Sulake, the company behind virtual world website Habbo Hotel and the popular Finnish chat site IRC-Galleria are to lay off up to 40 of their staff members in Helsinki. The company will initiate negotiations with staff next week and plans to cut employees in Finland by 13 percent. Sulake has a total work force of 300 people worldwide and is based in 13 countries.
According to Sulake the cuts are due to tougher competition online. However some sites are asking where the company’s revenue is actually ending up. According to Arctic Startup Sulake managed to create a one million Euro profit with their €50 million revenue last year. Some bloggers are wondering where that €50m is now going to end up.
[Austria] Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world’s first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major upgrade which crosses that significant line between technology and its effects in the ‘real’ world. Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more.
This may well appear at first to be an unwise, and possibly disrespectful, idea. However, Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, one of Wikitude’s founders, was actually in New York during the attacks. He says the idea of reviving the World Trade Center within the Wikitude World Browser 3D was a personal one. He obviously feels it’s going to be received as a respectful remembrance, not as a slight on the memory of those who died.
The effect was made possible by upgrading Wikitude’s Android App to 3D and it’s newly released iPhone app, out today (here from iTunes in the US only). From now on anyone in New York, using an AR enabled mobile phone, has the ability to see a virtual World Trade Center through the phone’s display. Wikitude demo shows how a “Memorial of light” at Ground Zero could be the next-generation of ‘virtual’ memorials. View a full video demonstration of this after the jump.
[Netherlands] Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site Sellaband to finance their next album. Public Enemy is one of the first established acts to sign up to Sellaband’s new custom funding program and aims to raise $250,000 for the album in $25 increments. Public Enemy was incidentally also one of the first acts to release music on mp3.
Amsterdam-based Sellaband allows artists to request support from fans, or in Sellaband parlance “Believers”, who invest anything from 10$ up in an album. Funding music this way is not for everyone but it does add a novel and badly-needed niche to the music business ecosystem. Sellaband’s next challenge is to prove that fan-funding can work for artists at any stage of their career and that the model will transfer from Europe to the US. The Public Enemy announcement is an attempt to hit both of those birds with one stone.
[UK] PureSolo, a UK startup which has developed an online music store which lets people record and share their own versions of well-known tracks, will this week launch a special service with hit UK TV show The X Factor, the American Idol-like show. The branded version for the official website will let fans record themselves singing to all those cheesy tracks the show’s contestants are forced to sing for judges like Simon Cowell. There’s presumably little to stop PureSolo creating other versions for other shows in other markets.
PureSolo technically competes in the online karaoke space with others like MikeStar, an online-karaoke community for Europe. However PureSolo’s emphasis on actual music notation and recording sets it apart from the average karaoke games. The startup, headed by CEO David Kaplan, is bootstrapped and backed by private individuals.
[Austria] Controversial Vienna based people search Startup 123people (Which TechCrunch covered from it’s early days) just released their iPhone App. The App hardly differs from the Web platform regarding the core functionality. The basic idea is to get a static 1-pager of people related information. Starting from phone numbers to blogs and Amazon wishlists (which, by the way, can sometimes be more embarrasing than any Myspace Photo). Users get an overview of the person’s web reputation at a glance – assuming it get’s the right person of course. You can download the app here.
[UK] Something interesting is going on. North West Business Insider magazine reports (no online link, it’s in the printed title, alas) that Envestors planning to launch in Manchester to take advantage of “wider pockets of wealth”. It’s a commonly known fact that the North West of the UK has a cluster of millionaire business people who may well be interested in putting small amounts into an organised network like this.
Envestors started in 2004 offering high-net-worth individuals the chance to invest between £20,000 and £2m in early-stage businesses, also plans to expand into Jersey. In other words, it’s not necessarily going where a tech scene is – it’s following the money.
[FRANCE] TalentSoft, a French software startup which has SAAS software enterprise products has finalised a new round of funding with Seventure Partners to the tune of €1.6 million. The idea is to further develop its products which are designed to perform staff appraisals and something called “talent planning”.
Finding a movie to watch on a rainy Friday night can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.Jinni is a content discovery system, or as the makers prefer to call it a “taste engine”, for movies and TV shows which addresses this problem. The service has just gone into public beta.
Most of us choose movies based on rather amorphous criteria like mood or an association with another movie we like. Categorisations like genre are too wide; titles are too specific. Jinni approaches discovery in an intuitive way. You can search for movies and TV shows based on mood terms like “witty”, “stylized” or “disturbing” or plot elements like “unlikely couple” or “ambition”. The results are presented visually (we are seaching video after all) with more popular results getting bigger images. You can also tune results to request lesser known titles or faster paced content.
Following TechCrunch Europe events in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and London among many others, we’re heading to Munich in Germany next. I’ll reveal more about the event this week.
In the meantime, we’d like to hear from speakers and startups who have something to launch or just speak about.
I am looking for speakers to give short, fast presentations.
I am looking for startups to pitch.
The event will be in English and covered on TechCrunch/TechCrunch Europe.
To be considered for the pitch competition you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher, with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of your company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase (you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your business model, your competitors, your team and what you’re looking for (Seed funding, Angel funding, Series A round, etc). There is no fee for one person form the startup to pitch, as is our policy. Deadline for entry is ASAP.
It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of *NSync and Emmy-award-winning dick boxing fame – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Weird weird weird.
Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood – clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in. Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but had bailed on the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us, rather than US – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.
Sulake, the company behind virtual world website Habbo Hotel and the popular Finnish chat site IRC-Galleria are to lay off up to 40 of their staff members in Helsinki. The company will initiate negotiations with staff next week and plans to cut employees in Finland by 13 percent. Sulake has a total work force of 300 people worldwide and is based in 13 countries.
[Austria] 
[Netherlands] Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site 
[UK] 
[Austria] Controversial Vienna based people search Startup 
[FRANCE] 
Finding a movie to watch on a rainy Friday night can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
It’s just weird.
