Posts Tagged ‘alven capital’
Online Furniture Outlet MyFab Raises An Extra €5 Million
Paris-based MyFab has just raised €5 million ($7 million) in a second round, which was led by previous investor Alven Capital and joined by BV Capital. The total amount invested in the company is now €7 million ($8.9 million). MyFab - which is currently available only in French and German - is an interesting e-commerce play in that its mission consists of cutting out all middlemen in the process of consumers buying furniture.
According to the company big furniture brands - particularly those wearing the ‘design’ hat - often outsource the whole manufacturing process of sofas, lamps, etc. to factories in foreign countries and charge ridiculous prices for the end-product compared to the total cost of production.
WizeHive Shaping Up To Become A Powerful Collaboration Tool
At the end of last year, we talked about and gave away some beta invites for newcomer WizeHive, a group messaging and task management app that rivals the likes of Yammer, Present.ly, Producteev and to some degree even more full-fledged collaboration services like BaseCamp and Central Desktop.
Since then, founders Mike Carson and Michael Levinson - the latter is also founder of DreamIt Ventures - have been bootstrapping their way to a pretty powerful business tool boasting a lot of useful features.
One recently added feature is push/pull integration with Twitter, which enables users to perform certain actions like creating tasks and notes from individual Twitter accounts, with the additional ability to retrieve and modify certain information from Twitter. Also, WizeHive now comes with what Levinson refers to as “3D task management”, or the ability to pick which data to display in rows, columns and which data you want color coded at intersecting cells, creating a nice visual overview of your current ‘workspace’. You can get an overview of all new features in separate demo videos on Levinson’s Vimeo channel.
The core task management functionality has also been revamped and now sports a nifty AJAX front-end that allows people to easily drag and drop tasks, assign tasks to other people, etc. Last but not least, WizeHive now also comes with an Adobe AIR-powered desktop client that features a tab with Twitter-style activity feeds as well as a list of tasks much like you would if you were using the web app.
WizeHive, which is still in beta mode, now boasts about 1000 active users who have entered or e-mailed in over 26000 notes and over 6700 tasks. When it’s finally ready for the public, WizeHive will have to compete for attention with a boatload of online collaboration and task management application providers, but if it ultimately turns out it can’t, it most certainly won’t be because the product doesn’t stack up to the rest.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0