Steve Rubel has long been a commentator on new media via his early blog Micropersuasion and now as a principal at Edelman PR. I caught up with him at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam to chat to him about how he thinks startups can better promote themselves on social media.

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

Popularity: unranked [?]

At The Next Web conference in Amsterdam I caught up with Guillaume Decugis, CEO of Scoop.it, a news curation startup coming out of France, but which is rapidly gaining traction and is poised to put down roots in the US. We’ve previously covered Scoop.it on TechCrunch France

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Sharing what mobile apps you have in a social network has been tried various ways. Appsfire hit on the idea of socialising apps. Zwapp is coming at it from a slightly different angle. Its iPhone app (iTunes link) auto-discovers what apps you have on your iPhone and connects up your contacts, Facebook and Twitter friends. You then follow people who’s opinion’s you respect when it comes to apps. It even has a live feed where you can see what apps your friends are using and downloading (privacy is now most definitely over it would seem).

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Onavo, as we just reported, is a magical iPhone app which literally shrinks the data your phone uses and thus your roaming data bill when you are travelling. It launches today and I caught up with CEO and co-founder Guy Rosen at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam.I’ve actually been using Onavo for weeks, since a trip to Tel Aviv and a random meeting with Rosen. Although the compression happens on Onavo’s servers, it’s changed nothing about my iPhone use - other than the fact that it’s saving a noticeable amount on roaming costs when I am travelling in Europe. It may even be between 20-30%.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Seedcamp, the pan-European micro seed fund and startup accelerator, has announced the winners of its recent startup showcase in Berlin. The two companies beat off competition from 20 finalists, while Seedcamp Berlin had the most applications to-date. Both will join its existing 38 portfolio companies.So, without further ado, the winners are:

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Teamly, the collaboration and time management tool for businesses and employees, has exited beta today and with it is announcing what it’s calling a “significant milestone”: 9 months in, Teamly users have created 100,000 “priorities”. The term “priorities” perhaps reflects the company’s key differentiation compared with similar offerings in the “performance management” software space which, says Teamly, aren’t designed to benefit the employee and are overly-complicated and encourage micro-management. In comparison, Teamly keeps things simple with a realtime stream where you can see both priorities and goal setting for the individual in the manner of a kind of “real-time appraisal”. To-date, 6,000 individuals in “hundreds of companies world-wide” are using the Software-as-a-Service.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Bigpoint, the German online gaming outfit, has taken a $350m majority share investment from Summit Partners and TA Associates in what’s described as a recapitalization of the company. Representatives from both firms will join Bigpoint’s Board of Directors.The new capital is said to position the company for “continued strong global growth” and will support Bigpoint’s international expansion, which has already seen it open new offices in the US and Brazil.The deal also sees original investor Comcast Interactive Capital’s Peacock Equity Fund sell their stake, while founder and co-CEO Heiko Hubertz (yes, the company has two people in the top job) will retain his 30% share in Bigpoint.

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

Popularity: unranked [?]

This is a guest post by Alex Barrera. Alex is Partner and Associate Director at Okuri Ventures, CEO and co-founder at Tetuan Valley, founder at Inkzee.com and mentor in several accelerator programs including Tetuan Valley, StartupBootCamp and Springboard.The newest edition of the Spain-based Tetuan Valley startup school kicked off in Madrid and Barcelona a few weeks ago. But, what’s Tetuan Valley and what’s the Startup School? Tetuan Valley is a mindset we want to bring to Europe, especially to countries where entrepreneurship isn’t always inherent in our DNA. This is the case for countries like Spain or Poland.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

With all the larger acquisitions that have taken place in France within the last year - like Exalead, PriceMinister or DailyMotion - it’s easy to almost forget that Alcatel-Lucent bought Sophia-Antipolis-based OpenPlug in September. It was the company’s 2nd acquisition in 3 months.Well my dear mobile app developer friends, Alcatel-Lucent has now released a free version of OpenPlug’s development platform.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

When Color came out with its $41m play, a rather lesser known startup had planned to launch around the same time - as these things go. How often does that happen? Pretty darn often no doubt. But while Color got all the press - not least for its funding - the lesser known Pixamid has had to wait for its time in the sun. But while I have struggled - really I have - to get into Color, Pixamid has given me pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this kind of app [iTunes link] from the word go. Today at the (sixth annual) Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I met CEO and founder Bart Denny who demo’d the app to me.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Now I know what you’re thinking: leave it to the French to come up with a dating site for extramarital affairs (er, cheating?). After all, local entrepreneurs have come up with some rather original ideas in this space before. Remember Ladieshoesme? Or Adoptaguy? There’s event Loue une petite amie (literally translates to “rent a girlfriend”). Yet oddly enough, I haven’t found anything along the lines of Cougarlife…But actually, believe it or not, the idea behind extramarital dating site Gleeden isn’t unique to France. In fact, Canadian-owned competitor, Ashley Madison, counts over 9 million “anonymous” registered users that are seeking a bit of…well, you get my point.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, is announcing a significant change today.In a move that represents less altruism and more capitalism, from May 1st onwards Flattr will no longer require new users to add credit to their accounts in order to run the Flattr button on their sites and start receiving payments. In other words, users won’t be required to give to receive.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

Sedo will announce shortly that it has sold the most expensive domain name of this year so far in its third biggest public sale ever handled behind sex.com ($13 million) and vodka.com ($3 million). The company has brokered the sale of gambling.com for $2.5 million in cash.UK-based Media Corporation sold the domain to an unnamed company also based in the United Kingdom for £1.5 million in cash. According to the seller, the transaction formally completed on 27 April, with the receipt of funds and transfer of the domain name.

More: continued here
Powered by SmartRSS

Popularity: unranked [?]

Peecho, the Cloud-printing startup based in Amsterdam, has launched a new service that it’s calling the ‘Print Button’.The idea is that with just a few lines of code, any website or web app can embed Peecho’s Cloud-based printing service, making it easy to send and print content to the company’s network of professional printers. Best of all they can add a markup to the cost, turning that content into a revenue stream.And in a clever bit of marketing, Peecho is pitching its ‘Print Button’ as a Facebook ‘Like’ for Cloud-printing. That’s a neat analogy, though for now it falls a little short.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

How much does an old Web 1.0 startup go for these days? Well, here’s an indication. Pub listings guide BeerintheEvening.com - running since the late 90s - was for £30,000, confirms Chris Hughes of new owner Neransk, a UK-based communities operator. The sale actually happened about a year ago but Neransk only just got back […]

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]