Bloglovin, a startup that has been compared to Tumblr and RSS, has just raised a $1 million Series A.
The company bills itself as a fun, simple way to follow all the fashion blogs that interest you. Like RSS, you can sign up to read updates from any blog (not just the ones on a single platform or content management system), and like Tumblr, there’s an emphasis on high-quality visuals and community. Bloglovin even held a fashion awards ceremony in New York earlier this year. → Read More
It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years. → Read More
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A new chapter today for Rutube, the YouTube of Russia: the user-generated video site, long competing against YouTube in its home market and losing, has redesigned and is now turning itself into more of an aggregator that will host content from Google’s video giant as well as Vimeo, as part of a new content injection that will also include full-length feature films. Rutube has also announced an integration with Facebook that will let users watch videos on Rutube that have been shared on the social network. Similar deals with Facebook’s Russian rival, Vkontakte, and Twitter will be following in the autumn.
The moves are part of a new beta version of the site that Rutube, owned by the Russian conglomerate Gazprom, will also include the addition of premium, branded content — a move that it hopes will increase engagement and page views among its 7.1 million unique monthly users, and help it better compete against YouTube, which has 24.9 million uniques, according to comScore.
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This is a guest post by Mehrunisa Qayyum, a consultant on the Middle East / North Africa region, founder of PitaPolicy and Huffington Post Blogger.
“Here’s a mobile app that rates the restaurant/bar/club based on the how many attractive women are there,” explained an Arab Net Summit attendee to me in a Hamraa neighborhood hotspot of Beirut. I had to contain myself. Here I was in Lebanon, attending the Arab Net conference, and trying to challenge another blogger’s belief that innovation in Arab countries is limited to localizing the application of existing startups. Clones, in other words. And the conversation had shifted from “who’s hot” rather than “what’s hot”. → Read More
As a fat, lazy blogger, I find myself often buying clothes online only to discover that XXL for a designer in Spain is basically a XXS for babies in America. The resulting shape and return fees were enough to drive me to distraction – until I saw this wild robot call the FitBot.
The robot – which is finally in production – essentially takes your measurements and reproduces them in real time. Got a big old tummy and broad shoulders? FitBot will show you what that shirt will look like on you. It can reproduce up to 2,000 body permutations and can be used by, say, an online store to show exactly what a certain shirt will look like on various people. → Read More
Add one more company to the ranks of hopefuls that want to own the space where dongles and mobiles are used for card-based payments. mPowa, a UK-based startup, is launching in the U.S. today with a solution that looks a lot like Square, Here from PayPal, and others. But while Square and the rest currently target smaller merchants that do not have card facilities already, mPowa is first going after bigger fish: the large enterprises that do.
“Our main focus are those businesses who already take cards but lack the mobile point of sale facilities to make transactions on the go, the Whirlpools or charities of the world,” Dan Wagner, the founder and CEO, told me in an interview earlier today. “Now they can make home visits or collect money anywhere.” And that’s not the only difference. The service works on devices covering four different platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows, another way to aim for mass coverage.
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Skimlinks provides content magnetisation for publishers that turns product references into affiliate links – and famously was a recent partner with Pinterest. We spoke to founder Alicia Navarro during the F.ounders conference at the Nasdaq in New York.
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Last week, Facebook staked out its claim as a prime destination for people looking for this summer’s Olympics coverage online. Today, the BBC threw its hat into the social media ring, too — it’s putting its sports coverage into a new Timeline app. The app, which is only accessible by UK users, is in beta form (pictured here) and live already: people can currently access streams of Wimbledon. That will get ramped up in coming weeks for Olympics coverage, when it will offer some of the most comprehensive coverage yet seen on the social network — 24 streams in all — and marks the first time that the BBC will stream live events using Facebook.
The move comes at a time when the BBC is ramping up its digital activities in long-view bid that this will need to become a much stronger part of its business as more traditional revenue streams continue to decline.
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“To be honest, it was awful”, says ShareMyPlaylists founder Kieron Donoghue on the company’s previous Android effort, which today gets a much needed reboot.
The new app brings many of the Spotify community site’s best features to Google’s platform, such as its editorally-picked ‘Featured Playlists’ as well as the ‘Top 50 Playlist Charts’. Although be warned: Android users need a premium Spotify account to join the fun.
Launched in 2009, ShareMyPlaylists.com claims to be the largest and oldest Spotify community site (it certainly feels like I’ve been covering the company for a very long time) and has published over 95,000 playlists for its users worldwide, while the site generates 15,000 playlists plays per-day and has over 300 new playlists uploaded daily. → Read More
Eric van der Kleij is to depart his post as CEO of the UK’s Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO) after his two year contract comes to an end this Summer. The TCIO was set up by the UK government to promote East London’s pre-existing cluster of technology startups and is just one of hundreds of similar initiatives around the world where a city is promoted as a ‘tech city’. It’s a natural course to take, given that tech is one of the few economic areas growing during a downturn in developed economies. Even tech-obsessed San Francisco itself is thinking that way.
A TCIO spokesperson told us it plans to advertise the positions “in the next couple of weeks”. Mr. van der Kleij will go part-time from the end of July and steps down formally in September. In a statement he said: “The TCIO work has been some of the most exciting I have ever done, and I promise to let you know what I am up to as soon as I can.”
TCIO now plans to split his role into two, a CEO and a Deputy CEO. Both positions have yet to be filled. The CEO will be external-facing, promoting the East London hub, while their Deputy will organise events and promote the tech community on the ground in London. Sources told us Mr. van der Kleij had been too stretched trying to fulfil both roles. → Read More
Skillpages is ‘one place on the web’ to find skilled people. The idea is that you find people who can do jobs for you that you share a mutual friend with, or perhaps worked at the same company or went to the same school. It brings much more social validation to hiring people. And they are getting significant traction. We spoke to founder Iain MacDonald during the F.ounders conference at the Nasdaq in New York.
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A number of companies have tried to crack the problem of having an app at a business conference which allows you to connect to the people around you, see the agenda and make business connections. So it’s encouraging to see the official launch today of Bizzabo on the iPhone and Android, but which – crucially – provides a self-service web interface for event organizers. It’s that last part that’s key here. We’ve seen CrowdVine and Presdo (both of which I hate with gusto BTW) do this for events, but after demoing Bizzabo I can confidently say it’s one of the best conference apps I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a few, because it makes that link between the event organizer and the people around you.
I think Bizzabo’s closest contender might be Oleapark who will now be watching this Bizzabo with interest as will Shpare. Among other contenders there is Schmooze, which is pretty good but still needs more conference integration. → Read More
Did you know that the word iPhoneography has its own Wikipedia entry? Me neither (look quick before it gets deleted). It’s the art of creating photos with an Apple iPhone, apparently — a phenomenon that a new Swedish startup hopes to cash in on by enabling iPhoneographers to do the same.
Launching its iPhone app officially in the US and UK today, Foap lets users upload their photos to the startup’s marketplace where they can be purchased for $10 a pop, with revenue split 50/50 between the photographer and Foap.
Interestingly, photos uploaded have to be manually approved first to ensure that the quality remains high and that there is market demand, and refreshingly, heavy Instagram filters and the like are strictly banned. Sorry, Hipsters. → Read More
General Assembly, the New York-based education startup that offers classes and mingling space to tech developers and entrepreneurs, today officially opens its doors on its new London campus — marking its first expansion outside the U.S., and part of a bigger international strategy that will see the Yuri Milner/Jeff Bezos-backed company also expand to Berlin in July.
Adam Pritzker, one of GA’s co-founders, says that London was an ideal first move abroad because the tech world here “has a lot of the same dynamics New York did 1-2 years ago.” But that doesn’t mean this will be a carbon copy of the original: he also says that GA wants to cater to the local clientele, and will be expanding its program accordingly.
That could see GA put a new emphasis on big data development in the future, he says — speaking more to the finance and finance tech community here in London, as well as other industries big in the city and ripe for technological innovation.
After Formspring’s recent pivot away from the personal end of the social Q&A space, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s little growth left in this narcissistic of all mediums. But if European competitor Ask.fm‘s numbers are to believed that may not be the case.
The Latvia-based Formspring clone says it’s now overtaken its US rival in terms of traffic, citing 37 million unique visitors per-month compared to Formspring’s 19-20 million. → Read More
In a bid to capitalise on what it says is a period of “accelerated growth”, eBuddy, the Dutch web and mobile messaging company, has appointed Sytse Zuidema as its new Chief Operations Officer, where he’ll be charged with leading the management team and overseeing day-to-day operations, such as sales, marketing, and product development.
Zuidema has plenty of experience, having served as Chief Commercial Officer for Dutch cable operator, Casema, where he’s said to have played a “significant role” at the company during a 2006 merger that lead to a $2.6 billion sale. And it’s this experience that eBuddy aims to tap into, perhaps as it gears up for an exit of its own. → Read More
Last year I saw an amazing demonstration. Psykopaint was a web app, but no ordinary web app. This was an incredible photo-editing site which allowed users to turn their photos into “painted” works of art in the style of the masters such as Monet, Renoir or Van Gogh. It was showcased at the European accelerator Seedcamp, where Balderton Capital and Atlas Venture are investors. And sure enough, today Psykosoft, the company behind Psykopaint, inks a $500,000 seed funding round co-led by Balderton Capital and Atlas Venture. Angel investors from Harmonix (developers of Guitar Hero) and Brightcove also participated. → Read More
The online and mobile payments markets have seen a number of disruptions — from slashing fees for processing to turning mobile handsets into card processing devices — but many of those efforts have been aimed at the consumer segment. Today, Traxpay, a German payments startup focused on online payments in the business-to-business segment, is announcing its own advance in this space: it has raised $4 million in a round led by Earlybird, one of the bigger VCs in the region. Traxpay will use the funds to continue building out its business in Europe and start its expansion to the U.S. later this year, as part of its ambition to become the PayPal of B2B online payments — a $250 billion market.
Separately, the company also announced that it has appointed a new CEO, John Bruggeman, who has previously held senior positions at enterprise software companies Cadence, Wind River and Mercury Interactive, as well as Netscape.
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The market for ‘panic alarm’ apps on smartphones is littered with simple apps which just make a lot of noise if you get attacked, but not much else. This is a mistake.
Smartphones have cameras, microphones, and can broadcast their location – basically everything you need to turn the phone into the ultimate safety device. So it’s surprising that so few startups are addressing this area. One that has been around since 2011 out of Denmark is PanicGuard. The app will sound an alarm, SMS someone, start recording video and track your location. But it’s expensive ($6 a month), and is failing to scale outside the UK/Europe. Its main competitor is the bSafe app on iOS and Android from the startup called Bipper.
This has now launched a major push into the U.S. with both a free and paid-for model, and a way of using it for more everyday safety. It’s this business model which has seen it become the most downloaded mobile safety app in Europe to date, with over 100,000 downloads. → Read More
Atomico, the technology investment firm founded by Niklas Zennström (a co-founder of Skype) has been deploying its funds in Europe for some time now, and most recently Zennström was taking an interest in Brazil. Indeed, Atomico has an office there. But for whatever reason he’s decided to lead the fund next into Japan, with the appointment today of Shinichi Iwata, former President of Skype Japan, to head up Atomic’s new Tokyo office. → Read More
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