It seems rumours of 3′s demise yesterday were greatly exaggerated because today in Battersea saw the global launch of the X-Series from 3. Although 3 have been struggling until now to gain a [significant] share of the UK mobile market, this new mobile broadband service just might make a big difference for them. For a longtime now I have likened my experience of surfing the web from my mobile, to the same feelings of despair and frustration I used to have while waiting for web pages to download on to my old ‘dial-up’ PC. Well if X-Series lives up to the hype and actually brings the broadband experience to mobiles, I will certainly be very interested and might even consider switching depending on the price, the true access speed, the availability range and the wider support for more mobile devices. i.e my JasJar from HTC. For far too long mobile phone companies have ripped us all off with their call charges and even more extortionate data charges. For example a recent business trip to France resulted in my T-Mobile monthly bill being £400+, simply because I was on the wrong plan but no one chose to tell me I was over paying, so downloading emails and surfing the web cost me £1 per megabyte! I have since moved to T-Mobile’s Web’n’Walk which until today seemed a more reasonable solution at £7.50 for unlimited internet access. As 3 say on their website “Why should you pay per minute, per message, per click, per megabit? In the real world, you buy your PC, pay for broadband and that’s it. Our principle is simple – X-Series customers will only pay a flat access fee on top of their basic subscription and then what’s free to use on the internet should be free to use on mobile broadband”. Along with the announcement of the new X-Series, 3 also announced a number of interesting partnerships, including one with Sling Media to give customers access to their home TV channels on their mobile handsets. “Working together with 3 has enabled us to push the boundaries of TV viewing further than ever before. 3 understands the power of mobile broadband to deliver compelling, value add applications and services like a truly personalized mobile TV experience and we are thrilled to be working with them,” said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media. The X-Series from 3 → Read More

PlayGen a London based game development studio with a strong and growing track record in developing serious games for training and learning purposes is developing their latest video “learning” game NanoWars. The idea is that the game should be based on fact as it’s meant to be an educational tool to make learning about nanoscience interesting for 12 to 18 year olds. “Our aim is to inspire and touch 28 million American and 6 million British teenagers, who play video games, to learn and know much more about nanotechnology.” According to PlayGen, “The game’s plot is to save the world from destruction by Dr.Nevil and his army of nano-machines and nano-materials, whilst the player stealthily learns about real world nanotechnology. The game hero (player)  supported by Dr. Goodlove and his assistants use nano-imaging and quantum theory, create nano-machines,  develop nano-materials, and utilise an extraordinary shrinking machine to shrink the player to nanoscale to stop Dr. Nevil and save the world.” I must declare I am not a gamer but of late War Craft, Habbo Hotel and especially Second Life have grabbed my attention. When you hear that Habbo hotel sold more furniture than Ikea last year and was more profitable in doing so; when you hear that more than 1m people now inhabit Second Life and that approx $0.5m is traded daily in Second Life, you have to sit up and take note. US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hours $489,156 as of 4:01pm PST When Business Week runs a story called “Why Savvy CEO’s hangout in Second Life” and IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano appears as an avatar (14th Nov) on the IBM island in Second Life to announce that the computer giant is investing $100 million in a new business unit to explore the potential of new technologies like virtual worlds in commerce, e-learning, and customer service, then you have to sit-up and take notice. IBM is not alone because in the last few months about 40 corporations have also established themselves on Second Life. Among them are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Reebok, Dell, and Reuters which assigned a full-time reporter Adam Reuters – aka Adam Pasick in first life – to hang out and chronicle the goings-on. According to Business Week, “it seems IBM actually stumbled into virtual reality thanks to the curiosity of British IBM software strategist Ian Hughes (avatar: ePredator Potato), who is → Read More

Today is your first deadline to get your information in to feature as part of our Money Mondays Showcase. Just to prevent confusion here’s the format. a) It is not a live, real world event (yet) b) We will publish your URL, a handful of relevant sentences we have picked out of your submission (no more than 300 words please) and your contact email address. c) This initiative is mainly for very ‘early’ companies with either a beta or a working demo we can point at. No vapour-ware (things which are just ideas but not yet sites, widgets or projects). We don’t even mind ‘back bedroom’ projects which are barely companies, so long as we can look at something and get a feel for what you are trying to do. d) The ones TechCrunch UK & Ireland likes the best will appear in one post on Monday. We’ll pick (roughly) the best five, or more. It depends on the submissions. Hint: we like projects on the Internet and/or the mobile. e) The reason we are doing this is to use our platform to help new entrepreneurs get started, noticed and ultimately some money/funding (hence Money Mondays) to pursue their dreams. Faster. f) The decision of TechCrunch UK & Ireland is final. g) Er, that’s it. → Read More

Given the news of BT buying PlusNet, it’s interesting to note that another small rival to BT in the UK broadband market is freedom2surf. With BT attempting to enter the TV market with BT Fusion Vision (at least, some time this century possibly), could F2S offer another tasty morsel for the giant? Because, aside from the usual ISP offerings, F2S has just become the first ISP to sign a partnership with IPTV provider Aggregator.tv. This new London-based start-up offers on-demand television over broadband – mainly niche, special interest programmes, such as that offered by its Mo TV portal for Russian expatriates living in the UK. (We did say niche). The idea is that Aggregator services will create a new UK pay-TV platform that will serve multiple devices including PCs and hybrid set-top boxes. It is going to try to build ‘niche TV communities’ via the PC, which will be aggregated under a consolidated brand when its Freeview/TV over broadband (TVoBB) set-top box is launched in the UK in early 2007. In a press statement accompanying this announcement Martin Goswami, co-founder and CEO of Aggregator, said: “The changing television landscape has brought non-traditional players into the digital media industry, offering specialist content that is in tune with customers needs.” Is this the same Martin Goswami who was formerly commercial director at BSkyB? Indeed it is. Perhaps he thought Sky is going to come under pressure from niche broadband channels? I’d say he’d be right. And, punters, what else does Aggregator.tv have in common with interesting Web/TV plays appearing online these days? We give you Paul Cleghorn, formerly of Aggregator.tv, now co-founder of Tape It Off The Internet. It’s a small world. → Read More

For those of you who have not seen the Technorati quarterly report from Dave Sifry, have a quick read it  certainly makes fascinating reading and analysis on the rapid growth of the blogosphere and the internationalisation effect of the web. No wonder it’s getting harder to be heard!   Summary SnapShot: Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts. The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized. → Read More

Loic has announced the Startup room (version 0.1) at LeWeb3 – “as I really want to give a chance to the startups to get known at LeWeb3″.  Below is a tentative program for the room, the principle is 5 minutes presentation, 5 minutes questions and 5 minutes setup. They may add more startups as there are so many companies still emailing Loic to participate.  Clicking through the list of companies, I will certainly be popping out of the main auditorium to see a couple of the pitches. I am a little  surprised to see so few UK startups  both attending and/or pitching? TechCrunch UK is currently toying with the idea of doing something similar in the UK but in the new year.  The plans are in place and we will be making the announcement in a few weeks. This program is subject to changes.   Monday, December 11th 10h00-10h15 Libcast.com RSS Generator for Companies and Institutions 10h15-10h30 Wikierp Next Generation ERP 10h30-10h45 MuseStorm Cutting edge widget engine and distribution service 10h45-11h00 Feedback2.0 Consumer feedback community 11h00-11h30 Wengo 11h30-12h00 SMSConnect 12h00-12h30 Sky-Click Skype web call centre with Salesforces CRM 12h30-12h45 Ulik Virtual library 14h00-14h15 podmailing.com Peer-to-Peer service for large e-mail 14h15-14h30 Quintura New See & Find visual find engine 14h30-15h00 Vpod.tv Video Publishing On Demand 15h00-15h15 Sniperoo Widget distribution and management 15h15-15h30 Jobmeeters eRecruitment 2.0 : Community based recruiting 15-30-16h00 Fon 16h00-16h30 Netvibes 16h30-16h45 Touristr Travel community 2.0 16h45-17h00 Jamendo Free, unlimited and legal music 17h00-17h15 Swoot Giving Internet a new face 17h15-17h30 Submate Making commuting fun ! 17h30-17h45 Podemus 17h45-18h00 Sublimobi Free mobile portal app for Chat, Bluetooth, RSS 18h00-18h15 Vozavi New Community Shopping 2.0 18h15-18h30 PutPlace Find, Organise, Secure and Share your Digital Life Tuesday, December 12th 09h00-09h15 Juicerss On line feed reader 09h30-09h45 Kerpass Mobile phone strong authentication as a service , 10h00-10h15 Mabber web and mobile InstantMessaging 10h15-10h30 Weebly Online AJAX-based website creator 10h45-11h00 Muniwireless.com Blog that became a vertically integrated business 11h15-11h30 Mobitype (Moblogging) Instant blogging : linking mobile communities 11h45-12h00 Qloud.com social search for music 12h15-12h30 → Read More

For those of you going to Le Web 3 (30 UK attendees and counting) Loic has just setup a public Google group LeWeb3 for any participant or person interested in the conference to have conversations around it. And in case you missed it, they have put together Planet LeWeb3 which is a one page of all the recent posts of everybody registered at LeWeb3. → Read More

Neville Hobson is blogging that the first CaseCamp ‘unconference’ in the virtual world of Second Life will be hosted by crayon, on December 14, in the amphitheatre on crayonville Island. If you’ve not heard of Casecamp before, the concept is simple – it’s a conference where presenters share case studies of their work, with the goal of creating a commons for discussion, learning and networking. Here’s the event structure: You have to present a *case* — no theory. Please keep the self-promotion to a dull roar (nobody’s coming to hear you pitch your company). A presention is 10 minutes, then the (virtual) clapping starts. A presentation has 5 slides. For CCSL, all slides will be displayed at once (imagine a series of billboards), so you can’t have crazy builds or reveals. Show — don’t tell. Often, the best slides are images. If you have to use words, keep them to under 10 to a slide. Five (5) minutes of open questions follow each presentation. Q&A will be taken by the moderator via Second Life instant message. Presenters will need to have an SL avatar and Skype; ideally, you will have used them both before CCSL. The event kicks off at 9pm Eastern time on December 14. As that’s 2am GMT on December 15, I’ll probably not be there, unfortunately. Don’t let that stop you being there, though! Details on how to participate at Casecamp. → Read More

Benchmark Capital Europe has raised €430 million for its new European venture capital fund. This is Benchmark’s third European fund, having raised €390 million in May 2000 and €290 million in July 2004. “We ran out of money,” said Barry Maloney (far right), a London-based general partner with Benchmark. He was referring to the fact that the VC firm had committed all the capital in its previous fund and is looking for more investments.  We love the European investing environment right now,” Mr. Maloney said. “It has one-twentieth of the competition of some other markets and really smart entrepreneurs. He said the VC firm would prefer to focus on Europe rather than China, as many Silicon Valley VCs do. – source Red Herring According to the firm, the fund was significantly oversubscribed and makes Benchmark one of the largest venture capital firms in Europe. Since 2000, it has funded over 50 European companies with investments ranging from €75,000 to over €39 million. In the past it has invested in Bebo, BetFair PageFlakes, RawFlow, RebTel, Zopa and Setanta to name but a few. Trend: With €2.97 billion invested after the first three quarters of the year, venture capital investment in Europe has already exceeded the amount invested in the same period of 2005 and is poised to surpass last year’s annual total, according to the quarterly European Venture Capital Report released by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young. However, deal flow, at 631 financings, remains 26% off the pace of last year, indicating that investors are continuing to favor fewer deals into European venture-backed companies, but are supporting them with larger investment sums. Read the rest of this interesting report here. → Read More

BT has made a cash offer for the UK ISP Plusnet and so the broadband consolidation begins. The deal, based on a cash offer of 210p per share, will add 200,000 broadband subscribers to BT’s own broadband customer base. Unsurprisingly the offer has been unanimously recommended by the PlusNet directors and values the company at £67m or £335 per customer which is approximately the revenue from 1 years worth of BT (option2) broadband. One comment I read summed up this deal beautifully “it seems an awful lot to pay for a turkey at this time of year. Mind you, the bill for the sage and onion stuffing is gonna be eye watering”. Of course BT are not alone in looking to acquire a larger customer base. Recently Pipex spent £24m expanding doing so with its acquisition of Bulldog’s customers and the Toucan service making it the sixth largest retail broadband player in the UK- see the table below – but will this be enough to make it a serious challenger to BT Retail, NTL, and the like or will it be the next one to be acquired? Based on the cost per customer acquisition (£335) above that would value Pipex at £200m. Personally I don’t get either deal. Instead of paying to acquire customers wouldn’t they be better off getting customers to switch of their own volition simply because they offer the best value services. Sadly that tactic doesn’t seem to be working for BT because only last week figures showed that although BT grew its subscriber base in line with the expanding market, overall it reduced its market share to competitors like Sky and Carphone Warehouse. So as Christmas is fast approaching as a consumer and not a shareholder here is my BT wishlist Santa: Instead of spending £67m I would like to see the monthly fee for broadband, line rental and call charges reduce. I would like to see Openzone made cheaper more reliable and widely available. I’d like to meet a BT Fusion user. I would like to see wireless broadband (WiMax, HSCDA or 4G) rolling out so that the mobile web can really start to take off. I’d like to see BT Vision (IPTV) before Christmas, not just for the people in Cardiff or near BT Centre. I’d like to see what the BT plans are for rolling out IPv6 in UK before China and India → Read More

Burning a Hole is a new search engine with a twist from Tom Smith, “it’s for people who don’t know exactly what they want when they are looking for a present or possibly something for themselves.” Traditional search engines and price comparison sites like Kelkoo and Price Runner are great but only if you know what you want to buy and want to find. You simply enter some text in a search box or decide on a category, like Books or Gardening or Flowers but many people don’t have a clue what they want but they know it when they see it. The twist with Burning a Hole is that it is a price-centric shopping site with thousands and thousands of products from partner stores like Amazon, John Lewis, Virgin Wines to name a few but listed by their price and not by their product category. “We’re more than a search engine. We’re an ideas-by-price engine. We’re a make-the-internet-work-for-your-wallet engine. We’re a what-do-you-do-with-that-fifty-quid-you’ve been-saving-in-your-sock-drawer engine. We’re your Christmas inspiration engine (and have you seen the range of office gifts we’ve got for under a tenner?) We think this is what the internet was always supposed to be about. I tried Burning a Hole this morning and was impressed by the breadth of products. Once I had chosen my price category, I was presented with an array of products which I could further filter by clicking on the grey microfilters next to each product description. If I then liked a product I could either add it to my wishlist or email it to a friend. Equally in order to buy any product, I simply clicked on the link and I was taken directly to the product listed within the sellers website. For a product that has only just been launched the site is very good and certainly makes you think about search in a different way. The one minor change I would like to see is having each product marked up as a microformat (hlisting) just like dealtagger does today. Looking at Tom’s code he is already 85% of the way to having each product marked up as a hlisting microformat. e.g a minor change to the div class=”product” to div class=”hlisting” shouldn’t be too much of a change. The question you might be asking is why bother? Well as the web continues to grow search engines like Google are becoming → Read More

“I started BuddyPing as a hobby, and it kinda just took over my life.” So says Justin Davies who launched an open beta version of BuddyPing as a “bet” nine months ago. Normally the head of the small London-based mobile consultancy Ninety Ten is more used to advising other startups and companies on their mobile strategy. BuddyPing was going to be different. This was his baby. Yesterday Davies, who built the site on his own using Ruby on Rails, went live with a new version. This could see the service substantially escalate in take-up. So far it has relied on simple word of mouth to garner its 5,000 users. However, the new version is likely to make bigger waves given its extra functionality and further plans. This is “MoSoSo” (Mobile Social Software) in action. Having looked both at the previous beta and the new version, I can say that BuddyPing could well be one of the best un-funded startups in the UK today, combining some of the best elements of mobility, presence, social networking and user generated content. Davies says BuddyPing is privately funded at the moment, “but will be looking for funding in the future to expand the service to other countries.” Currently BuddyPing only works in the UK. The idea behind BuddyPing is simple and the execution deceptively simple, making something quite complex appear effortless. Text your location to BuddyPing and it will text you back with the location of your friends (if they’re BuddyPing members) and what they’re doing. As Davies says: “The crux of BuddyPing is a ‘friend finder’ using the location features of the main mobile operators.” Davies believes the social networking effect of users wanting to keep in touch with relevant local events and people could be the long-desired key to the success of mobile location-based advertising. To date social networking has been an absent element in location-based services, which – in most incarnations – have had limited success. To do its work BuddyPing pulls the full, triangulated location of the user’s mobile handset from the mobile networks (BuddyPing pays for that data). Currently this means O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange, while Hutchinson’s 3 has its own Location System that is not available to aggregators like BuddyPing. Davies admits that this is “relatively expensive compared to what is usually involved in a 2.0 startup.” But the opportunity, Davies says, is in offsetting that cost → Read More

John Hauxwell says “reports are circulating in London today that Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa has put its UK mobile phone business 3 UK up for sale. Goldman Sachs has been appointed adviser and an official announcement is expected to be made on Thursday.”  Alan Patrick has also picked up on this story. Equally The Times is reporting that Arun Sarin, the chief executive, who has recently adopted a cautious approach to new acquisitions, said that if 3’s European assets went up for sale “then we would look at them”. I’m sure Vodafone have their reasons. I still think that in the next couple of years we will see a lot more mergers activity which will result in a smaller number of quad players offering us discounted services and content.  Recently we have witnessed Tiscali buying HomeChoice and CarphoneWarehouse acquiring AOL Uk’s broadband access business. Then last week we saw NTL announce it was interested in buying ITV.  BT’s CEO Ben Verwaayen also announced BT will certainly launch its BT (IPTV) Vision service before Christmas and that lots more content deals like the one from Disney will be announced in the coming weeks. I still think that we are only at the start of this UK consolidation; I wonder whose next? → Read More

OK, radio isn’t really killing video A few days ago, I was introduced to RadioSherpa, a very interesting intersection between broadcast radio and the web. The service is the product of two MIT Media Lab graduates, Sasha Javid and Deva Seetharam; incidentally, Deva is one of the architects of the open source cellphone movement. RadioSherpa presents users with a real-time carousel of tracks currently playing on radio stations in the Boston area. Clicking a ‘now playing’ track can either start playing a stream, bring up more information about the artist, song or station, add the track to a personal profile or click through to a purchase from Amazon or iTunes. Unfortunately, the service is currently limited to Boston, with plans to expand to New York and Los Angeles. Interestingly, RadioSherpa has been offering content from HD Radio stations too, giving US listeners a chance to experience HD before investing in a receiver. This is a useful lever to drive HD adoption, given upcoming problems with the evolution of DAB in the UK. Though RadioSherpa is outside the ‘jurisdiction’ of TechCrunch UK, there are some important and compelling reasons why services like RadioSherpa, aggregating and personalising radio content and metadata, are particularly relevant to the UK. Radio is characterised by the BBC as a re-emerging technology, one that is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in Britain with recent Ofcom reports confirming that listening figures are rising past those of TV – and a sizable mindshare amongst Brits. Here are some facts from the BBC’s R&Mi team… 90% reach – almost ubiquitous. 10 national networks – much less fragmented than the US. 32.5m listeners, averaging 24 hours of listening each week. More than 76’000 hours of programming from 2003-04. Multiple digital platforms – DAB, internet, digital TV. Indeed, R&Mi’s work with the BBC’s radio content, such as the Ten-Hour Takeover, has been at the cutting edge of convergence; moving broadcast radio to a more social medium with SMS, email and the web as rich-return paths. It’s no coincidence that the BBC is seeking to bring DAB to the iPod. Radio favours the attention contrained nature of most digital consumers as well as a natural ‘soft’ convergence of various media (rather than the contrived multiplay options from UK telcos). Its ubiquity and relative market cohesion in the UK presents a compelling opportunity for startups that can aggregate content, metadata and communities into compelling new experiences, perhaps notably for emerging widget platforms. To → Read More

Minibar, another new event (see also London 2.0) aimed at the BarCamp/developer crowd, has turned up giving people “a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, Creative Commons, web applications, social networking and general Web 2.0 mayhem.” If this sounds off-putting, then consider this: So far they have 60+ people registered from the following companies: ebay, Google, Tate Media, Bloomberg, Channel 4, last.fm, journos from the Guardian, BBC, Bloomberg and even OFCOM. You may even get a Google T-Shirt. For more info email at info [at] openbusiness.cc Being held at the eponymous startup location, East London’s Truman Brewery (off Brick Lane, next to Spitalfields Market and Liverpool Street Station) the event will feature bar, DJ and a talk by John Buckman of Magnatune.com and Bookmooch.com on music sharing, p2p philosophy and Creative Commons. The event aims to happen at the same place every month. The meeting is organised by the people behind CreativeCommons England & Wales, OpenBusiness.cc, OpenMute.org and ShiftSpace.cc. Apparently the “Uber-Geeks” from DorkBot London are also coming. Alas, it clashes with the UK Firefox 2 Launch Party also in London on the same night, but since the two events are around the corner from each other I envisage some mutually beneficial mingling. Luckily the Firefox party originally planned for the same date has now been moved to Dec 1. → Read More

UK mobile operator 02 has confirmed it is in talks with MySpace (among others) over a tie-up to allow their subscribers to access MySpace pages and their own profile via mobile. Although MySpace has been doing this for a while with the MVNO Helio in the US, it is reportedly looking to land a bigger fish in the form of Cingular, the number one mobile network in the US – so talking to the number one in the UK is a natural progression. With mobile phone penetration rates long past 100% in the UK and much of Europe the competition between networks is shifting towards extra services and social networking is an obvious move. According to MocoNews, Bebo – with 22 million users among the biggest social networking services globally and in UK – has also been talking to UK mobile players. With YouTube serving over 100m videos a day, and in some markets rivaling TV consumption, mobile players clearly want some of that action in some form or other. YouTube is in talks with Verizon Wireless in the US about this, for instance. To date the UK mobile networks have made a thoroughly half-hearted attempt to enter the social networking arena. 3’s Kink Kommunity has 50,000 paying subscribers and claims to get about 350,000 postings a day but the features on the site are pretty low-spec. O2′s LookAtMe makes users pay 10p to download video clips posted by other users and the site is just for information. In the UK the sites to watch for the next wave of mobile/web social networking include Moblog UK which has built a smart system from the ground up to work across any network in terms of uploading SMS and MMS content. And another site is about to come out offering some very smart mobile social networking features, but we’ll leave that scoop till later on this week… → Read More

Apologies for the delay, but here (YouTube version) and here (MyDeo version for Windows) is the video we shot at the recent TechCrunch UK & Ireland launch party. Just this once we pushed the envelope and brought in the fabulous Silver Apple Media to shoot some high quality footage at the event, of which this is just a taster. This is not intended to be an in-depth piece, more an overview. Instead, we also shot a number of longer interviews with various starups at the event which we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. We can’t promise all our video productions will be this slick (and by that I mean the filming and editing, not my attempts to act like a TV presenter), but video interviews and a regular podcast are just some of the things we want to bring to the site over the next few weeks. → Read More