beginning to question the Groupon model as a whole, whereby the perception may be far more important than reality with the tipping point required, arguably, nothing more than a marketing gimmick designed to make the offers go viral – see below.
Autoquake, an online used car retailer in the UK, has raised another £6 million round of venture capital and venture debt financing from existing investors Accel Partners and Highland Capital Partners. The debt is being provided by Kreos Capital. This is after raising £4m from Accel and Highland only last year. That takes its total funding so far to £20 million.
Autoquake’s plan is to disrupt the car retail industry by selling quality used cars on behalf of large corporate fleets and leasing companies direct to consumers via virtual showrooms. High quality pictures of the actual cars on sale appear instead of the usual fuzzy pictures on the average second hand advert.
[France] I first learned of Allmyapps at Le Web ’09 when the company’s CEO Thibauld Favre, and co-Founder Aranud Coulondre, grabbed my attention and enticed me into a demo. I nearly missed my flight. Allmyapps, a small but ambitious startup based in France, aims to become the “iTunes for software applications” as Thibauld puts it, bringing simple 1 click multi-application install to end-users. The company is backed by undisclosed business angels.
[Austria] 
Platogo, the social games platform, has today released its Platogo Wrapper that enables casual games developers to easily integrate their games with Facebook by inserting a few lines of code.
Essentially, it lets any casual game take advantages of the basic social features offered through Facebook, such as the ability for a user to invite and play with friends in their social graph and see how their scores compare, challenge each other, and display their gaming achievements on their Facebook wall.
The idea was to offer a solution that “automatically transforms any casual game into a social gaming experience.” says Florian Landerl, Product Manager at Platogo. That ‘social gaming experience’ on Facebook, of course, also means a casual game has the basis to go viral.
[Italy] The group buying model is proving incredibly popular right now. It seems that not a week passes by without another Groupon clone being launched – we have exclusive news coming tomorrow of a new London offering about to launch – but what if vendors themselves could easily add group buying to their own destination sites rather than relying on a third-party aggregator?
That’s the idea behind by SyncFu, a new side project from the two founders of Europa finalist Aleveo, the social network that lets students connect and exchange ideas with companies.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.
On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.
Thus conflicted, it was with some trepidation that I received news from the old country that Gordon Brown’s government is getting ready to enact its very own version of the DMCA. Called the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), the new statute aims – amongst other things – to halt the rising tide of intellectual property theft on the Internet. But unlike the DMCA, its reach won’t be limited to national borders: any site anywhere in the world that’s accessible from the UK needs to obey the law or else it’s liable to find itself blocked from the entire country. I’m not kidding, this is China-level enforcement.
Today TechCrunch Europe is backing the creation of a new entity to support a lasting, sustainable and innovative Digital Economy for British businesses based on modern thinking around the Internet. Coadec (The Coalition for a Digital Economy) will represent the new wave of British businesses built on technological innovation.
What’s prompted this move?
Well, we think the UK’s Digital Economy Bill in its current form will impact the innovation sector of the UK’s digital/tech economy in a host of negative ways. We could start a simple campaign on this blog, but that would just be us.
What is required is either an umbrella organisation to put the case for the digital economy to politicians, or a simple lobby organisation.
[Serbia] The owners of Serbian betting sites kladionicar.com and freebetting.net – Djordje Djokić and Dušan Jagličić – were arrested last week for “organizing illegal bookmaking and money laundering”. However, not all is what it seems.
Both sites are resources for sports fans who like to bet on various sporting events. They provide stats, news, tips and other information related to sports betting. But revenue is generated through banner ads with links to bookmakers outside of Serbia and via SMS services with related betting information not through actually taking bets.
In other words, the two sites only refer users to other betting sites and get paid for each referral. It therefore looks like Djokić and Jagličić have been arrested, perhaps mistakenly, for affiliate marketing.
U.K. startup Skimlinks is hoping to revolutionize the affiliate model by turning normal product links into affiliate links. The startup gives publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants across a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publishers makes money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions. Today, the startup is launching a nifty discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword.
[Russia] Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has signed a contract with AlterGeo – a hybrid positioning startup – to use its technology to add location-based features to the company’s maps and toolbar web applications.
AlterGeo technology aggregates GSM Cell-ID, Wi-Fi and WiMax to retrieve a user’s location. The traditional mobile triangulation with poor accuracy of a few hundred meters is adjusted with Wi-Fi to increase this to 30-150 meters. The accuracy of WiMax is not specified by the company, but due to its high popularity and almost 100% coverage in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the solution could be very promising.
Using AlterGeo technology Yandex will be able to provide location-adjusted searches such as a tracking pizzeria or shop nearby with its popular mapping service.
[Slovenia] Stripgenerator, a web based tool for creating comic strips, just released a new version based on Flash and Javascript. Unlike most tools of its kind, whose interfaces are made to look pretty, Stripgenerator’s service takes a more minimalistic approach – focusing on ease-of-use and simplicity over eye-candy.
Created by Slovenian web and mobile application developer 3fs, Stripgenerator is based around a community of users who constantly create new comic strips. The free tool lets you create a strip using predefined frames, characters and objects. Using your mouse, you drag and drop as well as rotate and resize the objects. The predefined objects are minimalistically designed, so even non-artistic users should be able to create something that looks decent. Hopefully, the strips they create will be funny as well.
[UK] The location-based social networking space is about as competitive as they get right now – though it’s still relatively early days – but Foursquare appears to be executing particularly well.
It certainly has the mind share of the press, which should trickle down to end-users, and today the New York-based startup has announced a tie-in with Vodafone UK, currently the number two mobile network in the UK, behind O2 and ahead of Orange (although that’s about to change once Orange completes its merger with T-Mobile).
The result of which is that the service will be placed ‘on-deck’, meaning that the mobile carrier is giving Foursquare a push through its own portal/app store – Vodafone MyWeb or Vodafone Live! on older handsets – as well as providing a short code to receive a link via SMS (text “FOURSQUARE” to 97886).
TechHub (@TechHub), the project set up by Elizabeth Varley to create a physical space in London for tech start-ups “from from across the UK, Europe, the US and beyond”, appears to be well on its way. It is now accepting a limited number of Founder Memberships, booking sponsors and details about the actual space will, I’m told, be outlined shortly.
Comparisons could be made with the similar-ish Plug and Play Tech Centers in Silicon Valley, although TechHub’s model feels like it may well be better adapted to the spread-out nature of the European scene, and potentially more flexible. It’s also not an incubator.
Not bad for an idea dreamt up a couple of years ago by my colleague and editor Mike Butcher, who is now helping Varley out as a board advisor on strategy. Perhaps because of that, the back-story here is relevant.
