According to one estimate the total data storage capacity produced by humans each year is expected to surpass 1 Yottabyte by 2013. Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months. And the mountains of content being produced by ordinary people as lifestreaming becomes more and more popular is only adding to that growth. So how are we going to deal with it – search it, store it? That’s the problem Silentale is planning to address, and the startup has just opened it’s private beta to start testing it’s platform. We have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers for the free private beta. Just leave a comment with your email address to get on the list.
Put simply, Silentale is aiming to store all your digital conversations in one place and allow you to access them from anywhere. Founded by Paris-based French Canadian entrepreneur Laurent Féral-Pierssens and his team, Silentale is going to set out with a very clear business model: We’ll aggregate everything you do out there: Twitter, Email and even SMS. We’ll store it and let you search it. Simple.
Ok, that’s not quite right – it won’t be aggregating your blog comments – that’s quite a different nut to crack. But the scale of its ambition in archiving all your messaging is quite large enough.
Tripwolf, the self proclaimed “social travel guide”, just launched their new and revamped version – tripwolf 2.0. Some new features have been added to the new version, and – at least at first sight – the usability of the site has been greatly improved, with an up-to-date contemporary look and feel. However, underneath the design and UI improvements, some substantial and beneficial changes have been underway.
Manchester-based developer Martin Rue has just launched tweetdoc.org, a tool “to help companies produce documents that facilitate brand monitoring, competitor analysis and market analysis through the power of Twitter”. Uh?
Let me explain. Companies need to keep an eye on what their customers are saying, mainly so they can spot when things are going wrong and intervene before a PR disaster strikes. tweetdoc.org collects all the tweets around a particular brand, company or event and whacks them in a single document for you. Pretty useful for PR types struggling to keep up with the real-time stream, no? All you have to do is enter a search term or hashtag and tweetdoc.org will spit out a PDF containing the results. And very handy for brand monitoring and competitor analysis, too. tweetdoc.org has paired up with document publishing platform edocr.com to enable documents like brand monitoring reports to be uploaded and shared with a single click. Read More
StudiVZ founder Ehssan Dariani, who got booted from his own company shortly after acquisition, has finally unleashed what appears to be a tsunami of pent-up anger at the event, in an interview with German quality newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He tries to compare his genius to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, but the interview leaves mostly the impression of someone with plenty of cash but rather too much time to brood. Dariani sounds bitter and disappointed in what the “paperboys from Stuttgart” made of his once successful German Facebook clone with 6 million registered members.
Being booted from StudiVZ “was extremely rude and without any contractual base” he says. It happened after a week-long fight. Holtzbrincks managers made comments in meetings that he decided to correct, er, sharply. “They were such corporate careerists in their forties who didn’t like to be rebuked in public by a tween”, Dariani says. But he also had some bad press during that time with some embarassing Youtube videos…
Well, we’ve done TechCrunch Berlin, TechCrunch Nordic, and Paris among many others. So TechCrunch Europe is again (as we did last year) teaming up with Seedcamp for the official London Seedcamp Week After-Party on 24 September in central London. “TechCrunch London” will be in the style of our annual “GeenknRolla” conference – namely, short, fast presentations and pitches from startups and a lively panel discussion. Following that TechCrunch Europe will be hosting the official after party with the Seedcamp participants and mentors.
It looks at first glance like Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman’s PROfounders Capital has a new and unexpected bit of competition in the shape of “online Dragon”Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital. The latter has just announced a brand-new £20m fund, the Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund, that aims to invest in early-stage companies.
Meyer rightly points out that lower costs mean investing £250,000 to £1m in a start-up today is roughly equivalent to the £5m – £10m that might have been needed ten years ago. That’s the space her new fund is aimed at, which places her head-to-head with PROfounders Capital. Doesn’t it?
Shares in Austrian provider of online gaming entertainment bwin Interactive Entertainment soared in early trading this morning after the company confirmed that it was in the final stages of acquiring Gioco Digitale, one of Italy’s oldest online gaming sites.
According to the announcement, the boards of both companies and its shareholders have agreed on principle terms for the acquisition of 100% of Gioco Digitale, but did state that although the acquisition was progressing, there could be no certainty that a final binding agreement on the transaction will be reached.
Details on deal size have not been disclosed yet at this point. Daniel Stewart & Company analyst James Hollins told Reuters that he estimated the purchase price to be around 100 million euros ($143 million), and expected the deal to boost bwin’s earnings. Italian media estimate Gioco Digitale to be purchased for in between 90 and 95 million Euros.
Ok, that headline was a lie. Sorry, but we’re not going to review the Spotify iPhone app that just launched, because as far as we can tell it’s identical to the leaked beta we reviewed over a month ago (while every other media outlet was having to make do with an official Spotify YouTube video). Apart from one or two crashes we’re hearing about via Twitter, and the fact that it doesn’t yet work in Ireland (boo!) it’s the same. Let’s move on.
Instead we’re gong to point out that co-founder Daniel Ek has either the coolest taste in music, or the worst, depending on your perspective. Demoing the new app to Sky News, Ek played Madonna’s “Holiday” (WTF?!) and Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. We’ll just leave it at that.
Twestival, the global Twitter-driven charity event born out of this single event last year in London, stages another global event this week. TechCrunch is supporting Twestval as it’s all about using Twitter for good. Thursday 10th September will see 133 cities from Beijing to Beirut holding Twestivals for their own local causes. The London event will raise money for ChildLine, a service provided by the NSPCC. The 1,000 volunteers involved globally hope to raise $400,000.
London’s Twestival – recently Twitter founder Ev Williams described London as Twitter’s “capital” given it has the most number of users of any single city – will be at Vinopolis and is aiming for for 1,200 attendees. You can get tickets here.
Elizabeth Varley who heads up London Twestival has announced The Hours will be playing on the night, fresh from their tour with U2. They’ll be joined by OneTaste and The Parks Dept. and three DJs. I’m certainly going to support the cause and I encourage you guys to as well.
Streaming music service Spotify has launched on the iPhone and Android devices for its premium subscribers only. You can download it from Apple’s App Store here and the Android Market. Though plans to launch there are in play, the service is not yet live in the US, and it has already taken several European markets by storm. This iPhone app is basically identical to the leaked beta we reviewed in detail.
The mobile apps will allow you to play the entire Spotify catalogue and the ‘offline mode’ caches playlists so they can be played… when you are offline, like on a plane. Spotify has set up a special mobile section with more details.
The launch of this mobile version now fires the starting gun on their US launch plans. A large number of record labels have actually invested in the Swedish-born, London-based startup, which is now valued at €170 million, or about $242 million, with a post money valuation of around €200 million.
According to one estimate the total data storage capacity produced by humans each year is expected to surpass 1 Yottabyte by 2013. Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months. And the mountains of content being produced by ordinary people as lifestreaming becomes more and more popular is only adding to that growth. So how are we going to deal with it – search it, store it? That’s the problem Silentale is planning to address, and the startup has just opened it’s private beta to start testing it’s platform. We have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers for the free private beta. Just leave a comment with your email address to get on the list.
Manchester-based developer Martin Rue has just launched 
It looks at first glance like Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman’s 
Streaming music service 