Luluvise is a social and communications platform aimed at young women and their best friends where they can hand pick their best pals and network privately. Online pyjama party? I’ve no idea, I’m a guy. However, the idea here is to re-create the patterns of close female friendship online, and they’ve raised a $1 million in equity financing from Passion Capital, PROfounders Capital, and angels to do so.
We wrote about their private beta launch here but now the service goes fully online today and they have some data to share so far. Plus, a sneak preview of a feature which may well land them in legal hot water.
Seatwave is a long-time secondary marketing startup in the UK which competes with Viagogo. However, it appears to be tacking towards trying to out-innovate the competition by today releasing an iOS SDK. As far as we know this is the first time a ticketing company has done such a thing, and it could well boost the company’s traction, especially amongst the plethora of music iPhone apps out there which point towards live events.
The fan-to-fan marketplace which majors on sporting and concert events will now enable developers to monetise their apps through ticketing. The move is a major pivot away from the portal model of these ticketing sites towards a more distributed approach.
Deezer, a competitor to Spotify in the realm of streaming music, has signed a partnership with JazzFM in the UK which will see a Jazz FM radio channel added to the site.
The ‘Jazz FM on Deezer’ radio channel will be a curated jazz music channel by Jazz FM’s specialist presenters.
It’s not quite the big distribution deal we were looking for but then, as we’ve said before, Deezer is going to find the UK a tough market to crack, after arriving some years after Spotify.
Viadeo, the world’s second-biggest online networking site for professionals after LinkedIn largely due to its joint ventures in China is extending that policy into Russia. It’s now launching a joint venture with the Russian subsidiary of Finnish publisher Sanoma Oyj to create a professional networking site in Russia.
Sanoma already has rb.ru, one of Russia’s leading business sites, so the idea is to develop a new site in Russian Cyrillic.
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.
