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.
