WiMP, the music streaming service owned by Aspiro, is bedding down in Scandinavia. Already available in Norway and Denmark, it’s “finally” coming to Sweden, once again via a distribution partnership with teclo Telenor.
Sweden, of course, is the birthplace of competitor Spotify and telco agreements are seen as the future for cloud-based music services. So despite its unfortunate name, WiMP hasn’t wimped out of taking the fight to Spotify head on.
Maxroam, the mobile company out to disrupt mobile cell roaming, has signed a significant deal with Ryanair, Europe’s biggest low-cost airline which carries 78 million passengers annually. The deal is to create the world’s first free mobile phone roaming service allowing passengers to receive free mobile calls and SMS messages when they travel abroad.
Although the deal is being marketed via Ryanair’s channels, anyone can take advantage of it by buying a SIM card. I’m told the deal will last for around a year. Given that Europeans have to cross borders frequently when travelling, this could well shake-up the mobile market here.
In an on-stage announcement at Mobile World Congress, Foursquare founder and CEO Denis Crowley said the location-based startup had added five new languages to its mobile application.
These are Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. He said the new app (2.2.5) will be available on versions for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android today.
The analytics platform remains oriented towards the US, but Crowley said they were looking at further internationalisation. He added that they would be focusing on the API this year.
Crowley also pit out the latest Foursquare adoption figures of 6.5 million users, 2 million check-ins per day. This adds up to 420 million checkins and a 3,400% growth last year.
Crowley described Foursquare as “almost like Pokemon for adults” and their continuing emphasis on mashup up clocatino and the social graph.
It’s interesting that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington kicked off a debate today about the current problems with search. Because it’s clear that while few players feel able to take on the might of Google, there remaina a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles.
One of them is Israeli startup SortFix, who I met on a recent trip to Tel Aviv in Israel (more on that soon).
Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its iPad app. But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix’s algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search. It’s still in beta but you can try it here.
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been on stage tonight at a Mobile World Congress press conference talking about Nokia’s future relationship with Microsoft. Various blogs have been live blogging (here’s a post from Engadget). But sitting back and listening to Elop’s explanation about how Symbian devices will still be shipped and a Meego device, due to ship this year, will be used for experimentation and “disruption”, one has to ask the simple question: Where are the apps?
While the first MeeGo product will ship this year with a Qt framework, Qt is unlikely to go onto Nokia’s Windows Phone, thus killing off all those developers who studied Qt. “f we encourage a fork in Windows Phone’s development platform, we could create a situation where we confuse developers and consumers,” said Elop tonight in Barcelona. Bang goes that talent base, then.
“Freedom of speech is being denied [to] Luke Harding while Wikileaks and Julian are getting in to bed with these dictators; these enemies of freedom of speech…” – David Leigh
I’ve just posted my review of the Guardian’s Wikileaks book, co-authored by Investigations Editor David Leigh and Moscow Correspondent Luke Harding.
The book is full of frankly incredible revelations about the paper’s relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. So incredible, in fact, that I wanted to ask the authors more about them.
On Thursday morning, I spoke to Leigh (who is based in London) via Skype. We talked about Assange, the Wikileaks revalations, whether Assange is a journalist or “just an IT guy”, the difference between the “mainstream media” and wiki journalism, Assange’s new-found friendship with the Russian government and a whole lot more.
The full video is below, followed by a few of my favourite quotes from Leigh.
Two weeks ago, I reviewed the New York Times’ book: ‘Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy‘. It’s a remarkable work of journalism, combining the paper’s collected reporting on Wikileaks, with editor Bill Keller’s personal account of working with Assange.
For my money, Keller’s account was the stand-out highlight of the book – a behind the scenes journalism thriller, punctuated by highlights from the leaked documents themselves.
In fact, as I read through the bulk of the book, I found myself wishing that Keller’s style had continued throughout. Even in edited, compiled form, the revalations from “Cablegate” and the Iraq war logs are a lot to digest and it would have been wonderful to have Keller as narrator to walk the reader through them all. That didn’t affect my review, though. I knew I was asking too much to expect the Times publish that kind of comprehensive narrative so quickly.
You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to receive a copy of the Guardian’s new crash-published Wikileaks book and realise that it was all the things I wanted from the Times’ book. And more.
Prior to the public announcement on Friday, Intel was kept in the dark with regards to Nokia’s plans to relegate MeeGo to a glorified R&D project, sources with knowledge of the situation tell TechCrunch Europe.
The U.S. chip maker, it appears, was caught off guard as were many media outlets and analysts – this publication aside – with the news that Nokia has forged a long term partnership with Microsoft that will see the handset maker adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform. Intel, which along with Nokia is developing the MeeGo operating system, is said to be extremely concerned now that Nokia will inevitably reduce its engineering commitment, which it desperately needs, and where this leaves plans to get its Atom chip into smartphones and other mobile devices.
We’ve also learned that Nokia’s first MeeGo device, originally scheduled to be announced late last year, has been sent back to the drawing board by operators.
While TechCrunch has reported a rumour that UberMedia has just acquired TweetDeck, the company itself is staying tight-lipped. CEO Iain Dodsworth told me today “We’re not going to comment on acquisition rumours.” Heck, that’s his prerogative. That being said, we have very good sources that told us today that the deal was for $30 million, UberMedia’s largest deal yet. Bill Gross’ company, after buying EchoFon, another popular Twitter client, now controls 20% of the userbase of Twitter.
TweetDeck had raised a little over $5 million in funding. But it started from humble roots.
My first interview with TweetDeck’s Dodsworth was at TechCrunch 50 in 2008 in the form of a podcast I laughingly called Butcher’s Bunch (archive here). At the time Dodsworth explained how Tweetdeck had largely started out as a hobby project.
As I was plugging in to power my iPhone to live stream today’s Nokia press conference, I overheard someone lean over and say “This is the most important day of your life”. It was whispered into the ear of Nokia’s PR spokesman as he took the stage today to introduce Nokia CEO Steven Elop. It certainly was important – but not in a great way. Today his boss effectively ended Nokia’s history as an ecosystem of its own, laid down its guns, and gave in to a Windows Phone future.
To me the direct comparison is Microsoft taking over as the search engine behind Yahoo. Under Carol Bartz, Yahoo surrendered in the search war to Google and decided to let someone else try: Bing. From that day on Yahoo gave up it’s long tradition of innovation.
Exactly the same thing has happened today. Everything about this event screamed that. Elop is Nokia’s Bartz. He’s looks at this entirely as a business transaction. Sure, he recognised the problems. But he took the decision not to fight.
Although Symbian will be around for a while longer as a legacy product, eventually Nokia will allow Windows to insert its phone OS into every Nokia product line, and even right down to the simplest, cheapest phones for the emerging markets.
Everything about this is fantastic for Microsoft. And in that regard I would even postulate that Nokia will now willingly sell itself to Microsoft, at a reduced price, within the next 18 months.
Siine, a Spain/UK-based developer of software that aims to change the way we communicate using touch-screen phones and tablets, has raised £550,000 (roughly $880,000) in seed funding from Atomico Ventures, the investment vehicle established by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.
The company says it has created unique systems that make it easier for people to type and transfer text via touch-screen devices, reducing the number of keystrokes required to use virtual, on-screen keyboards. That pitch, of course, sounds eerily similar to Swype‘s.
Well the news is in, the rest we find out now.
Podio, which describes itself as a connected work platform, has secured $4m in Series A funding. Sunstone Capital led the round and the investment is said be used to further develop Podio’s product and to hire “key employees”.
A sort of collaborative social network for the Enterprise or ‘Facebook for the workplace’, Podio operates in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 space providing tools such as messaging, calendars, tasks, and contact management. However, it doesn’t stop there. Podio also gives users the ability to build their own ‘apps’ without any technical knowledge. Over 2,000 apps have already been built by users, which include CRM systems, meeting planners, process facilitation, recruiting, contract drafting and employee feedback. Naturally, there’s an accompanying app store too.
FlyScreen, the lock screen replacement for Android and Symbian phones from Israeli startup Cellogic, has landed on the iPhone. But not as we know it.
That’s because Apple’s iOS is locked down as it were (see what I did there) and doesn’t allow third-party apps to take over the lock screen. This doesn’t mean that iPhone users of FlyScreen don’t get access to the app’s array of content widgets – they do – but this functionality is accessible like any other app. However, Cellogic has come up with a nice new twist for FlyScreen, something that the company is calling “Ambient Mode”, a more fun presentation of content for when the phone is docked.
SoundCloud, the audio platform originally targeted at music makers but now a wider consumer play, has announced that it’s reached three million registered users.
And considering that the Berlin-based startup was at a million users as recently as last May – pre-pivot, if you will – the change of direction would appear to be paying off or at least hasn’t affected the company’s growth trajectory negatively. That said, these are registered users-only not active users as it were but nonetheless growth does look steady.
SocialGO, the community building platform which in the past positioned itself against the likes of Ning, has secured $2.2m in funding from nine institutions in its largest fund raising to date. Since the startup is already floated on the AIM public market in the UK, the fund round lead by First Columbus, its secondary broker, and values the company at $24m. Prior to this it raised $800,000 from Veddis Ventures.
The institutions that took part were mainly private client funds that invest in small cap businesses. Some invested in previous rounds and will be announced in a public filing today. Alex Halliday, CEO and co-founder – who, at 25, happens to be also Britain’s youngest public CEO – told us the round was heavily oversubscribed. Bentworth Holdings Limited, in which former PartyGaming MD Vikrant Bhargava, a non-executive director, holds an indirect beneficial interest, owns 20.4 per cent of the company, according to a company filing.
The funds will be used to launch ‘SocialGO Version 2′ which is currently in closed beta and is due for launch in the middle of this year, but we can give you some screen shots below. The existing SocialGO platform hosts over 200,000 sites serving 3.5m users per month. Groups using include Levis, Hilton Hotels, French Presidential Candidates and Oxfam.
On Friday Nokia has its Capital Markets Day where it is rumoured to be making a big announcement about its future direction (Update: They did it). Or it could happen at Mobile World Congress, starting Sunday. At any rate. The “burning platform” memo will now go down in history as a momentous event. Nokia has been forced, by the stupendous growth of Apple iOS and Android, to consider dumping Symbian, going with Windows Phone or trying to make Meego work. But it would appear that Meego is now dead in the water, with Nokia’s own CEO admitting that only one device will come out this year. It is an appalling situation to be in.
But the rot seems to have set in late last year. Then, during a cold November’s conference in Dublin, Nokia assembled several hundred developers to chew over the Meego platform, for the first MeeGo Summit.
During keynote speeches, developer meetings and talks, the delegates poured over the only N900 Meego device and networked in the evening. Indeed, they did a lot of networking: football, drinking in bars and… a lot more drinking. In fact, Nokia threw a blank cheque at the conference, and as one blogger pointed out “Holy hell, Nokia and Intel have a lot of money to throw at us.”
Reuters is reporting that Nokia’s first device running MeeGo, its ‘next generation’ mobile operating system developed as a joint-venture with Intel, is dead on arrival. Or, specifically, it’s been canceled before actually being formerly announced. And yet, in the same report, analysts are cited as saying that the device could be revealed at the company’s Capital Markets Day this Friday or at Mobile World Congress on Sunday. Confused? Here’s what we know and what we’re hearing from our own well-placed sources.
Busuu.com, the language learning community, has teamed up with The Guardian newspaper and Macmillan Education to give its users more real-life context when learning English.
Under the partnership, busuu users can access daily world news updates provided by a feed from guardian.co.uk. However, if they don’t understand a particular word, powered by Macmillan Education’s online dictionary, a simple double-click on a word will reveal a definition – a bit like Amazon Kindle’s word look up feature. Additionally – and this is where the “community” element of busuu kicks in – users are then asked to take part in a ‘writing exercise’ in which they are required to comment on the article in question, earning “busuu berries” in return (yes, such a thing does exist). Those writing exercises are then shown to the English native community on busuu who are asked to correct any errors.
With all this recent talk of acquisitions and content strategies, it’s clear that content is coming back. Dare I even say… Content is King? (Shudder… no, let’s not go there). Suffice it to say that content production is turning into a big deal with the likes of Demand Media commanding strong interest in their IPO.
Meanwhile, the old content companies are producing video, but not nearly at the rate of knots of the young upstarts. And a case in point today is Crane.TV, a premium online video magazine for contemporary culture, which has figured out how to produce lots of video aimed at a high-end audience. Today it has signed a deal to provide content to Getty Images video entertainment library. Getty Images, a leading creator and distributor of still imagery, footage and multi-media, works in over 100 countries.
