[UK] This week Stephen Fry – British actor, journalist, celebrity ‘Tweeter’ and self-confessed technophile – appeared alongside Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn. They discussed the future impact of social media.
The discussion was not very ‘tech’ or ’startup’ oriented, but it did touch very much on the cultural and social impact of social networks, and Twitter in particular. Stephen Fry in particular mounted a robust defence of social networks as culturally positive, not negative.
I asked a question toward the end about what Twitter does when Skype and, perhaps Facebook, enable status updates to be as public and open as Twitter, but Biz Stone simply said they ‘don’t look in the rear view mirror’. Which was not exactly a fullsome answer, but hey.
The event formed part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK programme. The video comes from NESTA.
[Belgium] Earlier this week, 3D gesture recognition software developer Softkinetic and VUB university spin-off company Optrima, inventor of patented 3D sensing technology announced a joint venture offering what they say is the most complete 3D depth-sensing imaging and gesture recognition interface solution on the market. It’s available now, and is being offered to OEMs as an all-in-one product, capable of being embedded into a wide variety of consumer digital and electronic devices. One of the first to take up the technology is semiconductor giant, Texas Instruments.
As part of the deal, terms of which are undisclosed, Softkinetic-Optrima (the JV known as SKO to avoid confusion) will port its 3D gesture recognition middleware called iisu directly onto TI’s intelligent digital signal processors. It’ll also provide direct support for OptriCam, SKO’s 3D imagers product, to TI-based development boards.
So app developers get the tools and APIs they need to develop advanced gesture-based applications without having to muck about with the technicalities of the 3D depth sensing cameras.
Essentially, it’s an SDK offering a rich set of interfaces and predefined gesture-based patterns, letting TI’s customers focus their effort on the game play itself — or whatever 3D gesture-controlled app they’re building.
I recently spoke to Softkinetic’s CEO Michel Tombroff about the upcoming deal, and though he couldn’t at the time name the as-yet-unannounced partner, he was obviously brimming with enthusiasm for SKO’s goal of getting affordable gesture recognition apps into homes across Europe and the US by the end of 2010.
Which just happens to be when Microsoft’s much-anticipated Project Natal is due. Read More
A fairly pointless but fun survey asks: If the British could follow any figure from history on Twitter, who would it be? The top answer, apparently, is ex-war time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, a man who was renown for making speeches that far exceeded 140 characters.
Jesus, who isn’t short of followers outside of the Twittersphere, came in at a surprising second.
The poll, which surveyed 2000+ people across the UK, was carried out by YouGov on behalf of Prospect Magazine. It tested the views of the 11% of British people who are estimated to use Twitter, about 5.5m, and compared them to the rest of the country. The conclusion?
Here are some random upcoming events
• CloudStorm event in Paris, December 1
CloudStorm provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors. It is free for attendees to go to and it is paid for content – i.e. each sponsor/vendor pays for their 5 min presentation slot. These are not really startups paying to pitch, but it is actual larger CloudComputing vendors paying to promote themselves to an audience of probably startups and others. So from that point of view it could be useful. The presentations are followed by a panel discussion with visitors invited to a mini expo and networking party.
[UK] London-based Mendeley, which calls itself “the Last.fm of research”, has announced that its reached somewhat of a milestone today – claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.
That’s pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley’s database continue to grow at the current rate they’ll overtake Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the world’s largest online research paper database, in April 2010.
This is why I love this medium. You put something out there. Sometimes you have all the holes pluggged. Sometimes you don’t. But blog comments and latterly, Twitter conversations, can be just incredible, and go on to form a patchwork of great information around a story – even creating new stories.
That’s what’s happening on the comments on my post yesterday about the @Dinner_Guest Twitter user who is tweeting like he’s a murderer in Brighton. I figured it was interesting enough to do a quick post on it. Maybe I’ve been sucked into a dumb marketing campaign, maybe I haven’t – I’m not overly worried. I’d rather put something out there that I think is interesting than not, and I knew for sure that in this case the community out there would be great at looking into this.
German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING. Burda already has positions in Glam Media, the GameDuell startup and Zooplus.
Hamburg based business social network XING continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year. Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million).
[UK] Today in London a couple of hundred delegates turned up to Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference to jaw-jaw over the nature and impact of business and society of, well, Twitter. But as various startups and social media pundits took to the stage to debate the mostly positive impact Twitter will have, a much darker side has appeared on the social site in the last few days.
@Dinner_Guest is tweeting some extremely dark stuff. Most if it is decidedly not suitable for work, and read like passages from the novel about a killer, American Psycho. Of course, this is no surprise – Twitter is big enough now to attract all sorts of crazy people.
Hacker News, the now influential news aggregator about tech startups born out of Ycombinator, has been of huge value to a community not only keen to learn but to track the latest development on the Web.
But the conversation there is distinctly Silicon Valley oriented. So I am excited to learn of a new aggregator called Uni Startups. Clearly it’s aimed at people creating startups while they are at university, but being built on Slinkset, it’s already up and running and pulling in stories. It’s also got a widget you can embed, which I’ve done below.
[UK] It seems that the iPhone has all the bases covered, including those of the UK’s Royal Navy which is using Apple’s iconic device to help put potential new engineering recruits through their paces.
A dedicated iPhone app, developed in partnership with the Central Office of Information (COI) and creative agency Marvellous, presents those interested in joining the navy with a set of challenges that simulate real-world situations. Dubbed ‘The Royal Navy Engineer Officer Challenge’, five interactive missions are on offer – drawing from realistic Royal Navy training tasks – which utilise some of the iPhone’s hardware features, such as the touch screen (obviously) and accelerometer.
[Spain] Though I’m dying to browse around and mingle at FICOD, “Feria Internacional de Contenidos Digitales”, or International Digital Content Fair for you, a friend told me it would be nearly criminal not to at least mention what we have going on here in Madrid for the next three days (see program).
[Sweden] Movie-streaming service Voddler (the so called ”Spotify for movies”) has received about 3.4 million Euros (35 million SEK) in funding from a group of private investors. The money will supposedly go to developing the service.
Voddler has chosen to not to give out any info about the investors or how large their share in the company will be. The company has about 50 share holders to date. One of them is Deseven Capital where Voddler’s CEO Marcus Bäcklund is a partner.
[UK] Yep. You read that right. News has broke that the BBC News’ newly appointed Social Media Editor hasn’t signed up to Twitter prior to today. In other words, he’s a newbie. As a result, let’s just say that there’s a bit of a Twitter storm brewing.
Social Networking continues to be the killer app for mobile and Twitter is no exception. Loved by both handset makers and mobile networks alike the microblogging service is seen as a potential driver in selling more expensive handsets and those potentially lucrative data plans. It’s therefore not all that surprising to learn that Orange and Twitter have formed what’s being described as a “pan-European partnership”, although for now UK customers-only are to benefit.
Starting today, Orange UK customer can send and receive tweets by SMS to and from their followers, and in a world first, also share photos on Twitter via the carrier’s Multmedia Messaging Service (MMS) as part of its newly launched ‘Snapshot‘ service – sort of like an Orange-branded TwitPic or similar sites. This additional Twitter functionality is to be included in customers’ existing plans and won’t cost any more aside from standard charges for sending an SMS or MMS outside of any included bundle.
[UK] A new mobile payment service in the UK aims to lower the barriers to paying for content online, and in doing so, help bloggers, musicians, and other content owners generate much needed revenue.
GoPayforit lets website visitors make payments ranging from 25p to £10 via their mobile phone, charged to either their monthly phone bill or debited from their Pay As You Go (pre-pay) credit. The service is based on the industry-wide mobile payment system Payforit, which is backed by all of the major UK mobile networks. Talking of those (greedy) networks, the amount that content owners will receive after GoPayForit takes their cut can vary greatly as each operator charges a different amount per transaction.
Payment examples provided by the company include purchasing tracks or videos from a band’s website, subscribing to a blog or donating to a charity.
Tonight is the launch of the project to raise money for the charity Take Heart India, which teaches IT skills to blind and disabled people in India and helps them get skills that will employ them for the rest of their life, taking them out of the cycle of poverty. You can find out more about an LDNnudetech event to support them below, but I just want to say something first about startups, entrepreneurs and the Spirit of Punk. Yes.
This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week. This actually started out life as an initiative by the UK government, internally to the UK. But cleverly they have extended it globally and brought on partners. So all over the world there are events going on to promote the idea of entrepreneurship.
At the same time, governments all over the world are bailing out banks. Either that, or the banks are allowed to fail, taking startups and small businesses with them. It’s an impossible situation, but that’s what’s happening. Many say we are in for even more pain. Already millions are unemployed across the planet. None of this is going away anytime soon.
We’ll be running our own TechCrunch half-day and party event on the subject of Realtime in December (”Christmas Crunch: It’s a Realtime Holiday” £45, tickets here). But that’s a way off, and in the meantime, tomorrow in London the 140 Characters Conference from the US hits these shores. It will be at the O2 Indigo and is being put on by the long-time tech veteran Jeff Pulver.
At the last minute we’ve secured three free tickets to the event (I’ll be there moderating a panel on venture capital and realtime), so we’re delighted to give these away to anyone commenting on this post saying they want to go, and why. These are normally £425. So get commenting. We’ll pick someone randomly.
It’s my great pleasure to announce that I’m going to be joined by Steve O’Hear on TechCrunch Europe. Some of you may have noticed Steve’s work appear on the blog over the last month. Steve will be my Contributing Editor, and will be working closely with me on our continuing coverage of the tech scene in Europe and acting as my “wingman”. In fact, I did try to convince him that Wingman was a great title, but for some reason he preferred something with the word Editor in it. I can’t think why.
Steve has some awesome credentials. Aside from starting up the well-regarded independent gadget blog last100 (formerly a part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network) which he’ll continue to write, he’s written for some of the best titles out there including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and of course ReadWriteWeb. In particular he wrote the excellent ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’ from 2006 to 2008. And to top it all off he previously wrote and directed the documentary film ‘In Search of the Valley’, which interviewed many leading Web 2.0 people in Silicon Valley and was released in September 2006. It was highly recommended by Mike Arrington, FYI.
[Germany] Today I should have received my first edition of Niuu, a personalised print newspaper comprised of articles taken from various blogs and newspapers. Delivery time should be between 4 AM and 6 AM so that people can read it over breakfast. Niiu has contracts with mostly German newspapers like Bild, Frankfurter Rundschau and Handelsblatt but also with the Washington Times and The International Herald Tribune.
Readers can use the Niiu website to customise which page of a newspaper they want to read in the morning. Local news from Berliner Morgenpost can easily be combined with Sports from Bild and the New York Times’ frontpage with just a few clicks.
[Germany] It must be great to be in the social games business. Apparently anyone can jump on the bandwagon, even latecomers and copycats. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, a $43 million investment at Playdom and €5 million ($7.5m) additional funding for Wooga, comes the fourth investment in the last week: The Samwer brothers’ copy of social games giant Zynga, called… wait for it folks… Plinga. Sound familiar? The clone has been funded with an undisclosed amount. Now that’s what I call an investment spree.
