The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘europe’

Last Thursday saw the third edition of Plugg, a conference I started in my home country Belgium back in 2008 that essentially aims to launch and inspire European tech entrepreneurs and advance the startup ecosystem in these parts. The event is closely tied to TechCrunch, with myself as lead organizer and TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher running things on stage.

We invited a host of speakers from all corners of Europe to deliver inspiring keynotes about a wide range of topics, and as every year had 20 (well actually, 19) startups vying for the top prize in an exhilarating pitching competition. All these startups were carefully selected and are some of Europe’s most promising early-stage ventures, so I invite you to take a look at the full list of finalists in our previous post.

In the end, Estonia’s Fits.me won the main award of the show, with RazWar snatching the audience choice prize and Distimo and Inbox2 as runners-up.

If you didn’t attend the event but are interested in finding out what went on on stage, we’ve got you covered: the whole thing was captured on video and in pictures, and we also embedded a handy Nomadesk widget on the Plugg website where you can access a virtual folder carrying all the presentations.

Here’s a selection of videos I think will interest TechCrunch readers most (but please check out all of them):

Man alive, Twitter is blowing up right now at the expense of Real Madrid. That has nothing to do with the following story, but it had to be mentioned

Read more here: 
Iwatani Corp has an electric motor-bike that will never be released

You know the good feeling you get when you think about how your computer is running Folding@home all the time, or that you’ve been careful to clip six-pack rings all your life? Well, soon you might have one more warm fuzzy feeling, if this project underway at Intel Labs Berkeley comes through.

Read more from the original source: 
Your smartphone: future air-quality data point

Team Europe Ventures, the Berlin-based VC firm, has launched a new €6 million fund for early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet space. The fund is mainly targeting companies in Germany and Europe, but also in the USA, and the focus will be on the seed stage, with 4-5 startups being invested in per-year for a maximum of €500K per company.

This is bound to be good news for startups in Europe, and particularly in Germany where seed funding is seen to be a problem for early stage companies in the Internet space.

So we all know that drafting increases fuel efficiency.

Continued here:
The Road Train: taking drafting to a whole new level

I need to move to Europe for several reasons, but the one that’s relevant right now ? 3D broadcasts of top-tier football (“soccer”) leagues

See the rest here:
Germany’s 1st 3D broadcast happens next week. It’s a soccer match, as it should be.

gWallet, a recently launched company that partners with both brands and game developers to bring users virtual currency offers, is launching a new format for offers. Called the Brand Bar, the offers to earn virtual currency appears in a bar across the top of a social game.

gWallet says that the conversion rate of users who choose to pause and leave a game to earn virtual currency is so low, that offers and advertisements need to be engaging. According to the startup, only two to four percent of users choose to pause and leave the game in order to access offers and branded engagements. With the Brand Bar, gWallet says that its offers are places in a way that allows the advertisements to become part of the in-game experience.

The “Brand Bar” is already live on more than a dozen online games, including those developed by Clipwire Games, Zen Gaming Inc., Poolhouse, FooMojo, Bubblefish, Mobscience, and Chat Republic Games. gWallet, which recently raised $10 million in funding, was founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal. gWallet works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model and uses branded video campaigns to engage with consumers. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, Coke, and The History Channel are all using gWallet’s video campaigns on social networks, which are powered by Tube Mogul. gWallet also announced an early-stage venture fund to invest in social gaming companies and promote innovation within the social gaming ecosystem. gWallet faces competition from Offerpal and SuperRewards.

Chahal told me that gWallet is seeing steady growth in the U.S. and is now looking to international gaming markets to expand its offers globally. The startup will be opening up offices in Europe later this year and will also announce a partnership with a Chinese gaming company in the near future.

Sometimes I despair of Europe, even though I’m proud of what can be achieved here. But really, guys, can we get it together?

At the same time the European Union is investigating a pretty flimsy anti-trust complaint against Google, it’s conspiciously ignoring a case in Italy where three Google executives have been found guilty on a ridiculous charge. Here is the bizarre story.

An Italian court yesterday convicted three (ex) Google executives in a trial over a video showing a teenager being bullied. The Google Italy employees were accused of breaking Italian law by allowing the video of bullying of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome to be posted on YouTube in late 2006.

Despite the fact that Google removed the video within hours of being notified of its existence, Judge Oscar Magi (pictured) absolved the three of defamation but convicted them of privacy violations. The three executives have received a suspended six-month sentence, while a fourth defendant was acquitted.

Google has responded in a justifiably vociferous blog post calling this a “serious threat to the web in Italy”. Frankly they are right.

Former CEO of CBS Interactive Quincy Smith has joined with CBS Interactive EVP Michael Marquez and music industry veteran dealmaker Fred Davis to launch CODE Advisors, a new Silicon Valley and New York based investment bank.

As with all investment banks, CODE Advisors will look to advise companies on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising, for a fee. But the company also wants to be a long term partner for buyers and sellers, acting as a sort of outsourced business and corporate development group. This is something most banks promise, but few deliver on. Unless you’re a high velocity buyer like Google or Microsoft, in which case you get all the attention you want and more.

And these guys are certainly positioned to do that. Smith, Marquez and Davis are among the most connected people in the media and technology worlds. Smith and Marquez spearheaded the growth of CBS Interactive and its acquisitions of CNET and Last.fm, both of which are seen as successful buys, and both have deep experience in those industries.

Davis, a former music exec, is known for representing just about every online music venture over the last several years. When startups want to do business with labels and the other players in music, they go to Davis.

These guys literally know everybody. And they are also opinionated on which exactly what the world will look like when the old media and new media worlds finally collide. I sat down with the three partners on Tuesday for what I expected to be a 5-minute interview on the launch of CODE Advisors. When we were done, we had well over thirty minutes of footage. The conversation was mostly hovering around the future of online video and online music.

CODE Advisors already has several clients, including CBS, Comcast and Spotify (which was in the news yesterday).

We’ll have a full transcript of the video up later today, but the video is below.

Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets.

Turns out roughly half the tweets posted on the micro-sharing service are in English, down 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet. The analysis further showed that the top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish.

Semiocast says the study was conducted on messages gathered over a period of 48 hours, from February 8 to February 10, with the sole aim of determining which languages were most often used on Twitter. The messages were processed with the company’s own analysis tools, which it says can identify the language used in short messages for some 41 languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Tamil, etc.

English is still the most used language on Twitter, with 50% of messages, although Semiocast says this is a far cry from the two-third share they registered for English in the first half of 2009. Semiocast also forecasts that its share will grow thinner in the future, as Twitter becomes more internationalized (i.e. becomes available in more languages) and its pervasiveness spreads to Asia and Latin-America.

Japanese comes in second with 14% of messages. This isn’t all too surprising; Twitter has been addressing that market for almost two years now. The third most used language is Portuguese with 9% of all messages, mirroring the success of social networks in Brazil.

The rapid adoption of Twitter in Malaysia and Indonesia, where Twitter has partnerships with two mobile telcos in place, shows in the rankings as well. Malay languages, including Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia, now represent the fourth most used language on Twitter, with 6% of messages. Spanish comes in fifth with 4% of all messages.

The ranks six to eight are occupied by major European languages, namely Italian, Dutch and German, each accounting for about 1% to 2% of total messages. French represents a little less than 1% of total messages.

For your reference: Twitter earlier this week claimed that it was seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, so an analysis of less than 3 million messages measured over two days may not be super representative. Nevertheless, it only takes a peek at Twitter’s public timeline to see that there are lots of people using the service in a language other than English.