The successful launch of Hojoki, a German start-up, goes some way to confirm the view that that creating a central repository for all your cloud notifications is emerging as a new business model.
Let’s say you are working with Dropbox, Google Calendar, Pivotal Tracker, Evernote and Twitter on a project. Where can you have a real time global vision of a team’s activity in the project? Where can you have a “one stop search window” which finds in these numerous cloud applications, the document, the comment, or the modification that you are looking for?
The BBC has just released a BBC iPlayer app for Apple iPhone and iPod touch (iTunes link), and introduced 3G streaming across all mobile networks.
The mobile app is a big improvement on the mobile web app, which we’ve had to content with, offering better features. With ‘Live Channel Hopping’, users can switch between live channels as like on their TV, and live radio. Later in the week, 3G streaming will also become available on a range of BBC iPlayer mobile web devices.
Key features of the new BBC iPlayer app:
With both new domain extensions being created and old ones getting new meanings, it’s no wonder that Croatian startup WhoAPI just got their first investment to build a platform for creating domain search services and applications. WhoAPI, as the name states, is creating an extensive API that you can use to get domain name related information to your web or mobile application.
WhoAPI, based in Rijeka, has raised around 40,000 euros from angel investor Mihovil Barancic, the president of the Croatian angel investor’s association CRANE. Barancic previously invested into Entrio, a startup creating a Southeastern European oriented event registration service similar to Amiando.
In a move unusual for the region, WhoAPI’s founders Goran Duskic and Edi Budimlic sold their previous venture, a hosting business called GEM Studio, to one of the biggest hosting companies in Croatia. That capital in addition to the new funds will be used on both servers needed to expand the service and sales efforts to get WhoAPI, still in beta, in the hands of as many users as possible. While WhoAPI has gotten their capital locally, its founders are no strangers to traveling across Europe to seek investors, previously appearing at both HackFwd in Berlin and Mini Seedcamp in Prag.
Duskic says tha even with only the landing page they have gotten requests for the service and hope to extend it in the coming months. With angel and venture capital being sparse in Croatia as well as neighbouring countries, WhoAPI has a chance to actually create their businesses through the effort of its founders. What other startups hope is that Croatian angel investors will with projects like WhoAPI get the experience and grow their network, as to help them in the future.
The social discovery service, Tagged, has announced an acquisition of Topicmarks, which uses semantic engine to summarize content. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
At the time of the acquisition, Topicmarks was used in over 160 countries, and was especially popular where English is the second language. Now, Topicmarks is expected to help Tagged match people to people and people to interests in an elegant way, according to Aaron Patzer, Topicmarks’ advisor and investor.
What’s the music industry’s biggest problem? Big questions for Sean Parker today, interviewed by TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis onstage at Le Web. His appearance attracted the biggest crowd of all sessions at the three day conference. As usual, he was asked where the social web was going and approached by a member of the audience who claimed to be his son from the future. But mostly he talked about music.
Since Napster shut down in 2001, Parker invested in Spotify as a way of “redemption” and to pursue his passion for music, he says. “Napster hired all the wrong people because I was too young and naïve to distinguish between confident executives and someone who just had more experience than me and had the eloquence to impress me.”
It “motivates [Sparker] internally to want to fix the industry of music so that great art is finding an audience”.
So what is wrong with the industry? In Parker’s view, the overall size of the record industry has decreased to the point where it is too difficult to make money as a record label. “The record business has collapsed over the last 10 years and went from a $45 billion to a $12 billion worldwide industry. That’s the biggest problem.”
Two acquisitions today that were for the most part executed so Silicon Valley companies could buy their way into the UK (and Ireland) market.
Freshly funded location-based mobile gaming company Red Robot Labs has acquired UK-based indie gaming company Supermono Studios.
Cloud solutions company Appirio, which just raised funding from Salesforce.com and other strategic backers, has acquired Saaspoint, a provider of cloud consulting services.
Cloud emailing service provider Mailjet has raised 180,000 euros from earlier backers eFounders. Obviously, that’s not a huge amount, but it’s an interesting company solving a real problem and challenging more established, venture capital-backed rivals like SendGrid and Mailgun.
Basically, Mailjet eliminates the needs for SMBs to purchase or rent SMPT email servers by offering instead a cloud-based emailing solution that not only increases the deliverability of messages but also comes with detailed, real-time analytics.
This is a guest post by Colette Ballou, founder of Ballou PR.
I beat this drum all year long: conferences are awkward situations. You want to make the most of your time – chances are that you paid not only for the entrance fee, but also for the flight and the hotel. But why do we fail to make meaningful connections at conferences? Because we forget the perspective of the very people we are trying to connect with.
Interviewed on stage at Le Web by our very own Alexia Tsotsis, Kevin Systrom, CEO Instagram, said the photo app is hitting a new watermark in adoption “every day”. Now on 14 million users , the app is now generating “60 photos per second” and “We’re only at the tip of where we want to be,” said Systrom.
As a former member of the Odeo podcasting team which went on to “pivot” into a little thing called Twitter, Systrom also counselled the audience into thinking not about great products, but “great teams”.
“In the last 2 months we’ve doubled staff, and will be about 10 people in a month. Even though Odeo didn’t go anywhere, it was clear that Twitter cam about because we learned ‘Team’ was so important.”
At Le Web Foursquare Co-Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley expanded on the future direction for the company and product, signalling how check-in data is becoming less important than the recommendations it is capable of producing for users.
Interviewed on stage by blogger Robert Scoble, Crowley went in to the Explore feature of the product and how the sheer number of check-ins are adding to the recommendations Explore can give and feeding back into the other new feature, Radar. It’s this ability for to “technology to generate serendipity” that is at the core of what Foursquare is about he said.
TouchType, the London-based company behind the popular SwiftKey Android applications, has raise $2.4 million (£1.5 million) in Series A funding in a round led by Octopus Investments.
SwiftKey is a keyboard app that leverages TouchType’s natural language engine technology (dubbed Fluency) to learn a user’s writing style and try to accurately correct and even predict their text input. The idea is for the app to reduce the number of keystrokes and speed up text entry on smartphones and tablet computers.
Twilio really is on a roll this year. The cloud communications platform today announced it has raised a $17 million Series C round of funding from Bessemer Ventures and Union Square Ventures. The funding will mainly be used to boost the company’s expansion plans.
To sum it up, Twilio allows web developers to quickly integrate phone calls, IP voice communications and text messages into web, mobile and phone applications. When opening their London office earlier this year, Twilio announced their ambitious plans to expand to 20 other European countries within the following months. Since then they have launched in France in beta and grown their customer base by 400% to about 75,000 developers.
Deezer, which in a press release quite literally claims to have “invented music streaming” four years ago (who knew!), is planning to roll out its music streaming services all across the globe in the next few months to reach a total of 200 territories by June 2012. Not on the roadmap are the United States and Japan, because Deezer considers those countries uninteresting due to “market saturation and low growth forecasts”.
Details of the startup’s ambitious, global roll-out plans were unveiled at the Le Web conference in Paris, where Deezer will later this week celebrate the launch with an exclusive performance by The Ting Tings.
Le Web kicked off today in Paris, though the show was opened not with a discussion about a tech issue or company of the day, but with a demonstration by fashion god Karl Lagerfeld on how he uses the iPad and technology to enhance his work. Not your typical Le Web fare, but then this reflects a growing maturity in the tech scene as it infects the mainstream, in part thanks to devices like the iPhone and the iPad.
With just a small amount of technical hitches Lagerfeld managed to demonstrate to Le Web’s Loic Le Meur how he now creates many of his designs using drawing programmes on the iPad, even showing a sketch he’d done of Steve Jobs that morning.
Hewlett-Packard has acquired a German company called HIFLEX, based in Aachen, which develops software that helps companies in the print and media industries automate their business and technical processes.
HIFLEX products include HIFLEX MIS (Management Information System), HIFLEX Print Support and an open web-to-print system dubbed HIFLEX Webshop.
Startup workspace TechHub today announced its expansion to Prague. The new space will be much like the original TechHub London site, featuring a drop-in working space for annual members, permanent desks for resident startups and most of all a networking platform for the local startup scene. The space will open in the first quarter of 2012.
In charge at the office will be serial entrepreneur and former Skype engineer Lukas Hudecek, who currently runs the Startup Yard accelerator program. Obviously excited about the project, Lukas commented on the announcement saying the “rapid development of the startup scene in Prague and the lack of necessary communities make it the perfect time to open a Prague location”.
Pretender to the Instagram throne, EyeEm, a camera and photo discovery app startup, has launched a big update across its Android and iOS apps and the supporting web platform. It’s now even even more about visual, location-based search and has also introduced more social features.
For the last couple of years one of the main battles around smartphone apps has been around photo apps. One of the main ones to beat in this reach has been Instagram which recently reached around 14 million users, but there’s a battle going on in Europe for users which is perhaps less known but equally as fierce.
One of the earlier players in Europe is Mobypicture out of Amsterdam which did the same as Instagram in sending images across other social networks. They’ve now hit 1.2m users (both via android, iPhone and simple twitter integration). Two other pretenders to the thrown are Lightbox, which is doubling down on Android and has had almost 5000,000 installs via the Android marketplace.
This week at the Le Web conference in Paris, Foodie.fm will be formally launching its personalized social shopping platform for groceries. The Finnish startup basically aims to better inform shoppers about the food they buy, and help retailers communicate directly about the groceries they sell.
At the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system, which the company says relies on patent-pending technology, that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences – think food allergies or intolerance, budgetary restrictions and predilections.
ArtSpotter‘s new iPhone app has just gone live in the App store and if you like art you should check it out. It’s an interactive art map that lets you discover art around you and add to the map. This is version one, but the next one will allow sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Think Foursquare meets Timeout for art. Venues can get data on what people are doing via the app.
For the last few months there’s been a a lot of chatter about a big play coming to aim at the world of collaboration and documents. What on earth could someone do that is new in this space, I hear you ask? Well, that’s a fair point, but for whatever reason they’ve just secured a substantial $6.8 million first round investment to do it and we’ve just been tipped off that their beta version beta has gone live. Doo.net has secured this first round from from DuMont Venture and Angel investors Dr. Hermann Simon and Lars Hinrichs.
