Archive for March, 2008
« Previous Entries Next Entries »CloudMade raises €2.4m to supercharge open source maps
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Think for a moment about about how amazing it was a few years ago to see Google Maps for the first time. Suddenly not only was mapping a fascinating new arena for online, but Google’s map API lead to a wave of mashups and new innovation. It even lead UK startup MultiMap to completely change course and invest in draggable maps, because the market wanted them.
Now think for a moment about the incredible amout of data and value that is locked inside proprietary mapping databases. Hell, it’s why Nokia bought Navteq last year for £4bn and why Teleatlas went to TomTom for £2bn.
Now hold that thought while you consider that implications of someone first creating a globally available open-source mapping platform, and then launching a startup to leverage that data.
Well that’s what just happened, and they just won financing.
Open-source mapping company CloudMade has raised €2.4 million in Series A financing round from Copenhagen-based venture fund Sunstone Capital. They join open source evangelist Nikolaj Nyholm and early Skype investor Morten Lund.
CloudMade will professionalise and package geo data from OpenStreetMap, the global initiative to create a free, editable map of the world from user-generated input.
OpenStreetMap basically provides free tools to upload and edit user-generated GPS trace information to create highly detailed maps. And it’s a rapidly growing community now numbering in the tens of thousands of members all over the world attempting to complete the global map. The OSM project also also enables the creation of multiple metadata layers with additional details such as foot and bicycle paths, retail, building addresses and even ski slopes.
CloudMade is co-founded by Steve Coast - who actually started OSM in 2004 - and long-time OSM contributor Nick Black. It’s role will be to ensure the data integrity of the OSM and to package that data for third-party use, such as for map tiles, metadata and software tools.
OpenStreetMaps for urban areas like London, Berlin and even Copenhagen or the Netherlands are pretty good and can only get better because of the open source model. Other mapping companies have to spend millions making this kind of rich data.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 17, 2008, 9:47PM
Is WAYN on the block again?
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Back in January I had several very good leads telling me that WAYN, the social network for travelers was in talks with AOL about a $200m sale. A term sheet was said to be imminent. I called WAYN but they denied the whole thing and, via another channel, I heard they were a little put out by my ‘rumour-mongering’, as they saw it.
In hindsight I must have been both premature, and also slightly off target - it turned out that AOL was in talks to buy a company which WAYN’s VC investor DFJ Esprit was involved in. BUt it wasn’t WAYN. It was their stable-mate, buy.at, a sale which duly happened, for around $150 million, in February.
Oh well, I thought, you win some, you lose some.
But now it appears WAYN is happy for the sale rumours to float once again, according to The Guardian. Perhaps especially now Bebo has been picked up by, you guessed it, AOL - the dumb-money exit for startups and “the place where innovation goes to die“.
According to reports, WAYN has fended off several approaches and AOL is meant to have been one “interested” party. As the Guardan says, there is indeed a certain whiff of opportunistic PR around the story. But hey, who can blame them? They may as well ride the Bebo wave, right? The price being floated this time round is £100m, or around $200m. Hmmnn, sounds familiar…
But The Guardian values them at closer to £58m based on comScore’s 3.1m unique users per month and 340,000 active monthly unique users in the UK. Oh dear.
At any rate, WAYN founders Peter Ward and Jerome Touze should get a better reception from Silicon Valley than us cynical British hacks when they fly over there for the government-backed Web Mission project in April. I’ll be tagging along as part of the press pack, and will see if I can’t tempt them into giving me the story over a beer or two. And I’ll be noting if they skip off to a meeting with AOL…
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 18, 2008, 12:22AM
Getting plugged-in at Plugg
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
This week I will be reporting from Plugg, the European conference focusing on Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 startups on March 19th in Brussels. As well as a speaker programme [disclosure: I will be chairing some discussions] there will be a “Startup Rally” featuring tech start-ups looking for early-stage funding and press/blogger attention. I’m just about to grab the Eurostar, but tune in for the coverage from tomorrow. If you want to hook up with me there, my contact details are here. Here is a list of who else is going.
Also check out The Next Web awards in April. This is also a great place to get your startup noticed, so consider entering. There will be plenty of bloggers and press people there as well.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 18, 2008, 9:53AM
Isango raises $8 million for its ‘travel experiences’
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
UK travel startup Isango has raised $8 million led by Spark Ventures. Beringea contributed US$2.5m and the remaining US$1.5 million came from existing shareholders. Ranjan Singh, former MD of eBookers, is founder/CEO.
Isango is aiming to build the largest repository of travel experiences and currently offers around 4,000 activities in nearly 60 countries. It works alongside travel companies, airlines, car rental firms, hotel groups and other portals that include Hertz, Yahoo, Teletext and WAYN. isango’s exclusive focus is on the consumer motivation behind travel, the destination experience or ‘purpose’ of the journey. Release.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 18, 2008, 10:11AM
First-time startups start to feel a chill wind
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008“Funding business plans from first time entrepreneurs just won’t happen anymore!”
So says Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group, the investment vehicle he heads which has invested in (deep breath) Astley Clarke, Buildersite, Daylife, DH Gate, Digivate, Dopplr, Extate, Fizzback, Glasses Direct, Imagini, Kindo, Koodos, Kublax, Lookery, LoveFilm, Mashery, Mind Candy, Moo, MoveMe, Netlog, Openads, Seedcamp, Songkick, Spot Runner, Spotplex, Stardoll, Wonga, Zemanta and Zoopla (among others).
What’s his reasoning behind this? It’s not the suddenly uncertain economic climate as “we have seen no diminution in the flood of interesting new ventures being launched” and he gets pitched “at least 2 or 3 propositions per week.”
No, the real reason says Klein is that the quality bar is now so high amongst startups that you really do have to be pretty good now to win funding.
Here is Klein’s new criteria for startups he’ll consider investing in:
1. Founded by 2nd and 3rd time tech entrepreneurs
2. Aspiring to build global businesses with scale
3. With genuinely original ideas which are game changing or a significant advance on current state of play
4. Where the founder(s) have built prototypes or are already demonstrating momentum in customer/consumer adoption
5. Where founders have shown an ability to considerably ‘bootstrap’ the business with very little or no external cash (outside of friends and family).
You just need to have some or all of these attributes, and there’s plenty of funding to be had, he says.
But first time entrepreneurs? They can take a hike.
Whether you think this new reasoning is down to the coming global recession or because there are just lots of tech companies now is up to you. Personally I think it’s a combination of both. Who will now pick up the challenge? Angel investors? It’s hard to say.
Update: Responding to comments on his blog, Klein clarifies by saying that “just funding a ‘business plan’ ie a powerpoint plan with a 3year blue-sky financial model won’t happen” but “first time entrepreneurs who bootstrap and build something, demonstrate consumer or trade engagement are always going to be of great interest.” Note, he stops short of sounding more enthusiastic than that.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 18, 2008, 5:06PM
Blogging Plugg.eu - notes from panels
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
For a first time conference for investors and startups, Plugg, held in the rather nice ambience of an old theatre in Brussels, is going very well. It’s down to the hard work of Web 2.0 blogger and consultant Robin Wauters.
Plenty of people turned up for breakfast which was a sure sign the conference was heading in the right direction.
Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research gave us a heads-up on the social web right. The takeaways were that half of Europeans now engage in ’social computing’ (nice to get some speicif research on Europe). That means buzz and viral stuff happens really fast now, so for instance, the Imperial Star Destroyer from Lego sold out in 5 weeks, after consumer demand was picked up on sites like Facebook. The biggest creators of social media are in Holland (17%), the least in Germany and Spain (8%) and photo uploading is the in thing. The UK produces a lot of people (25%) who join networks but then don’t create much content on it. The least for this is France (4%) and Spain (5%).
VC and former entrepreneur Max Niederhofer of Atlas Venture gave a great presentation on how online games are already big and only going to get bigger, especially in the casual games via the browser. Gaming is a 20 billion dollar industry now and 75% of casual gamers are female. Since a 3D version of Flash will come out in 2009 tere is now an opportunity for startups to build Flash-based online games, disruptive the ‘printer cartridge’ model of the console market which requires high-priced games to work. Integrating online games with social networks could be a big deal.
An entrepreneur panel featuring Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (Fleck) , Simon McDermott (Attentio), Rodrigo Sepúlveda (Vpod.tv), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo) covered looked at starting up. They had some interesting advice, including going for English first (US market), go for a global market from day one (add other languages asap), but equally you can grow a good business for a local market (though admittedly it won’t scale as fast).
I’ll add more notes as I go….
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 19, 2008, 2:41PM
It looks like Spinvox has raised £50m
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Update: Reuters just confirmed the below story (which I wrote this morning, about 5 hours before Reuters), as Spinvox has now clearly put it out on the wire to stop any further speculation. It’s raised funding from a “Goldman Sachs Group Inc unit” and GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. It doubles the amount raised so far to $200 million and now effectively values the firm at “in excess of $500 million,” according to co-founder and Chief Executive Christina Domecq.
———————
It was reported ten days ago that Spinvox, the mobile-phone technology firm that converts voicemails into text messages, had appointed Goldman Sachs as advisers to weigh up fundraising options that include a stock-market flotation.
But earlier today some extremely well placed sources - one inside Spinvox - told me that Spinvox has now raised £50 million (yes, sterling, not dollars) in financing from a private equity group, as yet unnamed. That takes it’s total pot to around £100m.
In addition to this, the jungle drums are starting to beat. On a public investment panel this morning at the Plugg.eu conference Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital said Spinvox had “closed a $100m round”. Then that statement was later twittered by Paul Fisher of Advent Venture Partners. Ariadne has worked with Spinvox.
I just emailed Spinvox’s PR people to officially confirm or deny the story but they are simply referring me to the earlier news that they recently closed 12 carriers deals around the world for voice to text services for voicemail and spoken SMS and they expect to double that number over the next year. They also said they plan to launch new products and partnerships in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise Unified Communications arena.
The Times newspaper recently reported that the new financing could value the business at approaching £200m, but filings at Companies House show that sales were only £436,000 in 2006, up 78% from the preceding 17 months. Pretax losses stepped up from £5.8m to £10.7m because of increased research spending. However, the business is forecasting a sharp upturn in sales, from £40m in 2008 to £100m in 2009, after doubling the number of mobile-phone carrier partners it has from 12 to 24 this year.
Spinvox competes with Nuance Communications, a Nasdaq-listed firm worth $3.6 billion (£1.8 billion) whose speech-recognition technology is used in corporate IT departments and voice-activated satnav.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 19, 2008, 3:22PM
Myrl launches Web-based virtual world
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Virtual worlds are all very well but they are usually closed systems which don’t integrate well with the Web, and since the Web won the platform wars a while back it makes sense to integrate the two a little better. Despite this, virtual worlds are still adding users. There are now more than 200 virtual worlds and Gartner Research estimates that 50 to 60 million people will participate in virtual worlds by 2011.
So, a new London-based startup is going to integrate virtual-world-style avatars with the web on an open web platform. Myrl (which stands for My Real Life / My Role Life) is a collaborative platform for avatars enabling interaction between different virtual worlds and the web. Think of it as a social network based on avatars.
CEO, Francesco D’Orazio has now launched a private Beta with Angel funding, which he hopes will allow users to move their avatar between virtual worlds via Myrl’s open web platform.
Your Myrl avatar profile is automatically updated in real-time from the virtual world to the web via a light-weight app called Profiler, but information published can be selected by the avatar.
Currently the platform supports users from Second Life and There.com. Future plans are to support OpenSim worlds and to create relationships with virtual worlds such as Entropia, Active Worlds, Kaneva, HipiHi and Vast Park amongst the others, targeting a market of more than 30 millions users.
I think Myrl is going in the right direction. With Flash 3D appearing some time next year, virtual worlds and MMO games are entering the cloud and moving away from the desktop, so anything Web-based makes sense to me.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 21, 2008, 9:28AM
EU startups get plugged at Plugg
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
This week there was a new conference on the Web 2.0 block in Europe. Plugg saw investors and startups from across Europe come together to discuss the market and some 20 startups pitched their companies at the event, attended by about 300 people. Although much smaller than Le Web 3 in Paris (which gets about 1,500 attendees), Plugg had the makings of a more intimate atmosphere amongst European startups and being in Brussels meant it was easy to get to from London on the amazing Eurostar as well as plenty of othercontinental European cities.
So the heads-up on the startups: The winner of the start-ups rally was Viewdle, while Zilok got the best ratings from the audience.
Viewdle is a digital media platform for indexing, searching & monetizing video assets. One of it’s key USPs is that it uses facial recognition to index the video, frame-by-frame, to create a real-time index of on-screen appearances. Viewdle was a Crunchies finalist and presented at TechCrunch40.
Zilok is a service which allows you to rent anything online. Yes, the idea is not brand new, but this is a French startup which launched in November last year and is also available in the US. Think eBay for renting your stuff. TechCrunch reviewed it in more detail here.
The rest of the twenty startups who pitched are here.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 21, 2008, 10:12AM
Wikio walks out to a sticky wicket
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Wikio - which has launched a UK version - is a news portal featuring a search engine scouring press sites, the blogoshere and product listings. Think Google News meets Kelkoo meets Digg. But before I go on, at this point some disclosure is necessary: Ouriel Ohayon, editor of TechCrunch France and also a VC himself, is a shareholder and board member of Wikio, prior to which he reviewed Wikio here. However, I personally have no ‘interest’ in Wikio and since they have launched a UK version, the site seems worthy of discussion here.
Based in Luxembourg with a startup capital of 1.7mEUR Wikio has a team of 34 people (half tech, half infomediaries) located in various European countries, and claims over 5 million monthly uniques in continental Europe, according to Nielsen. Its blog service has a memetracker tracking blog discussions and a rather interesting Blog ranking. (This blog is number one but I do rather wonder about that. The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. With their algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked. It doesn’t sound very egalitarian but there you go. I guess I won’t complain that TCUK is number one, but I’m surprised that some blogs I know are not on the list).
Wikio also has a Digg-like ratings systems which is obviously broader in its subjects. Indexing over 55,000 media sites, blogs, video 70,000 products, all in real-time, there is a heavy price comparison aspect to this. Click on a product and you get a Kelkoo-style list of stuff. You can also only vote for something up. You can’t vote it down.
I like the fact that Wikio has localised versions, so I can click on the US, UK, French or German site and get a different picture on the world (assuming one can). Wikio “Live” is pretty cool, though it turns over headlines way too fast.
Ultimately though, Wikio’s main pitch is that it is indexing news sites and blogs and majors on new product reviews.
The Kelkoo comparison is no coincidence. Founder Pierre Chappaz was previously the founder of Kelkoo, long since sold to Yahoo! who in turn is now trying to sell it off. And here is where the wheels start to come off the Wikio idea, especially in the UK market.
Price comparison and product review sites are now a dime-a-dozen in the UK. Experian is having problems with its PriceGrabber service and plans to sell it. Yahoo has been looking to sell Kelkoo, which operates in 10 European countries, since October last year. Pricerunner, launched in Sweden in 1999 and bought by ValueClick for £16m, seems to be losing momentum. Six year old Confused.com is only staying in the game by runnning TV advertising on high rotation. The dominant player is Moneysupermartket which is the runaway market leader. It floated on the stock exchange last year for £800m. Wikio’s entry into the UK must therefore be seen in this context.
There are a few more issues.
When you click on a news link a new browser window opens with the story framed and Wikio’s ‘vote, send to a fiend’ bar still at the top. Very annoying. I know how to open a new browser window thanks, and at least I end up with the right URL in the address bar so I can bookmark it etc. This is a sucky way of operating - there’s no better way of saying it. It reminds me of horrible affiliate sites which send you in an eternal loop of new windows.
Although Wikio’s digg-like voting system is good it seems a way off mass adoption and the very ‘busy’ design of the site still feels like it’s not going to reach its goal of bringing RSS to the mainstream. (Despite it’s very non mainstream URL, UK startup Fav.or.it remains a more mainstream interface to RSS, although it’s still only in private beta).
Wikio is clearly more of a news hub on acid. There is a serious amount of features to this site. The trouble is, it doesn’t seem distinct enough right now and it’s strategic positioning seems flawed in 2008.
Originally
from TechCrunch UK
by
reBlogged
on Mar 25, 2008, 9:55AM