Typically, when I think of an “early adopter,” French President Sarkozy doesn’t come to mind. The man who announced his intention to run for reelection on February 12th didn’t even have a verified Twitter account prior to that date. Fortunately for him and his campaign, he now has a verified account with over 97,000 followers. He has even made it clear that he signs his own tweets with NS. → Read More
musiXmatch, a large music lyrics content provider, is doubling down on mobile at Mobile World Congress. That makes sense – how often have you wondered about the lyrics to a song and ended up surfing some really bad ad-filed site? The new free Android musiXmatch Lyrics Player lets you identify the lyrics from any audio source (using Gracenote). That means to hold up the app to the music your… → Read More
Well, here we are. Excuse us while we unpack a few boxes, but as you can see we’re just about moved out of the old EU.TechCrunch.com sub-domain, into this palatial place called TechCrunch.com/Europe. Yes, folks, after five years or so out there in the wilds of the EU, tapping away about startups on the other side of the Atlantic, our European secret agents are coming in from the cold…
Put… → Read More
Ahead of Mobile World Congress and an appearance by Facebook to explain its next moves in mobile, the social networking giant is coming under increasing strain over its use of users’ personal information. Mobile startups and operators are both fretting over the issue this week, as smartphones and the apps that come with them increasingly eclipse the feature phones of old. We’ve already seen how … → Read More
Last month we reported on the launch of Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was very Siri-like in its capabilities. Maybe it was too good at acting like Siri?
Yes, Evi can’t do Siri’s trick of adding things to your iPhone Calendar or hook into reminders. But, ask “How do I make apple pie?” and Evi provides a list of recipes with web links. Siri can’t give you a direct… → Read More
This is a guest post by Scott Allison, CEO and founder of Teamly.com.
It seems learning to code has become a theme in 2012, and the demand is being met by Code Year and others. I want to reflect on my experience as a non-technical founder and reassess my original decision – almost two years ago – to stick to what I’m good at, and not waste time learning to code.
So, should people who can’t… → Read More
The European Union says it will refer the controversial ACTA anti-piracy trade agreement to the institution’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, to check whether it complies with the EU’s fundamental rights.
EU trade chief Karel De Gucht is leading the process. He said: “We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and… → Read More
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year we’re teaming up with the creators of an awesome new event which runs alongside MWC, called Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival. Consider this the “Off Broadway” or Fringe Festival of MWC, where you get to actually talk about the real issues in the mobile startup ecosystem in a lively debate format.
This interactive event will feature some of the… → Read More
Moral ambiguity, thy name is advertising. How are we to parse this advertising campaign in London in which an intelligent bus stop billboard only displays its content to women? You read correctly: the billboard has a camera that scans passersby and if one stops to look, it determines their sex and shows them a 40-second video if they are female. Males only get a link to the advertiser’s… → Read More
Vienna and San Francisco based Super angel fund Speedinvest, launched just over 6 months ago, has announced it’s made four investments to date. According to Founder and CEO Oliver Holle, the fund has invested more than €1 million in those four startups and doubled that sum through co-investors.
The investments made are rather diverse, ranging from VoiP to an already well-known social sharing… → Read More
Following the trend towards global platforms for raising money, such as Kickstarter, Ammado, which connects charities with donors, has raised €7m, and signed up several multinational partners. The investment round was led by Belgiun-based Saffelburg Investments, which put in €5.5m and John Ryan, founder of Rovi, who put in about €1.5m. Set up in 2005 by Anna Kupka and Peter Conlon, the… → Read More
Tribe of Noise is an online music community connecting musicians with business professionals who want music. Artists can share a few songs for free in return for exposure, new revenue streams and new business opportunities with partners.
Now the startup is partnering with Getty Images. The lathers global sales force is ‘s going out there to sell music licenses to Getty’s customers (tv… → Read More
Bambuser, a live mobile video streaming startup along the lines of Qik, has become something of an underground hit in the last couple of years because of its ability to stream video over poor mobile connections. That’s made it a favourite of emerging markets, in part because it supports over 200 different mobile devices, from cheap Nokias to the latest iPhone. During the Arab Spring last year it… → Read More
Top executives often get perks just because of who they are, like freebies and travel upgrades. The American Express’ Centurion Card for instance is also known as “the black card” for this reason. Eric Kuhn started FoundersCard in 2009, deciding to bring the same rewards specifically to entrepreneurs and founders who put their neck on the line to take ricks and create value.
FoundersCard is… → Read More
E-commerce platform eSellerPro, an eCommerce software provider for multi-channel sellers, has secured a follow-on investment of £1m from Notion Capital, following the £1.8 million Notion put in 2010. The money will go towards the product and entry into new markets. → Read More
For the last few of years TechCrunch has headed to Barcelona for the annual conflab known as Mobile World Congress. But last year we neglected to set up a meetup. That changes this year with the start of, we hope, a regular annual meetup involving startups investors and the mobile industry together in the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries of mobile.
To do this we’re teaming up with… → Read More
While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.
Yes it was a… → Read More
A Lithuanian company has developed a Kinect-based online banking system. Yes, you read that right.
As a trusted developer by Microsoft, ETRONIKA received Kinect for Windows and the SDK before the official announcement, so had time to develop it.
Their solution manages to analyse a user’s face, voice, and gestures to act as a way to control the online banking processes.
In the video below… → Read More
You’ll recall the battles between the RIAA and the technology industry over music licensing. Well something similar as been going on regarding how newspaper content is licensed to commercial clippings agencies, and it’s blowing up on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Associated Press today filed suit against Meltwater News for copyright infringement and misappropriation of its breaking news… → Read More
It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.
Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing… → Read More
I’m just back from Riga in Latvia where we held our first ever TechCrunch Baltics meetup (where you will find video of the whole thing). It was a great day of panelists and speakers, (and thanks to all those who organised, participated and attended, especially Andris Berzins). After chatting to a few people at the event I came away with a sense that the tiny Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and… → Read More
Exclusive – Private shopping club SecretSales has raised £6.3 million in funding from a consortium of investors, including Doughty Hanson, Pentech Ventures and the Partech-managed OCP Innovation fund, TechCrunch has learned.
Launched in the United Kingdom in 2007, SecretSales plans to use the funding to double down on its expansion in the country. → Read More
The Quantified Self movement has produced a number of startups in that space, most notably fitness tracking apps such as Runkeeper, Edmondo or Fitbit. European sports tracking app Runtastic is one of them and just announced that they are moving into the hardware space with a manufacturing partner and are shipping their first products at the end of july.
The startup has silently built a team of… → Read More
Today at Techcrunch Baltics, we’re hearing a lot about the need for cooperation between the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. While the latter has won a lot of PR juice from its association with Skype over the last few years, there is no less talent in this other neighbouring countries, so its interesting to see a new initiative appear to cross those borders.
The so-called … → Read More
European accelerator HackFwd just announced that Infogr.am from Riga in Latvia as its latest investment. Infogr.am’s product is gunning to be a kind of adobe illustrator for online, allowing anyone to create cool info-graphics.
The web-based application needs no programming or design skills, and works in the same way that you can snap a photo and share it on your social networks. Users make a… → Read More
BaltCap, a leading venture investor in startups in the Baltics region, has signed a €1 million investment in Clusterpoint, an enterprise software startup created by Latvian programmers and backed by seed investors in the UK and Baltics.
Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they claim is highly scalable. They are competing against open… → Read More
It’s been a long and winding road since Tariq Krim created and eventually left Netvibes, but today Netvibes has been acquired by huge French engineering giant Dassault Systèmes for an undisclosed amount. Krim continues to pursue his original dream of organising the social web on Jolicloud.
Netvibes had an early lead back in the era when ‘personal start pages’ were the new new thing, but (and we… → Read More
We were a little concerned at the end of last year that one of Europe’s better VCs, Paul Jozefak (@pjozefak) had parted ways with his firm Neuhaus Partners in Hamburg, and that there was no news on his next move.
Now the word on the street appears to be that he’s working on something pretty interesting. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he’s told people about a new project called Liquid… → Read More
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