Video from the live video stream of TechCrunchTalk, a series of four panel discussions focusing on start-ups and the investment climate in the UK and Europe, recorded in London on 18 September, 3pm and 6pm GMT:
Video from the live video stream of TechCrunchTalk, a series of four panel discussions focusing on start-ups and the investment climate in the UK and Europe, recorded in London on 18 September, 3pm and 6pm GMT:
Video from the live video stream of TechCrunchTalk, a series of four panel discussions focusing on start-ups and the investment climate in the UK and Europe, recorded in London on 18 September, 3pm and 6pm GMT:
(Second half has new startups discussion)
Video from the live video stream of TechCrunchTalk, a series of four panel discussions focusing on start-ups and the investment climate in the UK and Europe, recorded in London on 18 September, 3pm and 6pm GMT:
Hubdub, the UK-based news prediction market aimed exclusively at a US audience, has today won a partnership deal with Reuters. Hubdub allows users to trade predictions with virtual money on the outcomes of breaking news stories and future events. It will run a new, dedicated Reuters section within the site. Reuters will generate questions for users to trade on based on the latest breaking news, such as the 2008 presidential election. The deal makes a lot of sense - prior to this Reuters-sourced questions were already among the most popular on Hubdub. As with HubDub partners, there are tools and resources designed to help build a Reuters community within the site, including a “friends” application, comment capabilities, links to the top Reuters stories of the day and Reuters market widgets. Often HubDub prediction markets are quite accurate about the future because it aggregate thousands of trades. So far about two million “Hubdub dollars” are traded daily as a result. Some examples of Reuters questions on Hubdub are issues like “Which of these banks will be the next victim of credit crisis?”
Seedcamp, the European-wide competion for startups, ended on a high this week naming a record seven winners rather than the five they originally set out to award. The seven will each get €50,000 seed funding from Seedcamp’s conglomerate of venture backers, but the stake in each startup will vary, along similar lines to the Y-Combinator model. This is a change from last year, when Seedcamp took a 10% stake int he startup, and a change which has been widely welcomed and applauded by industry sources I’ve spoken to. In fact, Seedcamp has tweaked its event so well that it almost looks like becoming the dominant event in Europe for early stage startups. The calibre of mentors, angels, VCs and CEOs passing through Seedcamp this week was astoundinlgy high - from Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, to Brent Hoberman from Lastminute/MyDeco and a host of faces from Europe and the US; from Google, to Facebook to Microsoft. Basically pick a name and they were there.
I put this to Seedcamp Chairman Saul Klein but in characteristic laid-back fashion Saul pointed out to me that “The most valuable network the Seedcamp teams will get is not meeting Brent Hoberman or all those named people but each-other as they are going through this process. A typical example is Anders Fredriksson from Tablefinder who started out as a young startup last year but came back this year and was mentoring other teams. That’s what we want, we want entrepreneurs to support eachother. The goal here was to be inclusive not exclusive. I feel strongly that you need networks and then you need to create hubs. It would be great if every major city on Europe was a tech centre, but we need to create the networks first.” Reshma Sohoni, Seecamp CEO said “Seedcamp is very open, as long as you want to help. It’s always been transparent. We even say to the teams that they should go back and start things on their own back in their home cities if they want.”
So Seedcamp is, in fact, poised to create the kind of network effect across Europe, tied-in with city-based hubs, that Europe’s startup eco-system is going to need. In fact, the whole scene is at this very moment having it’s own “industrial revolution” and although Seedcamp is pretty much the first of its pioneers, it is likely to become an engine of growth for many more. And this is reflected by the incredibly pan-European winners this year:
BaseKit (Chepstow, Wales)
This is a deceptively easy way to create complex web sites and applications. You can create a whole Web app with a user interface. For example, you can put in data from the Nestoria real estate search engine via drap and drop. It uses PHP on the server and Javascript and HTML on the front end. So you could deliver a complex site that might take a week to code from scratch in minutes or a couple of hours. The feedback from the mentors said this would mock up a site in a few minutes or hours, rather someone need to get deep into code. This of it like this. WordPress does blogs, and people have pushed it to the limit. At the other end you have a CMS like Drupal. But there is a gap in the middle, so BaseKit addresses that gap. One mentor, Dave McClure, said “They are selling cars to people who have horses.”
Kyko (Oxford, UK) (no site yet)
Currently in stealth mode, but I’ve seen what it does it’s pretty good for a 21-year old founder.
Mobclix (San Francisco, US)
Mobclix are trying to become the “comscore with an ad network for iPhones apps” said the judges. We are talking analytics, network and monetisation for iPhone applications. They were a TechCrunch 50 company, and frankly, anyone who can monetise iPhone apps this early is probably on to a winner.
Soup (Vienna, Austria)
This is Tumblr for the rest of us. Personally when I first saw their pitch I wondered what they were doing that was new, but looking at their “stress-free” tumblelogging platform you realise that it really does lower the barrier to publishing. It has a Twitter-like interface enabling feed imports/lifestreaming, bookmarklets, you name it.
Stupeflix (Paris, France)
This is similar to Animoto but where that site takes hours to convert video Stupeflix does it in real time on a massive scale. This team is coming out of DailyMotion and Exalead (which means serious street cred in the French startup community). Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. So a real estate agent could convert all their video for distribution onto all socials platforms. And unlike Animoto they are developing the API before the site and intend to integrate the payment system within the API, as Amazon does with its web services. One of the co-founder got sacked from Daily Motion the day after they were finalists in Seedcamp Paris, but they have happily come to an arrangement now!
Toksta (Berlin, Germany)
This is white label IM and video for social networks, so socnets don’t have to create it themselves. This adds stickines and increases user activity. But before you ask, no they are not going after Faceook, but the mid and long tail social networks. So either offering a SAAS solution or revenue share on advertising. The judges said this was literally “cut and paste integration” and makes build or buy an easier decision for socnets.
uberVU (Bucharest, Romania)
uberVU keeps track of context from all over the Web (responses, comments, trackbacks, diggs, etc.) around a story so you can see what people are saying about it on different sites and services. The Seedcamp judges said “PR people are will gonna love this” since it tracks any given topic across all of the conversations on the web. Not just comments on blogs - which sites like CoComment do - but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc you name it. The founders say they are “mapping the conversational graph” - pretty cool stuff for three guys from Romania, and is this one of the first significant Romanian startups to appear.
The rest of the Seedcamp finalists were Zoombu, Szuku, Decisions for Heroes, Adtaily, Saplo , Yoose, Quillp, Entrip, scred.com, tickerTXT, Speedsell, ThoughtTrail, Tripwolf, Deepmemo, FDream and Uniki.
Brit/US entrepreneur Michael Birch has not been resting since exiting from Bebo recently. He’s invested in a new startup which launched today, founded by former TV-producer Edward Baker, an ex-TV producer. But this is not your obvious startup - dictionaries are not exactly hot right now. So why do another one?
Birch and Baker think different. Wordia.com - fittingly launched today at the house of Dr Samuel Johnson, who compiled the world’s first dictionary 253 years ago - is, effectively (as Birch describes it) “Dictionary.com meet Youtube meets Wikipedia”. It combines a textual dictionary from partner Harper Collins with user-generated videos both from any user and profesionally produced videos featuring celebrities. Users edit, submit and rate definitions on relevance, accuracy or humour. The launch site has 76,000 words and 120,000 definitions, and another 21,000 word thesaurus entries. And the user-definitions are sarting to flood in, like this one. The project is also supported by the Open University and the National Literacy Trust. This is only in English right now. Wordia pulls in videos which are held on the site and also spun out to YouTube via their API. And if Harper Collins pulled out they still have an internal option.
But the interesting things is that it could scale across all languages, and also define new words, like techmeme or Techcrunched.
But the issue here is that Dictionary.com has not innovated, so Wordia is a play against that and has a lot of potetnial for branded content, something Ron Conway described at TechCrunch 50 as a billion dollar market.
I think kids will love this - it ought to bring words to life. It should also be interesting when Brit kids start to face off against US kids about the definition of words. Should be fun.
Here’s the live stream from TechCrunchTalk, a series of four panel discussions focusing on start-ups and the investment climate in the UK and Europe, live from London between 3pm and 6pm GMT:
Live streaming video by Ustream
FYI you can interact with the chairman/moderator, Mike Butcher (Editor, TCUK), by sending an @mbites to Twitter.
You’ve packed up your desk at Lehman Brothers, rolled up that AIG umbrella and headed to the pub. But wait, there is still hope!
For years, one of the biggest challenges facing UK Internet startups (and startups in Europe generally) startups has been the competition for technical talent, especially the attraction of the City and financial services. It was very difficult for a venture-backed startup to compete with the compensation packages offered by the big investment banks.
Now, no-one wants to “stamp on the grave” of companies while people are losing their livelihood, but there is now an opportunity for startup companies to attract seasoned, technical talent. That means you! 
So, consider joining a startup. You can read about them every day on TechCrunch UK and we even have a Jobs board, which is poised to explode I daresay…
A startup probably won’t offer the creature comforts of a job in the financial services industry, but it’s fun, there is barely any office politics and you get stock options to share on the upside. Plus, you get to work form home a lot.
[With apologies to Leavewallstreetjoinastartup.com ]
Following its name change and $6.8m financing round last April, the European social networking site Netlog had already stated an intention to release a developer platform with support for custom APIs. In fact, it plans to become a bit of a European evangelist for OpenSocial. That means developers can use a common set of programming interfaces on sites including Google, Orkut, MySpace, Yahoo!, Hi5 and Friendster, as well Netlog.
Today it is due to announce that it will open up its its translation and localisation capabilities to third-party developers. But Netlog will only be accepting applications which keep people in the site. It will refuse applications forcing the user to leave the site, install the application or invite friends. Applications can be branded, co-branded or sponsored. Developers receive 100% of the advertising revenues on the “canvas view” of the application. Developers will also be granted access to Netlog’s “credits economy” allowing developers the opportunity to monetise by charging credits, gleaning advertising revenues or to incentivise by giving credits away.
Meanwhile, as we reported earlier, Netlog still has issues dealing with prowlers on its system. Today a UK man has walked free from a court after being acquited of having drug-fuelled sex with a girl he thought was over the age of legal consent. She wasn’t. The girl said in court that she had been was inundated with messages from men who logged on to her Netlog profile.
And back in August a girl of 15 who was feared to have fled to Turkey to meet two men who befriended her on Netlog, was eventually found by police safe in Belgium.
In TechCrunch UK recently investigated and found that it was pretty easy to contact minors on Netlog’s system, so I hope they will be addressing this issue ASAP.
In its defence Netlog says it has consulted with child protection agencies and charities like Child Focus, but it can’t “control things when people lie about their age.”
