Over the last few months I’ve detected a disturbance in the Startup Force. While startups from Europe have often looked to the US as a natural market to scale up in, they’ve traditionally looked at the Valley as a natural place to start. But based on what I’ve been hearing, I’m starting to wonder about that. Sure, every company is different, and for cloud startups, Silicon Valley remains the Mecca. But increasingly, New York’s burgeoning tech scene is making it more and more attractive for Europeans to de-camp there. Being in New York for TechCrunch Disrupt has only served to strengthen my impression. But before I get into that, let’s meet up! We’re having a TechCrunch European meetup tonight at “Dublin 6″ Bar, 575 Hudson St from 6pm-8pm, use #TCEurope as a hashtag). Ok, back to the arguments. → Read More
There hasn’t been a whole lot of news coming out of the Google Zeitgeist event taking place in a posh hotel on the outskirts of London this week, but Google’s making some other news in England: its CEO Larry Page has been spotted wearing Google Glasses.
The pictures of Page wearing the super-funky augmented reality eyewear are possibly the first — although his Google co-founder Sergey Brin has also been seen wearing them in the wild. Today’s pictures come courtesy of a Google employee, who posted them — where else? — on Google+.
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Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered its launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.
Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.
People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.
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“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review.
DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist.
The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will.
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We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.
That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.
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One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up.
CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they can want, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. → Read More
Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can’t access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills.
This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It’s a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube’s API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School.
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Lately we’ve seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is leading the charge, and lately Llustre (also UK) has hit on a model of re-connecting designers with consumers.
That trend continues today as Urbanara, an online retailer for “high quality home textiles and home wares” supplied direct from the people who make them, secures a significant funding round. TA Venture, together with a group of international investors, including Blumberg Capital and Brain-to-Ventures, has participated in a €3.5 million series A investment round in the startup.
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UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years.
The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives.
But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones. → Read More
Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don’t blame you. Sure, there’s the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real problem for online publishers (who have enough problems already).
Israeli startup ClarityRay says it’s not something looming in the misty future — it’s happening now, and it’s only going to get worse. → Read More
There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of ‘e-learning’ but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math, or Moshi Monsters which has subtle learning tasks for kids.
Another which works well is Quipper, which, in a Q&A format, helps people learn things in a sort of game format. Today it’s announced that it has raised $3.6m (£2.3m) of Series A funding led by Globis, the Japanese VC. The round has been two other investors: Atomico, the London-based VC firm led by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and Benesse, a major Japanese education and publishing company. → Read More
The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.
Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history).
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Facebook says that it generated half of its revenues outside of the U.S. and Canada in the first quarter of 2012, and some numbers out today underscore just how extensive its reach is in different markets, with active usage in some countries outstripping that of Facebook in its home market.
According to figures from Nielsen — some of the latest numbers to come out in the battery of data that is being fired out in the final day before Facebook goes public – Brazil has the highest active reach of Internet consumers using the social network from home/work computers. Some 38.1 million Brazilians visited Facebook during March 2012, equivalent to 76.7 percent of all people who were active online that month from home and work computers in the market.
When you take into account people accessing Facebook from other sources like tablets and mobiles, Nielsen says New Zealand has the highest active reach, with nearly 80 percent of all consumers accessing Facebook in one format or another.
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Every few days something really amazing dumps over the transom here at TC HQ. Today it was YesterdayMe.com. Built by Vladimir V. Tuporshin and partner, Ilja Razinkov, the site essentially allows you to enter yesterday’s alcohol consumption. Why? Because, that’s why.
While the Russians are known for their heavy-duty drinking – although they’re moving from vodka to beer and wine these days, perhaps to prevent liver death – this site is ingenious in that it offers a very simple, hangover-proof interface for registering how much you sucked down. By sliding little drink indicators back and forth, you can tell the world or just yourself that you had too many beers.
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Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’ out of Y Combinator launched.
And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon’s infrastructure, but they’ll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current applications are located. → Read More
Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of growth: the funds to take the image-based social network into new international markets, and a business model.
First up, Rakuten’s home market of Japan, where “Pinterest is growing very fast,” notes Rakuten’s CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, in an interview with TechCrunch. He wants Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site.
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Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski.
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Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.
The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.
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This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion.
Here’s classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media. Back in February this year Coca-Cola Australia invited its fans to some ‘banter’ or chat. Fans obliged. Much fun ensued. Coca-Cola looked stupid.
What’s happening here? Coca Cola has invested tirelessly in its brand for the past 50 years. Now some bright social media spark is conducting inane ‘little experiments’ for social media ‘engagement’ that seem hellbent on killing it. Exactly the same thing can happen when young startups try to engage on social networks and think they have to “engage”. → Read More
Lately a trend has emerged: European VCs putting down more roots in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the current scene and act as a bridge for European companies trying to form local partnerships, and of course as a mechanism for M&A or further funding with US-based VCs. One of the more recent firms to do this was Index Ventures, which a year ago put partners on the ground for the first time outside of its bases in the UK and Switzerland.
The latest to join that trend is Earlybird Venture Capital out of Berlin which has brought on Valley-based Konstantin Guericke as a venture partner. Is this part of a developing theme?
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