Index Ventures is commonly regarded as once of the three “Big Cat” VCs stalking tech companies, in a pan-European sense out of London, alongside Accel Partners and Balderton Capital among others. I sat down with three of its key players today – Saul Klein, Robin Klein and Bernard Dallé – to tease out where they are right now and where they plan to head.
Socialtape is an app for iPhone or iPad that shows you videos shared on Facebook and allows you to comment on them. So far so simple.
Here’s the thing. The way we consume video is different from most other other content. Watching single video takes more time than, say, clicking on the image or scanning a shared article. And watching videos in the office can be problematic… However, Socialtape may show a new way forward.
The discussion regarding copycats of US startups in europe is still an ongoing one, and largely due to the fact that the copycats are often heartless rip-offs. DaWanda, a marketplace for DIY goods, took the successful concept of Etsy, which was founded in 2005, to Europe and has since then grown into a company with 65 employees and 1,9 million products for sale.
But in contrast to other “clones” in Europe, DaWanda does not deserve such a comparison, since they’ve managed to build a unique and individual style and community. Neither from a design perspective nor from a strategic one. With 120,000 designers on the site the company just announced that they’ve raised € 4 million in their latest round of financing. They are using the financial boost to develop and strengthen their international presence, with a focus on France. Those providing the capital are newly won investor Vorwerk Ventures, and existing shareholder Piton Capital. It’s an early birthday present for the designer marketplace, which was founded in 2006 and will be five years old in December.
This is important news for anyone who shops – or sells something – online in Europe. The European Commission this morning put forward a number of legislative proposals to alleviate some of the problems EU consumers encounter when buying goods and services on the Internet (see some examples in Neelie Kroes’ tweet, embedded above).
With the proposed legislation, the Commission basically wants to ensure that all EU consumers can solve such problems without going to court, regardless of the kind of product or service that the contractual dispute is about and regardless of where in Europe it was purchased.
French business media are reporting that Viadeo, the professional social network challenging LinkedIn in a number of countries, has acquired Soocial, a Dutch contact management, syncing and backup service provider (via Journal Du Net).
The service basically lets users sync all their contacts across their smartphones, email accounts and computers, and lets them manage, clean up and share contacts from their digital address books.
Budist which has launched its US service this month under the brand of Wakie, has won the Runet Prize, a prestigious Russian Internet award.
Instead of listening to a typical alarm tune, Wakie user receives a call on a mobile phone from a stranger, has a pleasant chat, while his or her brain is slowly switching on. I have not tried the tool myself (I have a very effective alarm composed of two small children) but can imagine that the excitement or anxiousness of talking to a complete stranger can wake one up rather quickly. The service is safe, since the user’s mobile phone number is not disclosed.
The fun idea which may just go viral was thought of by two brothers Grachik and Tatul Adzhamyan. Previously Grachik Adzhamyan was managing one of the Russia’s leading social networks MoiKrug, which was bought by Mail.ru. The company was founded in April 2011 and has collected over 100 000 Vkontakte Likes.
CallTrunk is one of those services where you place a call via the platform, then call someone else and record the conversation. There are one or two other similar services out there, but CallTrunk is attempting to go for broke on several platforms. Today it launches a simple-to-use Skype service that stores all Skype conversations in the cloud, together with a user’s landline and mobile conversations. Not exactly something that will make privacy campaigners woot with delight – but could prove useful in business transactions and interviews. But then then the UK is a “one party consent country” so you can record your own calls as long as you don’t publish them.
The calls can also be transcribed. The only issue is that this is already available as a cheap ad-on to Skype, Call Recorder. So CallTrunk may have to think again.
Twitter photo sharing service YFrog has deleted the account of Grace Dent, an influential UK Twitterer and writer with over 94,000 followers. There appears to be no explanation for the blunder at the moment but we’ve reached out to YFrog for comment.
Twitter recently became the number one photo sharing service on its platform, handling 36% of shares, and YFrog is down to 21% from 29.3% five months ago, indicating a slow death.
The idea that social commerce is the next big thing in marketing has been floating around for a while. K5 Advisors-backed startup Sellaround think that it’s inevitably the “next big thing”. The Stuttgart headquartered company allows its clients to create social selling widgets that can be embedded essentially anywhere across the social web, making them a portable mini-shop.
The key to this widget idea is that the purchasing process is incredibly simple. Since Sellaround partnered with PayPal earlier this year, buyers in essence pick and pay with a few clicks directly in the widget. It’s as quick and easy as online shopping has to be to get the attention of browsing users.
From a seller aspect simplicity strikes a chord as well. To build a widget sellers use an uncomplicated widget wizard. After picking whether you are using it for B2B or C2C product, you can edit the product details, shipping information and pricing, add a few pictures and you are ready to go.
Iovox is a startup specialising in something known as VaaS (Voice as a Service). Their telephony platform allows companies to build services on the telephone network that do real-world, heavy-lifting style jobs which normally require call centres. Companies which have taken on the service include News International and many others.
I went over to their West London offices (yes, not all startups in London are in the East, incredibly), to check out the legendary guitar playing skills of CEO Ryan Gallagher in our TechCrunch Europe version of TC Cribs. Maybe next time we should do a duet.
RjDj’s Michael Breidenbruecker, also a Founder last.fm, has certainly opened up the avenues for sound apps on mobile platforms. The startup’s apps have become platforms for musicians, but are gradually evolving into augmented reality mobile apps.
Most recently the company partnered with screenwriter Christopher Nolan on Inception: The App, which reached 4 million downloads. The amount of “dreamtime” (time spent listening to the app ) was over 94 years. The average listening time per session is over 30 minutes. This was not your average app!
I recently hit Bucharest in Romania to experience the rising star event of the Central and Eastern European scene, HowToWeb. This annual conference is doing an amazing job of bringing CEE entrepreneurs together, and Bucharest is gradually emerging as one of the key tech hubs in the region. The reason? It’s pretty simple – there is great engineering talent, plenty of it (there are 22 million Romanians) and it’s affordable. I could of course name any other number of cities that fit this profile – Kiev, Ljubljana, Sofia, Warsaw and more – but at the moment HowToWeb is bringing many startups and entrepreneurs in from the region to network and party, and mashing them up with international speakers such as Mark Randall of Adobe, Michael Breidenbruecker, founder of Last.fm and RjDj and Pablos Holman of Intellectual Ventures Lab.
The European Court of Justice this morning ruled that content owners can not strong-arm Internet service providers (ISPs) into filtering out copyright-infringing content.
This case has its origin in a dispute between ISP Scarlet and SABAM, a Belgian management company responsible for authorizing the use by third parties of the musical works of authors, composers and editors. In 2004, the right-holders group established that users of Scarlet’s services were downloading such musical works from its catalogue by means of peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing networks.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting a European city which is to a great extent a true example of how technology is changing society and business across Europe today. Once, Krakow was a city infamous for its nearness to Auschwitz and a terrifying example of how the Nazis could destroy a previously peaceful society where people of many creeds had lived together in peace. Under the Soviet occupation, it was just another grey Polish city. But since liberation in the later 1980s and the emergence of a strong Polish market economy in the 1990s/2000s, Krakow is taking its place in the technology world, along with the major hub of Warsaw, as a crucible of technology innovation.
I flew to Krakow to join the burgeoning startup group there known as Hive which showcased pitches from local startups aiming to go global. While there I shot the ‘mini documentary’ below which gives you a flavour of some of the early startup companies in Poland.
This is a guest post by Raj Uttamchandani
who runs Incubatrix, a company that develops cloud application software and digital films. He also advises the Government of India on international trade matters.
A year ago, I arrived in Chile at the invitation of the Chilean government, or rather, as one of the first 23 participants of the Start Up Chile pilot programme. In the last 12 months I have:
When Bonfire went live last month we had high hopes for this tiny startup which planned to bring instant messaging to the Twitter web site, Facebook-chat style.
With this IM presence, now you would know if your Twitter friends were online or not. The horror…
Except, it didn’t work.
Bonfire crashed under the weight of TechCrunch’s readership and we didn’t hear from them again for some time. Well, it happens.
But, boys and girls, Bonfire is back and appears to be working just fine. Unless of course this post kills it again in 3…2..1…
This is a guest post by Liam Boogar, a Californian-native writing in English about the French Startup scene on RudeBaguette.com
This past weekend I was invited to be a juror for Startup Weekend Strasbourg, one of many Startup Weekend events going on this weekend during Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011. Having never heard of anything startup-related in Strasbourg, I expected to see your standard “1st edition” of StartupWeekend: 50-70 participants, a lack of developers, and a relative ‘youth’ (read: mediocrity) in the ideas – boy was I in for a surprise.
It’s been an interesting journey for mydeco, the home design and furnishings startup founded by the management team behind lastminute.com, one of Europe’s most successful ever online businesses. Back in 2008 the site was ground-breaking in its use of 3D imaging to allow for interactive planning and visualisation tools. It even had a social network. But although doing well enough, the game has changed. Consumers are now assaulted by choice – and the 3D design tools were always slightly more functional than the average person needed or wanted. Instead of designing an infinite number of rooms, and purchase the items therein, mydeco now wants to woo its users by becoming a retailer specialising in curation. As CEO Nicole Vanderbilt told me “We’re a bit like ASOS. We started with an aggregator, we’re now becoming more of a retailer. Retailers own the customer and there are higher margins in that. But we eventually want to be the Google Maps of Interiors – anywhere you want to create beautiful rooms we will be there.”
To that end mydeco is now pivoting its model by splitting its business in two. The original site now become a affiliate-driven marketplace for home furnishings under a new name, mydecomarketplace.com. The new direction has meant zydeco has received £2million from EVC Partners / BV Capital, taking the total raised to more than £10 million.
This is a guest post by Darren Fell of SME-focused online accountancy service Crunch.co.uk
Everybody is looking to shake up a particular market these days, leave old business models in the dust and entice potential customers with something they’ve never seen before. It’s a great way to attract early-adopters and generate fantastic publicity, but disruption is never smooth and can sometimes be plain nasty.
One unfortunate and often unforeseen side-effect of rocking up to a stagnant market and releasing a disruptive service is that your existing competitors are not going to be happy about it and will do their best to see you off in one way or another.
