Globally-known London-based product and design consultancy Berg has become best known for its work with major tech companies such as Apple and Twitter, as well as it’s now famous “Little Printer” design which captured the collective imagination of the tech world last year. The tiny device that could print out any kind of information you wanted from the web became a physical manifestation of how… → Read More
Opera has just put out its latest State of Mobile Advertising report for Q1 2013 and its findings put the iPhone back on top for “impression volume” (i.e. generating the most traffic to mobile ads), regaining its lead over Android. iOS also maintains its top position for monetisation compared to the other mobile platforms. → Read More
Nokia today posted Q1 earnings that show the Finnish company still trying to recover from a fast-declining legacy handset business. But in the meantime, it is continuing to play another card in its hand, that of patents and intellectual property licensing. This is an area that will bring Nokia €500 million ($653 million) in revenues this year, CFO Timo Ihamuotila said in Nokia’s earnings call… → Read More
After booting out app discovery and promotion platform, AppGratis, from the App Store earlier this month for violating two clauses of its developer T&Cs, Apple has now followed up with a second blow to the business — by killing its ability to send push notifications to existing users of its app. AppGratis has claimed it has some 12 million users of its app. (<1 million of whom have so far… → Read More
Voddler, the Swedish film and TV streaming service that has been described as the “Spotify for video,” is going global to take on Netflix, Amazon, Vdio, BitTorrent, and the many others in this space. Live in Scandinavia since 2010, and Spain since 2012 (where all together it has picked up 1.2 million users), this week Voddler is extending its footprint to the rest of Europe and Russia; and it is… → Read More
According to the FT, which cites people with knowledge of Nokia’s plans, the former worldwide number one mobile maker (whose crown was snatched by Samsung) is planning several high end smartphones this year — including “a device that can work as a phone and a tablet [aka a phablet]… similar in size but with more advanced specifications to Samsung’s popular Galaxy Note”. → Read More
Nokia has just reported is results for Q1 2013 with sales of $7.6 billion and a non-IFRS loss per share of $0.03 (and a reported EPS of $0.09) — a mixed result compared to analyst estimates, who had expected a loss per share of $0.05 on revenues of $8.65 billion (€6.6 billion). That estimated loss per share is effectively half of what it was a year ago, when Nokia posted a loss of $0.08… → Read More
Tastebuds, the London-based startup that matches people based on their musical tastes, has been kicking around for a while. Now the company looks like it’s finally set to step on the gas. Today it’s announcing a $600,000 seed round from Black Ocean, which will be used to launch mobile apps, grow its developer team, as well as formally launching in the U.S. → Read More
Try-for-size-before-you buy virtual fitting room startup Fits.me has closed a €5.5M ($7.2M) Series A round. It’s not all new money — we covered the first €1.5M tranche, back in January 2012 — but the startup has now added €4M to complete the round. Backers include existing investor SmartCap, plus new participation from Conor Venture Partners, Fostergate Holdings Ltd and The Entrepreneurs… → Read More
When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S it seemed like a magic piece of software. The future had arrived. But it wasn’t alone. True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs had been working out what to do next. Siri was the ‘boom’ moment. They licensed Nuance’s voice recognition technology and created an app based on the True Knowledge engine… → Read More
Medium, the content creation platform started by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has acquired Matter, the science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former long-time Guardian technology correspondent and GigaOm writer Bobbie Johnson last year, for an undisclosed sum. This is Medium’s first acquisition. → Read More
Research firm Forrester has put out a new report exploring best practices for developers trying to get their apps noticed. Its findings include that word of mouth and social discovery play a key role in new apps finding loyal users, at least in Europe. The research also underlines the dominant role that mainline app stores continue to play in app discovery on the iOS and Android platforms. → Read More
BlackBerry has been hit hard by Apple and Android in the enterprise smartphone market, and now it’s making some moves to make sure that it doesn’t face the same fate in the automotive segment. QNX, BlackBerry’s operating system subsidiary that makes the new BB10 operating system, today announced that it would be adding music streaming service 7digital into its in-car entertainment and information… → Read More
Bitbar, the startup behind cloud-based mobile app testing platform Testdroid, has announced that it has closed a $3 million funding round. The round was led by Creathor Venture, DFJ Esprit, Finnvera Venture Capital, and, interestingly, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm via its venture arm, Qualcomm Ventures. Finland’s TEKES financing also participated. → Read More
Jolla, the Finnish startup comprised of ex-Nokians who left to keep the MeeGo fire burning, has confirmed it will be showing off its first handset next month, and kicking off a “pre-sales” campaign to allow fans to register to buy its first phone. Although Jolla has demoed its Sailfish UI in some detail it has not shown off the hardware design so next month will be another big reveal. → Read More
Despite its potential, the jury is arguably still out on the best use-case for Augmented Reality. But one startup, Augment, thinks it has the answer: helping to sell products by letting customers see what they might look like in the real world.
A graduate of the Paris-based accelerator Le Camping, today the company is announcing a €220k (~$289k) funding round — capital it will use to take… → Read More
Tonight in the UK there came a moment which you might call the end of an era in the UK tech startup scene. One of the first of the ‘new wave’ of startups from the mid-2000s lost its last founder, as Andy Young (pictured left), co-founder of the group management startup GroupSpaces, announced he was leaving to join the payments starts Stripe, and will be a core part of its “expansion into the UK… → Read More
We’ve seen a lot lately of car companies sidling up the technology world and vice versa. Consider Ford’s Open Developer Program for instance. But today, three big companies get involved in startups, one of them being the huge Mercedes-Benz. It, along with industrial giant Bosch and insurance company HDI, are partnering with tech accelerator Startupbootcamp in Berlin to create a new kind of… → Read More
Finnish startup Nosto has closed a $2.8 million seed round, including debt and grants, with backing from Open Ocean Capital, SanomaVentures and a number of undisclosed angel investors. The startup is building an online marketing SaaS targeting SMEs who want to amp up the power of their online stores with minimal effort and no up front cost. → Read More
Following expansion into Germany last month, Adzuna, the UK startup that operates what it calls a next generation jobs search engine, is taking its wares even further afield today. The London-based company has rolled out dedicated sites for Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada. That’s an interesting mix of countries and territories — the U.S., for now, is still notably missing in action … → Read More
Just a few years ago, e-invoicing was mainly the realm of large companies, with SMEs ruled out by legacy systems that carried prohibitive licensing fees and were expensive to implement. More recently, the cloud has helped to change this with a number of startups offering free e-invoicing for small companies. Today Dublin-based Senddr is throwing its wares into the ring. → Read More
AppGratis, the French app promotion and discovery platform startup that was recently ejected from the App Store on the grounds that it violates Apple’s developer T&Cs, is protesting the ban by petitioning its users to send supportive emails on its behalf. The petition has apparently garnered close to half a million emails so far but criticisms of its paid promotion business model are mounting. → Read More
Sorted, the UK startup that originally soft-launched as a reverse marketplace for local jobs akin to TaskRabbit in the U.S. (or a number of local “clones”, such as Sooqini, and TaskPandas), has relaunched today after rejigging its model.
Instead of users having to post what is essentially a classified ad for each job they want done, and then wait for a response, the new site turns the user-path… → Read More
Dust off that cheque book. Teddle, the UK startup that lets you easily find and book a home cleaner, has closed a £255,000 (~$391k) funding round from a group of entrepreneurs-cum-angel investors, including Open Table founder David Pritchard.
In addition, the Springboard alumni has managed to persuade Hailo founder and chairman Ron Zeghibe to join as non-executive chairman, although I’m told… → Read More
Move over HAPIfork. Estonian startup Jomi Interactive is cooking up a pair of smart devices that will remind people to drink more water. Or at least whatever liquid/poison of choice you put in your water bottle. The aim, says the startup, is to encourage healthy behaviour and counteract the mild dehydration we are all apparently afflicted with. → Read More
Google’s search results in Europe could soon look a bit different if a number of new reports about the company’s settlement with the European Union’s competition commission are correct. After a three-year investigation into its potentially anti-competitive practices, Google submitted its proposal for an agreement with the EU last week, but the details remained under wraps. → Read More
The hype about the Berlin tech startup scene has continued this year, but as 2013 ebbs into spring, many are asking the same question: When will the hype turn into real results? As many of my contacts said to me on a recent visit: what we need in Berlin for all this hype to be real is a big exit. The most recent evidence that Berlin is capable of producing a decent startup exit is the sale of… → Read More
Back in November last year image giant Corbis acquired Demotix, the crowd-sourced breaking news picture and video agency which had launched in 2008. We present for you a lighting fast ‘exit Q&A’ with founder and former CEO Turi Munthe, who has since left to pursue new projects. → Read More
While world of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games has ballooned in the last few years, the content available to people who’d rather not play a character from Western-inspired troops beating the crap out of some vague Eastern enemy has been somewhat limited. Culture is important, right? Which is why ‘Knights of Glory‘ – a sort of ‘Arabian Knights’ inspired MMO where warring Sultans of old… → Read More
One to 1.2 million Raspberry Pi microcomputers have shipped since the device’s launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it’s impossible to say exactly where each Pi has ended up, the vast majority sold to-date have shipped to developed nations — including the U.S. and the U.K. But the Pi Foundation wants to get more developing nations buying into Pi. → Read More
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