Russian Group Finam to Acquire 50% of German Deluxe Television
Yakov is reporting that Russian financial group Finam along with a group of Russian investors have acquired a minority stake in Deluxe Television. There are plans to increase the share to 50% by year-end. Deluxe Television is a Munich-based broadcaster of music television channels. Yakov notes a daily audience for Deluxe Television of 5 million people and he explains the current state of Deluxe Television:
Founded in 2004, Deluxe owns a free-to-air music television channel, Deluxe Music, seven pay-TV music channels (rock, soul, lounge, jazz, etc), two radio stations, the music label Sashimi Records. It also has an online shop where users can download songs and buy DVDs, CDs and merchandise. Deluxe tests a high-definition music channel to be launched later in 2008.
You might remember the name Finam as they were the venture capital firm for Russian contextual ad firm Begun which was recently acquired by Google.
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Pete Discusses Google/Digg, YouTube and iPhone Apps
Each week we will bring you a video recap of the week's tech news and events by our newest employee Pete. Don't worry, most of the time you won't hear or see her - she will be working like the other blog interns out there. But sometimes we will sit down to get her opinions on the latest topics at hand. I've given her the goal of getting more views than Justine has this week. Should online brands be targeting young children now so they become loyal as they grow? Get the kid hooked and their parents will be hooked as well. Look at how Pete talks about YouTube - she can watch Elmo all day - I wa lucky to get a few minutes of Cookie and Ernie a day when I was little.
Today Pete discusses:
- Google's potential acquisition of Digg
- YouTube - Elmo's premiere with Neil Patrick Harris
- The Facebook platform
- iPhone applications
Now we need to get her to stop talking about Seesmic!
Flock Launches Gloss; Customized Browser for Fashion and Entertainment
Social browser Flock has announced the launch of a new, customized version of their browser today. The new version is named Gloss and brings together Flock's browser technology with fashion and entertainment content from over 35 sources. Glam Media, who yesterday announced the launch of their platform, is one of the launch partners. Other content providers include: Glamour, The Budget Fashionista, TMZ, Cosmo, DesignerApparel, PopSugar and others.
Within the Flock Gloss browser, there are news feeds and pre-set favorites along with a pink design (see below). My guess is that we will see a variety of these customized versions from Flock this year as they try to gain market share in the browser market.
Check out all of our Flock coverage including the launch of their Eco-Green and German versions.
Japan Hits $100 Billion in Mobile Content Sales
Martyn Williams has an interesting look at the Japanese mobile content market. He notes that for the calendar year 2007, more than $100 billion was spent on mobile content. The total was actually $107.5 billion and includes items such as ring tones, Web site subscriptions and e-commerce purchases. E-commerce made up about 65% of the total amount spent and all sorts of transactions were handled including: movie and event ticket sales, travel reservations, air and rail ticket sales, stock trading and online auctions.
The biggest percentage gain came from "high-fidelity music" which increased 42% thanks to more mobile devices handling better quality sound. Mobile gaming jumped 13% as well.
Maybe the iPhone app store will push other countries to follow suit. While not mentioned in the article, I wonder what percentage of transactions took place via a QR code.
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babyZbook Wants To Help You Move Your Baby Books Online
babyZbook is a Swiss-based startup currently in beta which hopes to help you move your baby books online. The name is pronounced as "babies book". The service is available in multiple languages including German and English. The service feels like a test more than an actual beta but there is enough to get the product discussion moving in terms of overall roadmap.
I created a babyZbook and the process was easy overall. You can add information about the baby's birth, events, photo albums, measurements and graphs. The photo feature only offers an upload option - it would be good if they could pull in photos from online sources like Flickr or SmugMug.
The design of the actual baby book is pretty nice and has tabs for the different content options (see example below). The only major change would be to look at the ability to customize the background and allow for comments on the appropriate content. I want my family to interact with my baby's book not just look at the content. What about allowing my family to signup for email updates? And videos?
On the admin side where you enter the content, the interface feels very thrown together and really needs more work for people to take the tool seriously. All measurements within the service are in metric - they might want to offer the option to switch it if they are looking to enter the U.S. market.
There's certainly a business model in this type of site - from the simple ad-based model to premium upgrades to printed services, there are many options available. Other services in this area include Kidmondo and Lil'Grams.
Here's babyZbook's 20-second pitch from the Techcrunch meetup in Zurich last week:
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CN Employee Update: Matthew Out, Pete In
A month ago this week and after raising our $52.5 million dollar Series A round, we hired our first new blogger. His name is Matthew and at first he did a great job. He worked really hard and stuck to his 2 nap per day deal. But then we started to see him slack off. The biggest change was that most of the time he was supposed to be working, he was secretly "liking" his father's items on FriendFeed. He also created 142 FriendFeed accounts in a variety of different countries - all so he could help pops get more "likes". Unfortunately and after several written warnings (he claims he can't read yet), we have decided to terminate his employment immediately. We are willing to renew his deal once he gets past pre-K.
But don't worry folks. Over the past five days, we conducted a "CenterNetworks Blogger Idol" contest around the state of New York. After much deliberation and many Oreo cookies, we found a great replacement.
Her name is Pete and besides creating great written content, she is also a mega video star. Each day she moves up the ranks on Seesmic and is closing in on the man who looks like Santa Claus. Thankfully Pete already has an iPhone and a nice MacbookPro so this deal was much easier to finalize, all she wants is Web startup stickers. Now Pete isn't as big a name as Morgan, Veronica, Justine or Natali yet, but all the other video show hosts better watch out, Pete is coming for ya!
Here's Pete is her first CN video and you can view her Seesmic channel here. Please help me welcome Pete to the CN family.
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The Bit.ly Interview: “No Comment” on Twitter URL Switch and Yes, They Have a Business Plan
This morning I headed down to the Apple Soho neighborhood to meet with the team at Betaworks. I wanted to find out more about the URL shortener that's apparently a tech blogger's dream. The name of the URL shortener is bit.ly and bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick were in love with the tool like nothing else. Before we get into bit.ly, here's some details on Betaworks.
Betaworks is a NYC company that helps startups move forward. They were quick to say they aren't a vc or an incubator like Y Combinator is. They have a variety of NYC-based companies they either work with or invest in. The Betaworks company list includes: microblogging service Tumblr, location service Outside.in, conversational search service Summize (recently acquired by Twitter) and casual games site iminlikewithyou.
Alright, now back to bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL shortener. What that means is that if you want to share a long URL in an email, it can create a nice short one that doesn't break onto multiple lines, etc. That's the basic concept for all URL shortener tools. The idea for bit.ly came from another project the Betaworks team was working on. They needed a URL shortener for Twitabit and the current 70+ shorteners didn't fit the bill.
In my chat with Betaworks executives Andy Weissman and John Borthwick, they called bit.ly the "professional" URL shortener. There's statistics, an archive, page thumbnails, and a platform and API which is open to all third parties. The real key they say is in the API and the ability to process pages for "entities". Entities are bits of content on the page that bit.ly can extract and display them to help find other content that matches one of the entities you select.
Currently they use Amazon Simple Database for the database functions but are in the process of moving to MySQL. They also use Amazon's S3 storage option for the site thumbnails. There have been 40,000 bit.ly URLs created so far with 5,000 added everyday. They are a Mac shop and here's bit.ly lead developer Nathan Folkman cranking out code:
Betaworks is now an investor in Twitter after the Summize acquisition. I was curious to find out if they planned to push Twitter to move away from TinyURL and instead use bit.ly as their primary URL shortening service. John replied with a "no comment" but noted that they want to earn respect as the best URL shortener first. Here's my bet... the switch over will take place by the end of 2008.
Lastly we spoke about the bit.ly business plan. While they wouldn't share any specifics yet, the model is centered around data, data usage and there will also be a set of premium upgrades available for publishers and companies using the bit.ly service.
The bit.ly team is currently working on a sign-in option which will allow vanity URL's to be changed. They are also working on continuing to improve the API and on datastream access.
Can a URL shortener become a real business? I guess we will see as bit.ly moves forward on their product roadmap.
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Vimeo Bans Video Game Videos
NY-based video sharing service Vimeo has decided to no longer allow video game videos. In an announcement made yesterday on the Vimeo company blog, Blake Whitman noted that new videos will be removed and current videos are subject to deletion after September 1st.
Blake explains that there are two main reasons for the change. First, Vimeo is about creative expression and copying a video game isn't creative expression. Second, the game videos are larger and longer than most other videos which causes their transcoder to push long wait times for other Vimeo members. I've noticed this wait on Viddler as well and from what I understand on Viddler it has to do with non-U.S. show content.
There are nearly 500 replies on the Vimeo blog discussing the change - most are for the change. Apparently YouTube also bans these type of video game videos. The big question in the forums is what specific videos will be deleted and which will remain. Apparently it will have a lot to do with what the staff call "creative merit".
Check out our look at the NY online video scene - it might just be our greatest asset.
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Expedia Partners With Baynote on Social Search
Expedia is announcing this morning that they have partnered with Baynote to include Baynote' social search in the Expedia booking engine. Baynote's social search takes search queries and then can present options to future searchers for refining their query to help find exactly what they are seeking. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While the information provided talks about increasing the customer experience on Expedia, this type of search might lead to increased transaction rates. Rather than a customer potentially leaving Expedia when he or she doesn't find what they are seeking, now Baynote can help get the customer to what they are seeking and then book the travel item.
Baynote also powers other corporate customer's social search including NASA and Motorola.
Earlier this month Expedia lost their deal with MSN. Also check out our Google Trends showdown between Expedia and TripAdvisor.
Glam Media Launches Glam Platform Atako; Widgets ‘n Apps
Glam Media is announcing the launch of a platform today. Codenamed Atako, the goal is to offer a set of widgets and applications that can be monetized and also offer additional options for Glam network publishers. The new platform is codenamed Atako which Glam describes as, "signify the deep passion that application developers and users feel when they are working with technology that creates change."
The platform is open and Glam will allow developers to build applications for their network of content publishers. Seeing as the women's demographic is one of the "richest" online in terms of online advertising effectiveness, this could be a huge win for developers overall. The Glam Media Atako platform follows platforms by most of the major social networking providers including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Glam goes after Facebook by noting that their platform isn't a walled garden -- that is, the applications and widgets on Atako are open.
Developers and publishers will share in the revenue generated by their widgets and applications.
The Atako platform is currently in private beta for both developers and publishers. Glam Media reports 77 million monthly uniques across their network of sites and blogs. Check out all of our Glam Media coverage.
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CafeMom Relaunches; Mom Optimization and Future Growth Considered
NY-based CafeMom relaunched their social networking and content site this week. CafeMom focuses on moms and their needs. The major updates include a full rewrite of the backend to improve reliability and performance along with a focus on the future so they can support more partnerships and the needs of their sponsors.
I notice an overall ad reduction on the homepage. The design is fresh and welcoming. I spoke with Matt Zarzecki from CafeMom and he shared the following regarding the relaunch:
- Navigation overhaul - making it easier to find what moms are looking for - navigation changes seem to be pretty popular this year
- Wider site to accomodate more content and more ads/sponsors
When I interviewed the team at CafeMom, they shared stats including 2.7 million uniques and over 100 million pageviews per month. Google Trends shows about half of that in unique visitors per month.
CafeMom is co-founded by Andrew Shue from the TV show Melrose Place and has raised $20 million to-date.
Do You Compensate Content Creators?
There's been a good bit of discussion recently with regards to online advertising spend. Om Malik wonders if Silicon Valley should be worried about the current state of online advertising. Large companies like GM have announced overall ad budget reductions. Blodget calls a lot of what's currently going on, "Internet wreckage".
So I am curious, how do you compensate the content creators for the content you consume each and every day? By content, I mean audio, video, photos, text, etc. Specifically with regard to tech startups and tech blogs/content sites. More and more people I speak with say they read most blogs in a feed reader and never interact with the sites themselves. As we move more and more to mobile, are users interacting with advertising on mobile? No.
On our last frontpage Digg, my tracking noted that 52% of the visitors were using some sort of ad blocking software. This past weekend Michael Markman asked, "Can anyone remember the last internet ad you clicked? How many can you remember clicking in the past five days?" The majority of the replies were "no". Why not?
Please view the video below for my thoughts on the current situation and potential crisis. I am very interested in your thoughts so please leave a comment.
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Want More Weekend? Find a New Job
Below are some of the latest jobs posted on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.
Featured Jobs:
- Business Development Manager - Outbrain
More Fresh Jobs:
- Marketing Manager - Howcast Media
- Temporary TV Website Producer - Real Simple - Time, Inc.
- Senior Software Engineer - Social Web Applications - Signal Patterns
- Inside Sales Manager - Zillow
- Manager, Ad Sales Marketing - Hulu
- Web Programmer/Producer, The Takeaway - WNYC Radio
Employers - Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs now - $79 for 60 days
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Brief Update From Amazon on S3 Downtime and Outage
As most of the Internet world knows (or saw), yesterday Amazon's S3 cloud storage was down for over 8 hours. We reported on the S3 downtime scene as updates were provided. We are waiting for official word from Amazon on what happened, why it happened and what the Amazon Web Services team is doing to prevent future issues from taking down the ultra-popular storage service. My guess is that we won't hear anything until mid-week.
In the meantime, Om Malik of GigaOm has been able to get an update from Amazon. Here's the statement:
As a distributed system, the different components of S3 need to be aware of the state of each other. For example, this awareness makes it possible for the system to decide which redundant physical storage server to route a request to.
We experienced a problem with those internal system communications, leaving the components unable to interact properly, and customers unable to successfully process requests. After exploring several alternatives, the team determined it had to take the service offline to restore proper communication and then bring service online again.
These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to root cause in such a situation—we will be providing our customers with more information when we’ve fully investigated the incident. We’re proud of our operational performance in operating S3 for almost 2.5 years, and our customers have generally been pleased with the reliability and performance of the service. But any downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it is perfect.
Amazon S3 is used heavily by a number of services behind Amazon’s retail websites. Those services were impacted, but the retail website did not show noticeable problems because it mostly uses cached data.
So what it sounds like is that people stand on each corner and yell from one to another. If the 3rd person in line doesn't hear the 2nd, they take the service down because something might be wrong at the 2nd person's station.
It's good to hear that Amazon uses S3 for storage on their own sites. They should feel the same pain that other publishers do. Check out all of our Amazon S3 coverage.
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IAB Releases Mobile Advertising Report
The IAB is out with a new report that provides a basic overview of mobile advertising. If you buy or sell ads, it's well worth a read. The report provides a variety of mobile statistics and trend information outside of mobile advertising.
They break the mobile device market into three segments: mobile pioneer, mobile wannabe and mobile traditionalist. The pioneer category includes the iPhone 3G and currently has 15% of the overall market. The traditionalist category (phones that can do some mobile functions) currently accounts for 60% of the total market.
Here's one of the charts comparing mobile with the current state of the traditional Internet.
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AdBrite Launches Behavioral Targeted Product on The AdBrite Ad Network
Back in April, AdBrite launched their Open Targeting Exchange. Today AdBrite is announcing the launch of a behavioral targeting product within their ad network. They note that their behavioral network is five times larger than any of their competitors. From the announcement, "Leveraging technology from AdBrite’s Open Targeting Exchange (OTEx), AdBrite’s new Behavioral Targeting service allows advertisers to show ads to users with interest and/or purchase intent in 14 major categories and over 3,000 sub-categories."
Pricing is set via a real-time auction. The new behavioral product is only available to a select group of advertisers on an invitation-only basis. Computers and Internet are not initial launch categories. Instead they have (smartly) selected more monetizable categories including: Automotive, Business & Finance, Careers, Consumer Electronics, Dating & Singles, Health, Music, and Travel.
It's good to see AdBrite testing out new advertising options. By pushing forward, it can help them draw in additional advertisers to the AdBrite system as a whole.
My issue with AdBrite since their initial launch was the lack of advertisers. Having a million publishers is great but if there are no advertisers to fill the ads, it means nothing. AdBrite noted that they have 70,000 active publishers, up from 50,000 at the beginning of 2008. I'd prefer to see fill rate and total number of advertisers (not including ebaumsworld).
Veoh launched their behavioral targeted ad network last week. And ValueClick is expected to announce their behavioral ad product today as well. Here's a very short video from eMarketer on behavioral targeting:
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Sweet on Geeks: Find Your Perfect Geek Mate
Last week I watched a clip on a morning show about a relatively new dating site called Sweet on Geeks. The idea is that mainstream dating sites like Match and Jdate just don't cut it for geeks of either sex.
Membership is free and apparently the site monetizes itself from advertising. The couple that was interviewed on tv said they met over their love of Linux. Now they go to Batman movies and code PHP to get in the mood.
As I browsed a variety of profiles, living at home was a popular choice. One thing they ask that I've never seen before on a dating site: Hygiene. Most people say they are clean. That's always a good thing. Other parts of the site include an event directory that features a lot of "Con" events. They should look at adding a casual games section. Get members playing games online and interacting with each other while hitting them with relevant advertising.
Finding the right someone is very difficult and if Sweet on Geeks helps people find the right match, that's awesome. I wonder if they have a "FriendFeed Lover" option?
Here's an example of a profile page. Can anyone say 1998 design? All we need is the digging construction man!
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Amazon S3 Down
Amazon's S3 storage service appears to be down. CenterNetworks images are broken because of it and I had to move the style sheet back so the site at least renders correctly. Sites like Twitter have massive broken images currently because Amazon S3 is down.
We will keep updating this post until the service has recovered. As of Noon Eastern time, the S3 service is down.
Amazon's S3 service was also down this past February and Amazon explained the reasons for the outage and downtime a few days later. There has to be a way to failover when S3 is down.
As always report in if you are having issues with Amazon S3.
Update: Amazon S3 clients are now posting outage messages on the forums. It appears EC2 is working ok.
Update 2: Amazon is now reporting on their health dashboard that Amazon S3 has "elevated error rates".
Update 3 - 12:55pm: Now down over an hour, Amazon says they are "pursuing several paths of corrective action. Sites affected include SmugMug and Twitter. Twitter is up with no images while SmugMug had to take the service down since so much of it relies on Amazon's services.
Update 4 - 1:55pm: Amazon now reporting, "10:33 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated."
Update 5 - 3:45pm: We are now down over 3.5 hours - Amazon's latest update, "12:25 PM PDT We have restored communication between additional hosts and are continuing this work across the rest of the fleet. Thank you for your continued patience."
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Video Blogging: Where’s the Disclosure (video)
Over the past 24 hours, a story has blown up regarding video blogging and the lack of disclosure. We first wrote about the issues of video blogger disclosure with regards to Morgan Webb and her show Webb Alert. When she launched the show, it was produced (and still is I believe) by ad network Federated Media.
It sure seems to me like video bloggers have a different code when it comes to disclosure. Whether it's with stories like the above, Amanda's fiasco with DuPont, or other video bloggers, there seems to be little to no disclosure. Is that ok?
Let's recap what happened over the past 24 hours. Techcrunch had a post about mobile video technologies and included Sarah Austin of Pop17 in the videos. Apparently Sarah is paid by Flixwagon to use their service and for some "consulting". There was no disclosure of this on the Techcrunch post. Author Jason Kinkaid says that Sarah was just the video model and didn't actually comment on the reviews in any regard. Editor Mike Arrington says TC didn't know of this sponsorship deal when they wrote their post. Pat Phelan caught word of this and posted an investigation of the Flixwagon deal. There's a good discussion about video blogging disclosure on his post.
Let me disclose that I am friendly with both Sarah and her boyfriend Andrew Baron, Rocketboom founder. When Sarah uses Flixwagon it's not required that she discloses that she is getting paid from them. But when she is promoting their service, she does need to disclose. Here's what disclosures I believe were missing from the Techcrunch post:
- Sarah is paid by Flixwagon
- Techcrunch sponsors Sarah's show Pop17
These simple statements would have avoided this entire issue. Sarah notes that she always discloses but I am not sure this is the case. Earlier this week she had Rocketboom on Pop17 but there was no disclosure of her fiduciary relationship with Rocketboom or her personal one. Should there have been? Hells yes. Last night she wrote about this topic and linked to Techcrunch. Should there have been disclosure that TC is a sponsor of Pop17? Hells yes.
Now let's take this topic one step further to really drive home the point of video blogger disclosure at the macro level. In the videos she pimps her Web site, and says her favorite blog is Techcrunch. Which by the way is her show sponsor. Now let's watch this video outside of the context of Techcrunch and view it on the Qik site. Here we see a video with a "popular" video blogger who pimps Techcrunch. Where's the disclosure? The key to remember is that videos will travel further than text will and disclosure needs to be included in the videos so they travel with it.
Perhaps video platforms need to build in a disclosure option - this would certainly save us from future issues like this. As product placements in videos (see Diggnation) grow, this topic will become more widely discussed.
Here's my video with some further thoughts on the topic of video blogger disclosure:
On a side note, it's interesting to hear that for "a few dollars more" Sarah is willing to abandon Flixwagon for Qik. She says she would never take money if she didn't believe in the product but she's so willing to jump ship for a few more dollars. If I was running FlixWagon, she'd be fired immediately because that statement shows she is in it for the cash, not for the quality of the service. She pulled a Tila Tequila.
It's simple. Disclose your relationships. Whether you blog on video, text, audio, whatever.
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NYC Tech Events - Week of July 20th
Here are the Web tech events in NYC for the week of July 20th. Please submit other events to add to the list below. Check out Alley Reporter and NYTechEvents for more events as well.
Sunday
- Hacker News Meetup - 7:30pm
Monday
- NYC Web Design Meeting - 6pm
- Google Talk - Jeff Sutherland - 6:30pm
- NYC Java Meeting - 6:30pm
Tuesday
- ClickZ Online Video Ad Forum - all day
- Web2NewYork - 6pm
- NYC Web Analytics - 7pm
Wednesday
- iBreakfast Media Buying - 7:30am
- NY Internet Marketing - 7pm
- FlashCoders NY - 7pm
Thursday
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DataPortability Announces Initial Steering Group Members
The DataPortability group held an open nomination period to elect the first DataPortability steering group. Twelve people stepped forward and since the group was set to hold 12, no election was necessary. Here are the new DataPortability steering group members in alphabetical order:
-- J. Trent Adams
-- Daniela Barbosa
-- Elias Bizannes
-- Brady Brim-DeForest
-- Steven Greenberg
-- Brett McDowell
-- Drummond Reed
-- Steve Repetti
-- Chris Saad
-- Christian Scholz
-- Steve Williams
-- Phil Wolff
Looks like an intelligent set of folks. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.
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Evite Attempts To Move Their Platform Forward; Partners With JS-Kit, Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube
Yesterday I spent some time with the Evite and JS-Kit teams to discuss the updated Evite beta platform launch. From a Web perspective the most impactful update is the addition of JS-Kit's comment system and polling platform. Now when you create an event, a message board is automatically added to the event where guests can speak before, during and after the event. JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux notes that this deal pushes JS-Kit past the blogosphere in terms of integration. This is a major distribution deal for JS-Kit who are just coming off their acquisition of Haloscan.
Other Evite platform updates include integration of Flickr for images, YouTube/Vimeo for videos and Plaxo for contact management. Event pages are more "hip" by adding images and videos. Evite also signed popular artist Robert Holmes to create a variety of new event designs. There's also a private comment feature which allows guests to send notes to the host without the entire guest list viewing them - quicker than an email. More mobile options have been added including event reminders and the ability for hosts to send event invites to guests via sms.
Users can now contribute their own designs as well. This was an interesting area of discussion. All designs are automatically approved and available in the event gallery. The Evite editors will hand pick some of the popular designs to place on their home page. They expect the community to police the user-submitted designs for illegal and objectionable content. Wonder how long before we see something way out there - my odds are one week.
The Evite platform is built in Java. eVite is part of IAC and has 35 team members in Los Angeles. eVite's self-reported stats include: 18 million registered members, 15 million monthly invitations sent, 6 million parties planned and 24,000 Evite invitations sent every hour. The average event guest goes to Evite four times per event.
The Evite team explained that the biggest challenge the face is working on a new platform while still maintaining the current platform.
To be honest, the updates are a bit of a letdown. When JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux and I spoke about this announcement a week ago, I was really looking forward to yesterday's meeting. I was excited to see a whole new Evite that was more 2008 and less 1998. The team certainly was excited to demo their changes and that's what makes this so difficult. But what I've seen is somewhere in the middle, call it 2005. When you are the market leader, it's ok to be years behind.
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TechCrunch Zurich Recap: We Really Do Have Startups Here!
Are there actually startups outside of Sillicon Valley and the USA? For us Europeans this is quite an akward question. Of course there are startups here. And thanks to Mike Butcher and TechCrunch and his European tour we can show the world how great our startup scene actually is. As one of twelve cities on the tour, Mike came to Zurich on July 17th. As a techblogger and engineer myself and as a CenterNetworks writer, I had the great pleasure to attend, take photos and videotape the event.
One of the highlights of the evening was the 20-second pitches each startup had the opportunity to give. We have compiled together a video with all the pitches. If you have 14 minutes and want to see a variety of Swiss startups, check it out below. I've also included some photos as well - over 150 people attended. Please share your thoughts on any of the startups represented in the video.
Editor's note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness. Also, we've provided reviews of two of the startups from the event, Poken and Mixin.
Poken is Touch and Connect Social Networking
Poken is a new Swiss startup that aims to simplify the way we go from real world interaction to online social networking friends. This week we reviewed DropCard which offers a way to stop collecting business cards and instead send the information through SMS. Poken also is interested with ending business card collection but in a different way.
When you signup for Poken, they send you a keychain fob which contains your social networking information. When you meet someone at a conference, event, mixer, etc and they also have a Poken fob, you tap the fobs together and instantly you are connected on the social networks where there is a match.
Since most people have only one social network they are attached to, is Poken really necessary? Apparently the Poken fob costs about $3 and the team is working on securing advertisers to "own" the Poken fob. For techies the idea seems more interesting and feasible. Also, enough people you meet and in your circle would need a Poken to make the system work. The first person you try to poke (?) and they have no fob, it's done.
It seems like for this type of application to work, it has to connect to the devices we carry already. Poken has an API and perhaps they should be working to integrate their technology (including the fob) into mobile devices? Maybe it could replace the infared port on many mobiles and actually make it more useful. Overall I like the concept and see it as moving the business card conversation forward.
Paul Stamatiou has a good look at physical social networking. Poken is currently angel-funded and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Here's their quick pitch filmed by Corsin Camichel at the TechCrunch Zurich event last night:
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Wallstrip Gets New Player and Lots of Pre-Roll/Post-Roll Ads
Back in January, Julie Alexandria took over as Wallstrip host. Today Wallstrip has re-launched their site and video player. There's an updated archive show finder, threaded comments along with the ability to note if you are long or short on the stocks they create videos for.
The player is the big update in my opinion. It's now branded CBS and has pre-roll and post-roll ads. In my tests, there were 30 second and 15 second pre-roll ads on different video loads along with 15 second post-roll ads. The pre-roll ads included Blackberry and Brita. A minute of commercials for a video that's less than 3 minutes long - over 25% of the total time is taken up with ads!
I guess the days of OptionsXpress ads are over.
Here's today's show featuring PapaJohns. I can't say that I find Wallstrip funny or interesting but clearly some others do.
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Prague-based 1C Acquires BUKA For $80 Million
Yakov is reporting that Prague-based game and software publisher 1C Company has agreed to aquire Russian video game creator Buka. The deal is reported at an estimated $80 million. BUKA generated revenues of $35 million and EBITDA of $10 million in 2007.
Yakov notes regarding Buka, "BUKA, which was founded in 1993, has 250 employees. BUKA published games Far Cry, Half Life series, War Hammer 40,000: Dawn of Warfrom from Western publishers including THQ, Ubisoft, Valve, Codemasters, Lesta Studio, Targem, and CDV."
Check out the list of the top 10 Russian Web sites and the top Russian search engines.
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Mixin - Social Micro Timeline and Activity Aggregator
Mixin is a new Swiss-based startup that aims to aggregate your activities into a timeline/agenda. Basically the way Mixin works is that it can aggregate your event timeline from sites like Twitter and you can also place events directly into your timeline through Mixin.
Here's an example Mixin activity page. It's basically like a messageboard thread where you start the thread with your event. Your friends can then note if they plan to attend, leave comments and embed photos and videos. Events can be sent to Mixin by mobile sms, IM and email as well. Then you can post the event to Facebook and/or Twitter. There's also an API so developers can build on top of what Mixin offers.
There's color-coding for event types so you know whether to pull out your finest shoes or flip-flops. When you setup your friends list in Mixin, you can decide if they person is just an online friend, or if they are a "real" friend by placing a star next to their name. Friend updates can be sent to your email or mobile.
Notifications can be setup daily to remind you of upcoming events. It would be great if you could include an address for the event or a conference URL. There's a link to Google Maps but without a specific address it won't work correctly. A connection into Google Calendar and the other online calendar applications would also round out the service.
You can also embed your timeline into a blog, Website or email. Here's what my embedded Mixin timeline looks like:
Mixin supports OpenID and the overall interface is pretty slick. The "how to use" guide is very interesting as it actually layers on top of the service so you can interact with the service while looking at the help.
This is one of the most interesting services I've seen as of late. It aggregates and leverages content from other sources but can also survive alone. I could see Mixin doing very well if it can gain some level of traction.
LessonWriter Makes Creating Lesson Plans Easy
LessonWriter is a new NY-based startup that aims to help teachers and instructors create lesson plans easily and in minutes. The company describes their service as, "develops literacy lesson plans & teaching materials from any text in a matter of minutes, allowing teachers to include English lessons in history or science class or to use this mornings news in a comprehensive, standards based lesson." There's a demo video that explains how the service works.
Here's how it works. You find content online on a Web page or in a document on your computer. Copy the content and paste it into LessonWriter. From there, you select the vocabulary, pronunciation and word roots to focus on in the lesson. There's also an option to add comprehension questions in a quiz-style format. LessonWriter then creates a full, printable lessonplan with all of the created content.
I have two comments on the LessonWriter service. First, when the content is copied out of a Web page, no attribution is noted. There needs to be attribution when using another's content for a lesson plan. Second, the end result is a very nicely formatted, printable document. Why not allow students to complete the work online? Answer the questions and allow for the fill-in blanks to be completed. This way the teacher can keep the records in a database on LessonWriter. Would certainly increase the value of the application.
The service is in beta and a note on the LessonWriter home page explains that teachers should proof everything before giving the handouts to their students. Clearly they haven't proofed the Web site yet either - see below :)
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PodTech Acquired by ViewPartner
Eric "Scoop" Eldon is reporting that corporate podcasting service PodTech has been acquired by ViewPartner for less than one million dollars. Eldon notes, "The investors, from my understanding, were looking to make PodTech more of a blog network, and didn’t see eye to eye with the company’s early employees on what, exactly, the company intended to be." PodTech raised $7.5 million in venture capital.
PodTech has seen it's share of drama in the past. Last October founder John Furrier left the company. Some of their content was questionable at best. Former PodTech employee Jeremiah Owyang left for Forrester, Robert Scoble quit then later joined FastCompany.
A year ago I tried to offer PodTech some ideas on how to at least improve their image. There's room for a corporate video production company in the market. It will be interesting to see what happens to PodTech under the ViewPartner umbrella.
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