A mobile payment joint venture from the UK's biggest carriers, first announced over a year ago, today finally received "unconditional" clearance from European regulators. The move means that now Vodafone, Telefonica's O2 and Everything Everywhere (the JV from T-Mobile and Orange) can proceed developing a cross-carrier mobile payments platform -- not unlike the Isis initiative in the U.S. They say they will be getting the service "up and running as quickly as possible," although no launch dates or other specifics -- including a name -- have been announced. In other words, now the hard work begins.Given that one of the biggest pain points in mobile payments has been lack of interoperability between platforms, this is potentially a big step in helping such services grow: the idea is that with a bigger potential audience to serve, bigger merchants, banks, payment providers, developers and handset makers will be more likely to make the necessary investments in infrastructure themselves. read more..
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Unconditional Clearance-Mobile Payments-Vodafone
Friday, 31 August 2012
Aalto University In Finland-Windows Phone-Microsoft-Incubator-Nokia
Next week Nokia and Microsoft are expected to unveil the first handset(s) running on Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 platform, and today comes news about the apps they hope will lure in more users to buy them. AppCampus, an $23 million (€18 million) JV between Microsoft, Nokia and Aalto University in Finland, first announced in May, to foster more app development on the platform, said it has doled out the first $1 million-plus of their budget on 36 developers out of a total of 900 submissions, an average of $30,000 per app, although individual investments over the course of the JV will be between $25,000 and $88,000.Pekka Sivonen, Head of AppCampus, tells me the apps are expected to be coming out starting in October, and will run exclusively on Windows Phone and "other Nokia platforms" for their first six months -- potentially touching some 500 million devices out in the market today. read more..
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Incubator Hitfox-Mobile Games-Startups
Well that was quick or just well timed PR: HitFox Game Ventures, the games distribution incubator that launched last month, has given birth to two new startups already.AppLift, co-founded and managed by Kaya Taner, who was an early employee at HitFox, promises to be an affiliate network that will focus solely on mobile games. App Discovery, also co-founded and run by another HitFox manager, Xavier Rezgui, operates at the consumer end to help mobile gamers intelligently navigate the 100,000 or so games in the iOS App Store.Both startups hatched with a "seven figure" Euro seed investment from HitFox. read more..
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Incubator Program-Nokia
Nokia may still be fighting some pretty major fires on its burning platform, but it's also building some bridges -- namely the Nokia Bridge incubator program -- to help those running from the flames, with financing of up to €150,000 ($185,000) to pursue new startups, before they've even paid a visit to VCs and angel investors.The activities in Nokia Bridge are a small but encouraging counterpoint to the fairly-constant, grim updates on the state of the Finnish mobile company, once the world's biggest by a long shot, and now under the gun with falling handset sales and dwindling cash reserves as it struggles to compete against the Apple/Android smartphone juggernaut. It's understood that there are already some 100 companies in the incubator -- dozens in the UK alone -- although Nokia has not published a list of them anywhere. Jolla, the startup formed by ex-Nokia execs that will try to give MeeGo phones another shot, is one of them. read more..
Friday, 22 June 2012
Angry Birds-Monster
In a move that borrows from the Angry Birds playbook, quite literally, Fight My Monster - the so-called ‘Moshi for boys’ - has appointed licensing heavy-weights Russell Binder and Dimensional Branding Group to represent the brand globally and, presumably, to begin exploring merchandising options.Binder’s Striker Entertainment actually claims Angry Birds as a client, while DBG works with the likes of Sony, Miniclip and Temple Run -- so this appears to be quite an ambitious appointment for the young company and points to the potential of Fight My Monster’s brand amongst its much coveted and hard to reach audience of 8-14 year old boys. read more..
Monday, 18 June 2012
Historical Photographs-Olympic Athletes-London Olympics-London 2012-Facebook
A lot of Londoners (me included) haven't been able to get tickets to the London Olympics this summer. But we'll all get something else, Facebook announced today. The company is launching Explore London 2012, a dedicated page for athletes to communicate with fans and provide their own personalized updates around the event, including metal wins and their own photographs as well as status updates. Alongside that, Facebook is adding other data to pad out the story: historical photographs and other information about notable events -- part of an effort to be able to claim that 2012 will mark the first "Social Olympics."Officials from the International Olympics Committee tell me they started to work with Facebook on the effort some 18 months ago. So far there are only 250 of more than 10,000 Olympic athletes on the site, including UK athletes Tom Daly, Jessica Ennis, and the cycling team, although Facebook expects that to ramp up significantly in the weeks ahead. Significantly, although the pages may expect to get a huge amount of traffic from the millions of people who tune in to watch the sporting event, Facebook will not run any advertising alongside any of it. read more..
Monday, 28 May 2012
Social Networking-Social Shopping-Social Media-Yandex
It's not a given that a leader in search can successfully pivot into other areas like social media -- just ask Google -- but a new service launching in Russia today, from that country's search leader Yandex, shows one route a company with a lot of smarts can take to make sure they remain a central player in the social game. Today sees the launch of SocialMart, a social shopping startup financed by Yandex (through its seed-funding program Yandex.Factory), and powered by Yandex (via Yandex.Market), but is not Yandex itself.Both Yandex and SocialMart are banking on the fact that the rising popularity of ecommerce in Russia is inevitably going to cross over with the equally popular trend of social networking: up to now, those twains have not met, unlike in other markets, where services like Mertado (now part of Groupon), Sneakpeeq, and Fab have been running away with the "social shopping" banner, picking up users and funding in the process. read more..
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Social Networks
We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn't work work, but it's not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.That's where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it's a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV. read more..
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Environmental Activists-Development Platform-European Developers-Azure Competitor
Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a 'Heroku for .NET' out of Y Combinator launched.And today AppHarbor has extended its service to European developers. EU applications will still run on Amazon's infrastructure, but they'll be running out of the EU-West region (Dublin) instead of US-East, where all current applications are located. read more..
Remains of the Day: Walk the walk, talk the talk
Environmental activists want Apple to clean up its cloud act, Cupertino wants to silence Siri complainers, and a noted screenwriter gets ready to put words in Steve Jobs's mouth. read more..
Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Mobile Payment Service-Square Of Europe-Mobile Payments-Free Readers
With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden's iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network. read more..
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Music Services-Deezer
Music streaming provider Deezer is one of the bigger (and older -- it's been around since 2006) services of its kind, with some 20 million registered users in 48 territories, and 15 million tracks in its catalog -- but it has failed to capture mindshare in quite the same way as rival Spotify; and some might argue that this will make it harder in the long run for Deezer to keep up and grow.Today sees the launch of the company's latest attempt to turn that situation around: "Open Deezer," a new set of APIs for iOS, Android and Java-based web apps, which it hopes will help it bring on a new raft of developers to create music services around its platform. read more..
Monday, 30 April 2012
Music Festival-Conference-Startups
MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that's vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it's as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey.Amid the excellent speeches about the future of mobile, and the future generally, organiser Harald Neidhardt throws together a diverse range of speakers, from Grammy Award winning Musician Chamillionaire to "CameraGirl", who runs tech at Burning Man. As one delegate, Dr. Robert Daubner of billiger, put it to me, "mobile is poised to disrupt the world." Never were truer words spoken...Amid the high concept presentations from the likes of the Singularity University and others were a number of startup pitches from U.S.-based startups. Here's a run-down on those: read more..
Monday, 23 April 2012
Enterprise Business-Mobile Operators-Vodafone-Cable
Big news from the UK this morning: Vodafone, one of Europe's biggest mobile operators, has made a formal offer to buy up the assets of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1 billion ($1.7 billion), a deal that catapults Vodafone into running its own fixed line network in the UK and specifically will give it a much bigger view to winning enterprise business -- a big challenge to BT and a mark of further consolidation in the space.Cable & Wireless, first founded in the nineteeth century and one of the biggest operators in Europe, has fallen on hard times more recently and has run through three chief executives since a restructuring in 2010.The deal will make Vodafone the UK's second-largest operator, with £7 billion ($10.5 billion) in annual revenue. read more..
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Default Search Engine-Skydrive-Dropbox-Yandex-Icloud
Yandex may be in line to become the default search engine on devices that Apple sells in Russia. But for now it's engaging in a little competition with Cupertino, and others. Today the Russian search giant is launching its own answer to iCloud: a free web-based storage product it's calling Yandex.Disk.Users of Yandex.Disk get up to 10 gigabytes of space that they can use for personal documents, photos, music and videos, and like iCloud and Microsoft's Skydrive the service is aimed specifically at offering storage services that help keep users tied in to the rest of Yandex's portfolio of products. The files can subsequently be accessed from any internet-enabled device. read more..
Monday, 26 March 2012
Sales Business Model-Brand New Cars-Car Buyers-Groupon
If you thought the application of the Groupon sales business model could not extend any further you may be wrong. CarRush.co.uk launches today billing itself as 'Groupon for New Cars'. It's essentially a consumer front-end for FinanceAcar.co.uk. The idea is to provide exclusive weekly deals with discounts of up to 40 per cent on brand new cars on a monthly financing arrangement. This could hit a sweet spot for the 80 per cent of car buyers that purchase a new car based on a monthly payment. But will they run into the same problems Groupon participants have experienced. Let's see... read more..
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Convertible Note-Legal Services-London Web-Startups
Today at the London Web Summit a number of startups are launching on stage so here's a quick run-down of their businesses and our quick take on them. Out of these 20, three will demo on stage for a prize worth close to £100,000 in a convertible note from DJJ Esprit, £15k in legal services from Orrick, £15k in advisory services from KPMG and £4k in hardware from HP. However, we'll be delving a little deeper into these guys in due course. They are being judged on the usual startup criteria: Problem, Solution, Technology, Team, Market, Traction, and Future prospects. read more..
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Startup Entrepreneur-Web Site Analytics-The Apple Store-Pc World
A startup entrepreneur has become the first person in the UK to buy the new iPad in store, two of them in fact. Chris Leydon, GoSquared (realtime web site analytics, which competes with Chartbeat), stood in line outside PC World on Tottenham Court Road which opened at midnight. A mere 5 minutes walk away in Regent Street, Apple's flagship UK store only opened at 8am this morning. I bet the huge queue of Mac fans outside the Apple store were more than a little annoyed... He even did an unboxing video. Update: It appears startups have realised this is a good press opportunity. Andrew Brackin was first out of the Regent street store the new iPad and just happens to be working on a startup called Amped.io.Chris showed some canny entrepreneurial skills in securing his two iPads. "I saw a rumour going around on Twitter that the PC World nearby would be opening at midnight, eight hours ahead of the Apple store. I phoned the PC World Press Office and the store itself and they confirmed." read more..
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Seedcamp
Seedcamp, the European seed funding network and startup accelerator, came through San Francisco this week as part of its annual multi-city trip to the US. All 18 companies were solid -- you can find the full list here -- but I pulled aside five of the most compelling startups for one-on-one interviews to get a bit more insight on what they do. read more..
Mobile World Congress-Apps
We've been trawling Barcelona for apps and startups during Mobile World Congress, so here's a little round-up of some of those that have been plying their wares - many of whom don't have the cash to exhibit at the official Congress, but who are pitching like mad in the hotel bars of Barcelona.BearCare from Tagofjoy is an Augmented Reality game with a freemium business model. In the game you have to protect your beloved helpless Teddy Bear and cuddle him to keep him happy (go with it, it gets better). The fun part is that it takes place in a real environment, which is blended with lively and playful 3D bears. The games ha two modes. One is a fast-paced action game, in which you have to protect your helpless bear from unearthly, evil toy bears. Another mode lets you take care of him and keep him happy by cuddling him, playing with him and feeding him when he gets hungry. It's a Tamagotchi basically, but re-done for a new world.PlayTales is a an interesting virtual store and publishing platform. It publishes interactive children’s ebooks in 7 languages on Android, iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone and soon a flash web site. It's basically a dream come true for parents who want to read stories to their kids on an iPad.Mafuta Go! is a one from left field for you. Coming out of Uganda, this is an app that lets users find the nearest gas station with the cheapest prices. Should you need that.It's worth also pointing out that Swiftkey, which we've covered before, won the official GMA award for most innovative app, beating Google Wallet. Here's a few others: read more..
Monday, 26 December 2011
Federal Trade Commission-Osama Bin Laden-Data Protection-Social Network-Treasure Trove
Facebook announced a lengthy list of privacy-related tweaks to its site on Wednesday, following a sweeping and often less-than-flattering report from European Internet watchdogs. The Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), an agency that handles data protection (read: privacy) across Europe, provided 149 detailed pages of recommendations for how Facebook could better serve its users, and just as they did following similar scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook's press team was ready with an instant response. Action items abound -- 45 of them in fact. ... read more..
From Osama to Skrillex: Facebook's Top Memes of 2011
Facebook has mined its rather sizable treasure trove of data and users to reveal what were the most talked about topics on the social network in 2011. Not surprisingly, Osama bin Laden's death in May was the most mentioned topic in people's status updates this year.Related: Is Facebook Really Worth $50 Billion? read more..