Steve O’Hear is probably best known as a technology journalist, most recently at TechCrunch. He still occasionally blogs at last100. Until February 2012, he was CEO of expertise platform Beepl where he helped the company navigate its first VC round, along with seeing the product through development, private alpha and a high-profile public launch.
Last100 was co-founded with Richard MacManus in May 2007 as part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network. However, the network was disbanded in November 2008 and Steve now runs the site as an independent property.
Along with TechCrunch Europe and last100, Steve has written for numerous publications, including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and ReadWriteWeb, on topics ranging from the social web, educational technology to consumer electronics.
From 2006 to 2008 Steve wrote the ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’. He also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary ‘In Search of the Valley’, which was released in September 2006.
In 2002 Steve was made a fellow of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and awarded a bursary to support the development of innovative and practical uses of online technologies in a variety of learning environments. From 2004 to 2005 he served on the board of governors for the University of East London.
Zibaba, the Tel Aviv-based social commerce company, has been chosen to power retailer Marks & Spencer’s Facebook storefront.
Leveraging M&S’ over 300,000 Facebook fans, the Father’s Day-themed so-called ‘f-Commerce’ store (if you can stomach that phrase) lets users shop within Facebook itself, offering items such as Mens clothing, electrical appliances, gifts, and travel accessories. However, Zibaba says that its technology allows for automated catalogue updates (via an XML feed), so the inventory that M&S are currently displaying can be dynamically updated post Father’s Day. → Read More
Team Europe Ventures, the investment arm of German incubator Team Europe, is being rebranded as Point Nine Capital (PNC). Additionally, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Christoph Janz is joining its leadership team.
To date, the fund, which focuses on early-stage companies in the Internet and mobile space, has invested in over 10 startups, including inFakt, Lieferheld, Madvertise, MisterSpex, myGengo and SponsorPay. → Read More
Russian geolocation service AlterGeo has reportedly raised $10m from Intel Capital and Almaz Capital – a 25% share increase – and values the company at around $20-25m.
Serial investor Esther Dyson, who has a track record in Russia, having previously invested in Russian search engine Yandex (a partner of AlterGeo‘s), is also said to have participated.
The company plans to use the new financing to expand its user base and develop new services. → Read More
ImpulsePay, the mobile payment service in the UK, has launched PublishPay, which is designed to help publishers charge for their content on mobiles. It does this in two ways.
On the content side, the platform is able to turn any RSS feed (which can be kelp private) into a mobile-friendly website, a potentially cheaper option than building a native app. In turn, that content can then be charged for – and to a reader’s mobile phone bill or pre-pay credit – through ImpulsePay’s support for Payforit, the mobile payments service backed by all the UK’s mobile operators. This provides a fairly frictionless alternative to Premium SMS or credit card payments — see our previous coverage. → Read More
MarketMeSuite is partnering with PeerIndex to integrate influence rankings into its social media dashboard. Through the partnership, MarketMeSuite users will be able to utilise PeerIndex’s topic-specific “social media rankings” in order to identify influencers and experts in the markets that they are targeting.
So, for example, if you’re pitching something technology-based (or perhaps coffee), I’m probably worth a shot (no pun intended) but go too far off the beaten track and my potential influence will soon drop off. That’s because UK-based PeerIndex, which competes most directly with Klout, identifies influential individuals online according to specific topics. → Read More
This really is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies: Build a computer program that can see as the human eye does. Based on the principles of the human visual cortex, Cortexica Vision Systems claims to have done just that.
The London startup, which was spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009 after six and a half years of research to understand how humans see and two years building algorithms to accurately mimic human visual recognition, today releases its VisualSearch API, which has been in private Beta for a while. It’s aimed at brands who want to “directly engage with consumers” via their mobile device while bypassing the need to use QR codes or other barcodes or more traditional text search. → Read More
Mobile social network Flirtomatic (“the world’s number one flirting company”) has appointed Neil Goldberg as its new CEO. He’ll replace outgoing CEO Mark Curtis.
Goldberg is described as having “16 years of leadership experience building global companies in the entertainment and technology industries” and was previously with Silicon Valley’s SayNow, the social, voice-based entertainment platform, which was sold to Google. That’s notable since Flirtomatic is making in-roads in the U.S., attributing success in the States as a key factor in its ability to raise a $9 million Series C round from Nauta Capital and existing investors last July.
As for Curtis’ decision to step down, it’s described as an “amicable departure” and as having unanimous backing from the Board “in the interest of the company’s next growth phase.” → Read More
EDITD, the London-based startup that offers a retail monitoring and analytics platform for the fashion industry, has raised a $1.6 million “seed round” led by Index Ventures. Alex Zubillaga, Atlas Venture, High Line Venture Partners, Sylvie Gabriel and Joanne Wilson have also participated.
The new funding will be used to further develop EDITD’s product offering, including increasing the amount of data being analysed, along with entering new markets and expanding the team “globally”. Robin Klein of Index will also join the company’s board as chairman. → Read More
Social media specialist Punktilio has been acquired by digital media agency Essence, just two years after being founded.
In fact, the accompanying press release carries the line: “From ‘start-up to ‘sold’ in just two years”, which reminds me of the Stuart Baggs quote from the TV show The Apprentice: “Everything I touch, turns to sold”. That’s because, Punktilio’s sale is also just one year after Michael Birch invested in the London-based company. Birch, of course, has seen multiple exits, including Bebo, which he originally sold to AOL for $850 million in March 2008. → Read More
Restalo.es, the leading Spanish restaurant reservations site, has raised €1m from Barcelona-based Active Venture Partners. The funding will be used to fuel growth both at home and Internationally. Funded in 2008, the startup currently operates across Spain, along with Paris, London and Rome.
Similar to Toptable in the UK, Restalo lets diners book tables in real-time with immediate confirmation of a booking in addition to offering discounts of up to 70%. To date, the company claims to have taken 500,000 bookings worth €14 million for restaurateurs, while saving over €6m for its users. It has 3 million page views per month and over 300,000 members. → Read More
Brandwatch, the UK social media monitoring startup, has released a free search plugin for Seesmic, the desktop client for companies who want to manage their social media presence.
Aimed at users who want to monitor a particular brand or topic across the whole of the Web, not just the services that Seesmic supports out of the box, the Brandwatch plugin adds additional search/monitoring functionality. This is presented in a new column within the app which updates in real-time to display Brandwatch data alongside the user’s Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds. → Read More
Mixcloud, the ‘YouTube of radio’ (see our recent TechCrunch TV interview), has finally brought its offering to the iPhone in the form of a native app.
The Mixcloud iPhone app gives on-the-go access to the London startup’s library of on-demand radio – DJ mixes, radio shows and podcasts, along with 100s of thousands of other “Cloudcasts” that have been uploaded to the service. The app is in Beta and thus is currently being offered for free. → Read More
Seen as a “last throw of the dice” in 2008 by Michael Acton Smith’s Mind Candy, Moshi Monsters has grown into a phenomenal success. The educational social game for kids is said to be signing up a new player every second and when your online brand is shifting merchandise in the physical world too, you must be doing something right.
It’s no wonder then that a new UK startup would want to pitch itself on the back of Moshi Monsters’ success and Fight My Monster is doing just that, aiming to be a “Moshi Monsters for boys”. → Read More
Designed to mark the company’s full launch after four years of development, iGlue, in partnership with one of its backers, Power of the Dream Ventures (PDV), is launching “The iGlue Summer Annotation Challenge” with cash prizes totaling $40k.
Putting to one side the question as to whether this is money well spent compared to other forms of marketing, the competition, which kicks off today and will last through to August 31st, asks users to download iGlue’s browser add-on or install the bookmarklet and help Wikify the Web. → Read More
Although this isn’t on the same level as Wooga’s $24m Series B round announced today, it’s more evidence that social gaming remains a hot space.
Pixonic, the social games publisher, has raised a $5 million round from VCs Ventech, Kite Ventures, and TA Ventures. This follows earlier funding of $1m secured last year. The new investment will be used to expand the Russian startup’s social game lineup through new titles published via its PixAPI platform on to various social networks, including Facebook. → Read More
Billed as a sort of affordable TED, The Inspire Conference is coming to London on 7-8 June.
The event, organised by the team behind Launch48, promises to bring “the most brilliant minds” together in Technology, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. And on that note our very own Mike Butcher is making an appearance. He’ll be doing an on-stage discussion/interview with Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of the phenomenon that is Angry Birds. You don’t get much more brilliant than that.
Overall, the event will feature 30+ speakers including representatives from The Times, Mozilla Labs, Spotify, MediaSift, Ogilvy, YouGov, Mendeley, Ushahidi, Soundcloud and others. → Read More
Magma, the platform that helps magazine publishers (both dead tree and online) streamline their workflow, has secured $350k from Syddansk Teknologisk Innovation (SDTI).
A sort of ‘Basecamp for magazine publishers’, Magma was founded in July 2010 by Andrew Dahl, whose had stints at Amazon, Expedia and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Sebastian Stockmarr, a User Experience Designer who has worked with Benjamin Media, one of Denmark’s largest publishers. It helps streamline magazine publishing – an area that is said to be seeing a resurgence because of new digital devices like the iPad – by offering collaborative tools for copywriters, editorial, layout designers and ad planning. → Read More
There’s an argument that says that more enterprises would adopt cloud-based alternatives to legacy desktop software if it wasn’t for those pesky users. That’s presuming that you can get buy in from the IT department first.
But presuming that is the case, Huddle has an interesting offer: the company is introducing the ‘Huddle Adoption Guarantee’ for its cloud-based collaboration platform in which enterprises adopting the service who don’t see 100% user adoption across the organisation can expect to get their money back, with a few caveats, of course. The idea, says Huddle, is to enable IT buyers to “make the leap to cloud computing without the investment risk or concerns about low user adoption.”
On the surface at least, it’s a bold offer and likely coded talk for saying we’ll give you more help in weaning users off of Microsoft SharePoint, the company’s closest legacy competitor. → Read More
Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends and discover new ones, is rolling out a new money-making feature today: Brands can now create collections of their favourite locations, which users of the platform can then ‘follow’.
Collections are a form of location curation so in this sense brands get to put their stamp on places that are worth checking out, perhaps around a certain theme that, conveniently, ties-in with the brand’s own offering. So, for example, Heineken could start a collection with rooftop bars around the world that a user can follow. Or Red Bull could host a collection of skateparks around the world. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
