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Lean-but-mean StylistPick Guns For The Competition With New War Chest

Administrator — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:31:52 +0000

Bringing US business models to Europe might seem an obvious move for some – but it’s frequently far harder than it might appear. US incumbents can indeed try to expand, but some fall at the first hurdle. Exactly this happened on January 20 when Shoedazzle announced its closure in the UK. UK head Nigel Whiteoak has since admitted to me that the company was looking to make more of the continued opportunity in the US, versus trying to expand in the UK. Shades of the Romans over-reaching their borders? Maybe. Whatever the case, the news has been a boon to Stylistpick , the local UK player which is making hay in the UK and now heading to other markets with a war chest. StylistPick has now raised an $11million B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe. The subscription-based fast fashion brand, kept existing investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures on board, who invested $8 million in a Series A in April 2011. The board of directors is now Davor Hebel (Fidelity), Sonali de Rycker (Accel), Robin Klein (Index) and Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital).

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Lean-but-mean StylistPick Guns For The Competition With New War Chest

SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

blogger — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:05:30 +0000

Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics. The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. For example, as outlined over email by SoftKinetic’s vice president of marketing and communications Virgile Delporte, a young woman might walk up to SoftKinetic-equipped display at an airport, and she could browse information about nearby malls and fashion-related shops. If the viewer was an older man, they might see an ad for a nearby cigar shop. The description reminds me of one of the most famous scenes in Minority Report , when Tom Cruise’s character runs through the mall and all of the advertisements start delivering personalized messages. (The movie is also famous for featuring gesture-controlled computers, so clearly the SoftKinetic team was watching very closely) Of course, not everyone thinks the Minority Report future is positive, but for people worried about privacy, Delporte assures me that SoftKinetic’s data will be anonymized. “Only statistical information will be stored, and this anonymous data will be shared in the cloud to provide real-time data to the advertisers, who can easily test different advertising scenarios,” he says. “Think about the way web advertising is managed today. Combined with 3D imaging analysis, the data will get even more accurate.” SoftKinetic doesn’t have any customers to announce yet, but it’s demonstrating the technology at the Integrated Systems Europe conference in Europe starting January 31. I’ve included a video of SoftKinetic’s technology in action at Yahoo, as well as the Minority Report scene, below.

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SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

Nerve Dating Re-Launches To Put The Humanity (And Humor) Back In Online Dating

jos — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:51:21 +0000

Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote an interesting article for The New Yorker that detailed the rise of online dating and the effects it’s had on web culture. What struck me most were some of the eye-opening statistics he shared about the size and popularity of the industry, beginning with the fact that fee-based dating sites have become, collectively, a billion-dollar industry — that “one in six new marriages is the result of meetings on Internet dating site.” What’s more, online dating is now the third most common way for people to meet. It’s clear that much of the early blush (read: stigma) around using online platforms to meet new people and pursue relationships has worn off. But anyone who’s spent any time on dating websites knows that plenty of friction still exists, whether it be in the awkwardness of online-to-offline interaction, the inherent dangers of meeting an eStranger, or the problem of having to rely on algorithms and science to find your perfect “match.” As much as dating sites strive to find a scientific method (or a more efficient way) by which to introduce us to the loves of our lives, many of them still feel impersonal and gimmicky, and, as Paumgarten points out in his article, it’s for this reason that online dating remains an isolating pursuit. Sean Mills, the CEO of Nerve Dating , agrees that online dating today still feels like a search for the best deals on airline tickets. It seems as if, in playing online games, we go to buy more missiles, and in doing so suddenly find out that we’re the proud member of an online dating community. Dating sites will do anything to attract new customers, promising true love, infinite happiness, and walls filled with fewer cat pictures. And thus, people are itching for a better way to meet their match, and they’re no longer content with an industry where the prevailing methodology for introducing us to other humans is based on these gimmicks, or on pseudoscience, robot matchmakers, and the deployment of virtual fruit, as Mills said in his introductory letter to the Nerve community . In 1997, Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field launched a website and eMag dedicated to sex, relationships, and culture called Nerve . After spending eight years as president of everyone’s favorite satirical news source, The Onion , Sean Mills took over as the chief exec at Nerve , looking to bring the same brand loyalty and affinity people had for The Onion to Nerve’s community of sex-addicted readers. Early on, Nerve was defined by some amazing editorial content, boosted by contributions from writers like Jonathan Lethem, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joyce Carol Oates (to name a few), and it evolved into one of the few early success stories of New York’s Silicon Alley. Created as an online sex magazine that both men and women could enjoy — a less raunchy, more highbrow Penthouse, with broad appeal — Nerve has since become a site dedicated more broadly to love and culture. Having witnessed the success of The Onion’s dating site firsthand, which capitalizes on a more relaxed and humorous approach to online dating, Mills officially re-launched Nerve Dating in New York in December as an extension of the existing site. Because Nerve already had a loyal readership and fanbase (about 2 million monthly uniques), there was a readymade audience for Nerve Dating, making it easier, Mills says, to reach critical mass. When creating a new dating website (or really any other consumer-facing web business), scale is one of the biggest challenges, and online dating really doesn’t work unless there is a crowd of people on the site ready for love. Nerve Dating already has over 10,000 users, and Mills says that the team is already hearing success stories. Today, the team is launching Nerve Dating in San Francisco, with plans to continue rolling out across the U.S. The main thrust of Nerve’s bi-costal dating service is to create a platform that “celebrates individual voices,” without the taxonomy inherent to dating websites that tends to lump people into categories so that matching technology can do the heavy lifting. As Mills tells us, the challenge facing the users of online dating sites is not so much in figuring out whether you like someone (people are already pretty good at doing that on their own), but simply in starting the conversation. Walking across the room to introduce yourself to someone you don’t already know? Gulp. That can be challenging, and it’s something that sites like Commonred identify with, as they attempt to meld the meetup and “new people” discovery space, inhabited by startups like Sonar, Meetup, and LetsLunch, with professional networking sites/apps like Branchout and Hashable. Just as Shaker launched to bring a fun, interesting way to socialize on Facebook, Nerve is trying to make dating more like an enjoyable cocktail party, something that’s more natural and casual than an awkward blind date. Thus, on Nerve, users can actively share their thoughts and opinions about restaurants, bars, movies, music, and books, and are instantly introduced to other people who enjoy the same things. Mills equates it to seeing someone at a bar who’s wearing a t-shirt with your favorite band on it — this makes it much easier to approach them and strike up a conversation. On the other hand, an online dating site lives or dies based on the attempts it makes to make its users feel safe and secure, and Mills believes that many sites make the mistake of trying to offer an online dating service for free. If you can make it affordable, he says, it’s to everyone’s benefit, because it boosts the quality of the service offered and helps to keep out unsavory types. (Neve Dating costs $20 a month.) And to that point, Nerve has made it their mission to monitor activity on the site, and the team keeps a close eye on suspicious activity, flagging users for abnormal behavior, and booting them if necessary. In fact, Nerve recently flagged a user for setting up what looked to be a fake profile, and when they contacted the owner, they found that the profile was created by none other than OkCupid Co-founder Chris Coyne. (It’s always a good sign when your nominal competitors are setting up profiles on your site to “check it out.”) While Nerve Dating costs $20 a month, users can respond to messages they receive for free, unlike many other sites. The idea here is to encourage people to interact with each other, to socialize, and reach out, but initial messages are kept to a Twitter-length 141 characters, with the idea being that this takes the pressure off and is a little more casual. Nerve also has a “Last Night” feature, which Mills says is a bit like a checkin, in that users are encouraged to write what they did the night before. And, on that note, an additional perk is that Mills says that he’s enlisted some of the writers at The Onion to pen questions about culture and what users were up to last night. The site will also soon be introducing something which is now internally called “The Like Machine,” which will enable the site to create virtual affinity groups, and help daters meet other people who are interested in similar music, books, and so on. The topics and categories that you follow will show up on your profile, and the site will also be hosting a database of categories people can search through to find users with similar interest graphs. The site also has a “Notice Him/Her” function, which is akin to “poking” someone on Facebook, a nonverbal expression of interest. Building a profile on dating sites can be excruciating, and this is designed to make that process easier, as few people enjoy creating their own personal statements for dating websites. The process is awkward to say the least. When I asked Mills if the team had plans to establish Facebook connect or allow users to pull in their other social profiles, he said that, interestingly, dating sites that implement Facebook Connect have seen a 50 percent drop in signups. This seems to be evidence that, while people want their dating lives to be social, it’s all about discovering new people, they don’t want to be followed by their social graphs, people want to be anonymous. Though Mills is open to potentially integrating with Spotify, or GoodReads — sites that would enable people to share personal information without porting their entire social profiles. Nerve is also hoping to leverage the community its created around its lifestyle and culture publication, hosting live events for people to mingle and hang out, to facilitate yet another opportunity for users to move their online identities into the real world. Innovating in online dating is tricky, and Nerve seems to be off to a great start by giving people a more casual platform through which to interact and meet new people. It’s a tough nut to crack, but check them out at home here , and let us know what you think. (Oh, and mobile apps are in the works.) Readers interested in testing out the site can get two free weeks on Nerve Dating by registering here .

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Nerve Dating Re-Launches To Put The Humanity (And Humor) Back In Online Dating

Clio Grabs $6 Million To Help Bring Small Legal Practices To The Cloud

Administrator — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:00:08 +0000

Lawyers have long been the punchline for jokes, whether it be for their ambulance chasing ways, or for having a penchant for greed and chaos, or charging an armload for their services. However, there are a number of services out there that are trying to make the legal profession’s web presences less of a laughing matter. While there’s a perception that most lawyers work in big law firms, 80 percent of the legal market is comprised of solo practitioners or small firms. With meager support staffs and no IT departments to speak of, these solo practitioners and small firms quickly become over-burdened with the administrative side of their business. That’s where services like Clio come in. Clio is a web-based management tool for the legal industry, providing lawyers with collaborative and secure ways to manage their practice and interact with clients. Today, the cloud-based management service is announcing that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from Acton Capital Partners, a Munich-based growth equity fund and Point Nine Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Berlin. This brings Clio’s total funding to $7 million. The company will use this new infusion of capital to push product and feature development around its technology, add support for its growing customer base, and expand internationally. Currently, the U.S. represents 95 percent of Clio’s customer base, and Founder and CEO Jack Newton says that he wants to change that and is eyeing Europe, Canada, and Australia. While the legal industry has been largely perceived as being slow to adopt modern technologies, Clio’s opportunity lies in helping transition the many small practices out there to the cloud. Like MyCase and Rocket Matter, Clio wants to make it easy for lawyers to manage their practices from a cloud-backed web management system. The service enables lawyers to keep lawyerin’ by tracking notes, time, and client information for all of their cases. Maintaining a diary of all one’s cases is essential for most litigators, and Clio helps small practices keep tabs on upcoming court dates and deadlines all in one place, enabling them to add a slew of individual cases into one task list, all without having to hire a support staff. Integrating with Google Apps, too, helps lawyers sync their schedules with Google Calendar as well as sync contacts and take advantage of a single sign-on. Beyond case and billing management, Clio also enables small practices to take advantage of trust accounting and detailed reporting, and offers a secure portal for exchanging information and collaborating with clients, in addition to an offline time-capture application. As with so many other industries, legal practices are moving to the cloud, and Clio has been one of the pioneers in helping the industry move forward. With $6 million in new funding, expect that legal train to keep on rolling. For more, check out Clio at home here .

Hotel Reputation Management Software Maker Olery Raises $1 Million

Administrator — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:39:42 +0000

Olery , an Amsterdam-based startup that offers reputation management and media monitoring tools for the leisure industry, has raised 750,000 euros ($1 million) to boost its international expansion and develop new products. Founded in 2010, Olery offers simple online brand, reputation management and performance benchmarking tools for hotels that help turn online reviews and social media feedback into actionable business intelligence. Read more at TechCrunch Europe .

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Hotel Reputation Management Software Maker Olery Raises $1 Million

European Startup Accelerators Gradually Revealing Data – But We Need Much More

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:09:56 +0000

With the rise of numerous accelerator programs in Europe one cannot help but wonder whether jumping through the application process hoops, sweating through the mentoring sessions and flirting with investors at demo days are all worth a founders’ time. When I attended the recent Startup Sauna demo day in Helsinki in December 2011, I met teams not only from Finland but also from Russia, Poland and the Baltic Rim. I was amazed how young many of the participating entrepreneurs were. So when the performance stats from Startup Sauna hit my mailbox I was curious to learn what actually happens to all those startups after they complete the seven-weeks-long coaching program in the startup co-working space Aalto Venture Garage .

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European Startup Accelerators Gradually Revealing Data – But We Need Much More

Nintendo Reports US$630 Million Net Loss Between April And December 2011, Announces Wii U For 2012

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:08:34 +0000

3DS sales have picked up lately , but Nintendo ‘s financial numbers are still weak. Big N today released [PDF] another set of disappointing results for the first nine months of its fiscal year (April to December 2011). The company lost a whopping US$630 million, compared with a profit of US$635 million in the same time frame last fiscal. Sales were down 31.2% year-on-year to US$7.2 billion. Nintendo says there are three main reasons for this performance: weak Wii sales, the unprecedented price cut for the 3DS in spring last year, and losses on its foreign currency holdings coming from the very strong yen. But today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was able to announce good news, too: Iwata said this company is ready to phase out the Wii and to start selling the follow-up console, the Wii U , in Japan, America, Europe and Australia by the “year-end season” 2012.

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Nintendo Reports US$630 Million Net Loss Between April And December 2011, Announces Wii U For 2012

TheFunded Calls Ben Horowitz The Most Disruptive VC

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:31:31 +0000

TheFunded , the site where entrepreneurs can anonymously review venture capitalists, sometimes a reputation for being anti-VC (especially in its early days), but it’s not above showing investors a little love. Today it’s the announcing the winners of its awards for Top Investors 0f 2011. Adeo Ressi, founding member at TheFunded, says these awards were determined by user ratings , though a five-person committee, including Ressi, made the final choices. The site has given out these awards for the past four years, usually in private ceremonies (this year’s ceremony happened last week), but Ressi says he’s trying to make the awards “more public” this year because of “the massive amount of transformation going on in the investment industry.” Here’s the list, with descriptions from TheFunded: Most Disruptive: Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz — Andreessen Horowitz modeled their fund off of the modern talent agencies to provide a big network of value to their portfolio companies, reinventing the venture capital firm. Best New Manager: Dave McClure of 500 Startups — 500 Startups has done over 250 investments in less than two years since launching with deals being done all over the world, making 500 Startups the most prolific early-stage investor operating today. (TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis actually interviewed McClure at the event .) Top Rated in Americas: George Zachary of Charles River Ventures — Charles River Ventures has pioneered the seed-stage investing model that has been copied by most venture firms worldwide, and they continue to be one of the most prolific seed stage investors, evolving the seed-stage venture model. Top Rated in Europe, Middle East and Africa: Philippe Herbert of Banexi Venture Partners — Banexi Venture Partners is an active early-stage investor in the French startup ecosystem, supporting incubators and other new models to grow the success of European startups. Top Rated in Asia: Yuri Milner of Mail.ru Group, Formerly DST — Mail.ru is renown for creating the “DST round,” where top internet and technology companies secure hundreds of millions of dollars at multi-billion dollar valuations, changing the entire late-stage investment market. And here’s a video of Horowitz accepting his award, where he outlines how his firm mirrors the model of Hollywood talent agencies.

Top European Blogging Platform OverBlog Acquires Timeline Creator Timekiwi

Achilles — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:47:18 +0000

Normally, Palo Alto companies buy European ones, but sometimes there are exceptions. Case in point: today OverBlog , a leading blog platform in Europe with over 32 million uniques according to comScore, is announcing it has acquired Timekiwi , a tool that helps you make a timeline using your social media postings. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but OverBlog says Timekiwi will be integrated into its platform by summer 2012. For those unfamiliar, Timekiwi allows users to create attractive timelines (no relation to Facebook’s new Timeline feature) using posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr and, of course, OverBlog. The Palo Alto-based startup was founded in 2010 and launched in the fall. But it has flown under the radar, picking up just 5,000 registered users to date. Says OverBlog founder Frederic Montagnon (also the Director of Strategy at ebuzzing , the company that owns OverBlog), the acquisition was more for the technology in Timekiwi than it was for Timekiwi’s audience. Nor was it an acqui-hire, as the Timekiwi founders, Miha Rebernik and Robert Farazin , will not be joining the OverBlog team. Ebuzzing, which raised $25 million in August 2011 following a rebranding from its former name, Wikio Group, saw revenue of $15 million in 2010. In 2011, that figure almost doubled, says Montagnon, and the company expects it to double again in 2012. OverBlog had already been working on a similar concept for its blogging platform, so when it saw the Timekiwi technology, it decided to acquire the tech instead of continuing to build from scratch. Timekiwi will be a feature in the new OverBlog release which is planned for this summer.

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Top European Blogging Platform OverBlog Acquires Timeline Creator Timekiwi

Rising Telecommuter Numbers Worldwide Form A Notable Trend

Administrator — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:32:24 +0000

A new poll of over 11,000 workers worldwide by Ipsos and Reuters shows that telecommuting is an increasingly popular choice, especially in non-Western countries. This will come as no surprise to many, but the numbers are higher than some might have guessed. Over 30 percent of workers in India, Mexico, and Indonesia claimed to telecommute regularly, and one in ten overall work from home every day. It’s tempting to call any work that can be done via telecommute “knowledge work” or the like, but there isn’t enough of that to create these kinds of numbers. The internet has been so incredibly enabling in so many different ways that to limit it to such a narrow category is shortsighted. Many are doing web design or creating product themselves, certainly, but many are also managing entire “virtual” businesses, handling email chains with the Chinese manufacturers on one end and the Singapore design guys on the other, or keeping track of orders and customer queries via an online clearing house. There is very little that can be done in an office that must be done in an office, and worldwide in developing markets the cost savings of that fact are being welcomed with open arms. Interestingly, it is in already-productive countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan that telecommuting is viewed with suspicion. On one hand it is surprising: these highly wired and progressive countries are welcoming of technology in so many forms that it seems unlike them to reject it in this one. But part of their success is in their social infrastructure: cities, factories, offices, large companies in business for decades or even centuries. Telecommuting makes labor unit-based and decentralizes, preventing the kind of top-down regulation that they feel (and are certainly justified in feeling) has contributed so much to their prosperity. The personal benefits and professional problems with telecommuting were not ignored: 65 percent of those polled felt that telecommuting allowed them to be more productive because they have more control over their work life. But 62 percent found it “socially isolating” and worried that lack of face time at the office would lessen their chances of promotion. As a telecommuter myself, I am concerned more with the lack of infrastructure in place to deal with significant numbers of critical telecommuting employees. Just try to record a Skype video conversation between a three or four people, or give a presentation to 100 off-site employees and 200 on-site ones. There are solutions, of course, but many are expensive and industrial-size, requiring special equipment and software from Cisco or another enterprise enabler. Companies like Boeing may have settled the global collaboration problem, but what about a 12-person operation spread across Europe and Canada that makes camera accessories? Just as services have enabled one relatively tech-naive person to become an online business (and continue to do so), new services over the next few years will have to focus on repairing the natural loss that occurs when your employees are never physically near each other. The numbers, as shown by the huge numbers in emerging markets, are huge and getting bigger, and the big money in established countries is still waiting for the right moment to jump in. Collaboration tools and startups have been big at Disrupt and other showcases, and for good reason. The next ten years of global productivity are going to be driven by them.

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Rising Telecommuter Numbers Worldwide Form A Notable Trend