Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who would listen. But since then it’s quite clear that a couple of things have happened. The whole European scene has improved massively. There are now startup events, activity and fundraising across Europe in an ongoing manner. Sure, it’s not Silicon Valley (I’m sorry, but who cares?) – in fact we should really be comparing ourselves to our own progress, not to other places. And the news is good. The ‘Valley Virus’ has spread, and Europe is now starting to boast some amazing startups. → Read More
Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the Silicon Roundabout area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners.
Clearer is a specialised tech/media consulting company but is also doing a startup. The soon to launch Frameblast is aimed at SOHO companies who want to handle video in a smarter way along the lines of Media Silo. Companies can upload their archives into the cloud and use it like a Google search engine for their archive, with tags galore. → Read More
This is guest post by Mohamed El Dahshan, an economist and writer who also advises governments and IGOs on entrepreneurship in developing countries, with a focus on post-conflict nations. He has been been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Huffington Post, Daily News Hurriyet, among others. Mohamed has maintained his blog www.travellerwithin.com and Twitter account as anonymous until the end of the January 25th 2011 revolution in Egypt, in which he took part from day one. Most recently he was a speaker at the inaugural TEDxRamallah conference.
They say Palestinians are more passionate about the Spanish football league than Spaniards.
Not here, though.
“The Barcelona-Real game? No, we’re not really the football watching type.” Mohammad and Mourad laugh. “We did read the results on Twitter though”.
Welcome to Bazinga!, the first Palestinian tech hub, offering a workspace and support to technology and internet entrepreneurs.
The brainchild of five friends, Bazinga! has in a few months established itself as a central address for internet and mobile applications startups, and its founding fathers (and mother) unavoidable figures of the Palestinian tech scene. → Read More
According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date.
No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan. → Read More
If you’re in the United States, you’re probably tired of hearing about Spotify, the on-demand music service that lets you to listen to any of 13 million tracks as often as you’d like on both your PC and mobile phone. The service still hasn’t managed to close deals with the major music labels over here, but it has developed quite a following in Europe, with over 10 million users and 1 million paid subscribers. And when it finally does come stateside it might turn into an even bigger hit.
And it all started with one main business idea: make a music service that’s more convenient than piracy.
That’s one of the highlights from a presentation given by Spotify engineer Gunnar Kreitz at KTH Royal Institute of Technology last month (many of Spotify’s engineers came from KTH). Unfortunately I’m not seeing a recording of the presentation anywhere online, but Kreitz has posted the slides to his website, which you can find embedded below. The slides outline some of the key technical attributes that make Spotify what it is, many of which revolve around one key factor: speed. → Read More
Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in Airbnb (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.
Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.” → Read More
IAC-owned Match.com has set its sights on Europe’s largest dating site, Meetic.com. Match Match.com has put in a public tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for €15.00 per outstanding share in cash (that’s $21.42 in U.S. dollars). That’s a 11.6 percent increase in value from the closing price of Meetic shares on May 27, 2011 (€13.44) and values the company at nearly $500 million.
Match.com actually already owns approximately 27% of the outstanding shares of Meetic, which it obtained when it combined its European businesses with Meetic in 2009. Back then, IAC sold 100 percent of the stock of Match Europe – the entity that houses Match.com’s European operations – for an approximate 27 percent stake in Meetic, plus a 5 million euro note. → Read More
Seems like it’s Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and Africa’s fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There are cranes and construction sites everywhere, throwing up gleaming new glass-and-steel buildings full of shops selling computers and mobile phones. The major thoroughfares throng with people making, trading, repairing, unloading, selling, and generally hustling.
Don’t get me wrong: this is still a poor country. Electrical outages are regular occurrences, the taxis that patrol the city’s broad avenues are rusting Ladas, and the side streets are harrowed dirt strewn with garbage, lined with tin shacks, and patrolled by beggars and feral dogs. But I’ve only seen occasional pockets of the poisonous stagnation I’ve found so often elsewhere south of the Sahara. This feels like a place where things happen. It’s a city and culture that could be on the cusp of a genuine transformation, catalyzed by technology—were it not for a single, gigantic roadblock: its own government. → Read More
“Anything you can do, I can do better,” is the tune Samsung’s whistling this Memorial Day weekend, as its legal team has requested that Apple hand over some upcoming products as a part of its ongoing patent battle with the Mac maker. Just last week, Apple asked the same of Samsung, and a federal judged agreed, ordering Samsung to hand over five products from its Galaxy and Infuse lines. → Read More
Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM.
I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum.
I often get asked “what’s the role of a startup CEO?” Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch “CEO” and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn’t an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I’ll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I’ll get into the role post-launch.
So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup?
Let’s go back to the beginning of Meebo, circa April, 2005. → Read More
Today, on the first day of the yearly Computex Taipei exhibition in Taiwan, Asus took the wraps off the Android tablet/phone combo it teased last week. Dubbed Padfone, Asus is relatively mum on details (specs, pricing, availability) at this point. → Read More
Do you miss the feeling of pressing physical buttons when you touch icons or letters on a smartphone touchscreen? Japan’s second largest mobile carrier KDDI is working on a display that recreates exactly that “clicking sensation” by combining vibration with a pressure sensor. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: The Cansole: A Pong Console In A Can DIY Collapsable Ninja Star Is Great For Collapsable Ninjas Your Nightmares Have Arrived: Kinect-Driven Powerpoint LusionBloom: A Magnetic Vase For Your Next Weird Cocktail Party A Watch Created In 1969 Could Sense Heart Attacks… But Wait, There’s More → Read More
The idea of translating spoken language from cell phone to cell phone isn’t exactly new, but the mobile simultaneous translation system NTT Docomo is currently working on looks really impressive. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier says it uses the “best technologies” for voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis out there for its solution. → Read More
The other day we were in Las Vegas, in a hotel that like all of Vegas stank of cigarettes and losers, which by definition included us for being there. We sat at a sushi restaurant, or what started with sushi and ended with samba — three kitchens with little crossover from latin to salmon. And so we sailed across the generations, talking music and the history of salesforce, and arriving at the movies. And in particular Citizen Kane.
Orson Welles’ defining moment, the intersection of melodrama and politics, of the end of the age of controlled media and the dawn of what we now call social media. The story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for Hearst who started wars when there was a dearth of headlines. We saw him in a fake newsreel standing on a balcony with Hitler, saw the arc of his life at the center of the Golden Age where Washington and Hollywood were two sides of the same coin. And as we were swept along in the daring pop media that the film invented, we became a generation of one. → Read More
Paul Picot offers these new C-Type Yachtman watches for 2011. The naming schemas confuse me. The C-Type I know, but I am not sure whether these are C-Type and Yachtman watches, or C-Type Yachtman watches!? Screw it, I’m just going to use the Yachtman name for now. Yachtman 3 to be exact – which sounds like an awful movie name. The watches are still cool looking, though, and this year they make equal jabs at Rolex and IWC wanting to be something like a Submariner or Aquatimer. → Read More
Currently I am not in Cancun. The reason I am not in Cancun is out of my control (an over three hour Virgin delay on the tarmac at JFK caused me to miss my connecting USAirways flight at SFO). I spent a good part of those three plus plane-trapped hours bitching on Twitter, asking both the @VirginAmerica and @USAirways Twitter accounts for guidance, because calling their respective 800 numbers either put me on hold or wouldn’t go through. → Read More
This past Thursday, Twitter rolled out a new small feature that garnered quite a bit of positive buzz. Essentially, they now allow you to see what other users see when they look at Twitter. In other words, if you click on the “Following” area in my profile, you can see the main tweet stream that I see with all the (public) tweets from people I follow. Very cool. But it’s actually not new at all.
In fact, Twitter had this feature in place two years ago. We mentioned this in passing in the post, but then I was directed to the blog post explaining why they removed it in June of 2009. It’s pretty interesting. From the post on June 4, 2009 on their Twitter Status blog: → Read More
