The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘second-round’

Eyeka, which connects brands and creative consumers, has raised €3 million ($4 million) in a second round of financing. The company already had €5 million in backing in 2006 with Ventech, DN Capital and SFR Developpement, while the company was focused on a platform to enhance pictures and videos management from mobiles. For this new round, previous investors are joined by French VC I-Source. This new round is to accelerate their international development and develop new product. Essentially speaking it’s a platform for crowd-sourcing ad campaigns for ad agencies and brands.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million ($9.6 million) in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million ($18 million). The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.

Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a ‘legitimately’ free music search engine back in August 2007.

This is one mobile application I think everyone should have installed. And be recommended by them to all of their friends and relatives to boot.

Meet iMobile Care, a potential life-saver that you can carry around in your pocket.

Launched at the beginning of this month, the app is primarily a reference guide that lets you obtain essential information about medical conditions and situations quickly and easily. The tool allows users to get a visual and textual explanation of how deliver aid and care during emergencies and events such as accidents, bites and stings, choking, injuries, poisoning, burns, and many other critical situations.

But billed as a mere mobile first aid guide even by its own makers, it’s actually much more than that. And I’m not saying that because you can make fart noises with it (you can’t), but because iMobile Care also boasts a number of location and personalization features that could well make the difference between life or death for yourself in the situations described above.

I purchased and installed the iPhone app, which allows me to have the app automatically pinpoint my location if I choose to configure it that way. In addition, I can provide additional, optional data like my blood type, address, primary contact in case of emergency, any medication I use, allergies I have, and more.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the app lets you call your local emergency number – which it automatically fetches as soon as you set your country – and access your camera or photo library in just one click. This can prove very useful e.g. in case of a car accident where you can provide much more information about the situation with one image than with a thousand words (and much faster too).

You can also sound an SOS alert from your phone in case of distress, and provide additional information for when you switch it on, all of which you can store in advance to make sure you don’t lose time explaining your situation (provided you’re even capable to do so at that point). Here’s an example of how that might work:

VisionSync, the company behind the app, is careful enough to clearly state it doesn’t substitute for care that well-trained first aid personnel can deliver and that it works best for users who have gone through the various conditions and situations located on the iMobile Care app prior to them actually occurring.

We should probably also point out that the company’s privacy policy shows that they cannot guarantee the absolute privacy of the data you provide, which can include confidential information like medical history, conditions, medications, and location. I purchased the app and I’m willing to take that risk because I think the advantages outweigh the potential disadvantages, but you may feel different about that.

iMobile Care is available for the iPhone ($2.99 – iTunes link) and smartphones running Android. Support for Blackberry devices and Windows Mobile-equipped phones will be added in the near future.

Cheesy video with more screenshots:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We’re now a little over a week into the extended roll-out of the preview build of Google Wave. This is an important time for the service because many people can now finally start using it as they eventually may — which is to say, with their friends and colleagues. Of course, the backlash is also already in full-swing, as expected. But I can’t help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it is a byproduct of, is blinding some to the larger picture. Google Wave is not just a service, it is perhaps the most complete example yet of a desire to shift the way we communicate once again.

The Wall Street Journal has a long article about this today, noting “The End of the Email Era.” But most of that article is spent focusing on how Twitter and Facebook, which is to say, status updates and the streams, are replacing our need for much of what email has provided in the past. Only very briefly do they mention Wave. And I think that overlooks something.

For many of us, email is simply not cutting it the way that it used to. It’s a sedentary beast in a fast-moving web. It uses old principles for management, and this is leading to overload. I think the key statement in the WSJ is this:

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.

That’s absolutely true. But that also implies that we want some sort of always-on communication connection. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we want the option to communicate in real-time at will, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. I would consider this to be a desire for a “passive-agressive” method of communication. Perhaps it would be better stated as a “passive/active” method of communication, but passive-aggressive sounds better, so we’ll go with that.

I would consider email to be a passive form of communication. I don’t mean that you don’t respond to it, I mean that you don’t have to respond to it right away. Instant messaging is at the other end of the spectrum. If used correctly, it’s supposed to be an “aggressive” or “active” form of communication in which you respond immediately. Twitter is very passive because the use of it is such that people don’t even necessarily expect a response of any kind, even if they point a message at you. Facebook is a mixture of all of those things (more on that below).

Google Wave is attempting to be a passive-agressive form of communication. You can actively (aggressively) engage in threads in real-time, or you can sit back and let messages come to you at your leisure (passively). Having used the product for a few months now, and after using it quite a bit more actively with my friends these past few days, I really think that Wave is onto something with this method of communication. I would argue that Google Wave’s new message alert system needs to be somewhat reworked or re-imagined, but I do think the desire to blend passive and agressive methods of communicating is there.

We’ve been slowly building up to a system like this. Gmail has for a while offered users a nice blend of email and instant messaging on the same page. And while it is nice that there is also the option to archive all your chats for searching purposes later, there is no good way to say, see that you missed an IM if you have a computer with Gmail open at home while you’re away and checking it remotely. You also can’t check these easily via IMAP on your phone, and the like.

And while there is the option to reply to emails by chat if that person is online, there’s no real integration between the email message and the IM message, they exist as two totally separate things. It seems like we’re at the point now where that shouldn’t have be the case.

Others, like Yahoo Mail, are now trying to tack-on status updates and the stream to email services too. The result is a Frankenstein-like service.

Facebook is another interesting example in that, as I mentioned, it combines all of these elements: Email, IM, status updates, and a stream. But the connection between all of these things in that system is loose at best. From a unified communications standpoint, Facebook is really kind of a mess. There are whispers of changes, and I hope that’s true, but I’m not holding my breath for a service with 300 million users to do something new and drastic that will alienate a certain (probably large) percentage of its base.

That’s why Wave is interesting. It’s backed by a huge company, Google, but it’s not trying to shove this upon all of its Gmail users. Instead, they’re going to slowly roll this out and see how users end up using it. And maybe more importantly, they want to see how developers start using it.

And that’s really a key that a lot of early users are overlooking. Right now, when people hear “Google Wave,” everyone seems to want to place emphasis on the “Google” part of it. But the truth is that the grand goal of the team behind the project is to emphasize “Wave” as both a platform and a new communication standard.

Whether Google Wave succeeds is really irrelevant. More important is if the idea of Wave does. Again, the idea of passive-aggressive communication.

Wave, the Google web-based client, will only ever appeal to a certain number of users. Does anyone really think that Twitter would be where it is today if they only had twitter.com? No. Wave desktop apps, and mobile apps, internal company Waves, and public Waves; it’s the platform, not the product, that’s interesting. Or, more to the point, it’s the key communication idea behind it.

[photo: flickr/matheus sanchez]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

When email was first created in 1965 it was used as a method to communicate between time-shared mainframe computers. Email has rapidly evolved since then, with the evolution of rich desktop clients, corporate email systems and webmail. Despite the evolution in the core messaging system, and despite the explosion in use of email, the default method for accessing and viewing communications has remained the same: chronological order.

The first webmail imitated earlier mail clients by displaying messages in chronological order. The desktop computing paradigm was folders and files, sorted alphabetically. The web paradigm for accessing information has in most cases become chronological order, mostly because of the email and webmail legacy.

A chronological system for indexing information breaks down quickly once the amount of information received reaches a certain critical point. Active users of email constantly moan about the information overload they experience, and the information is only a load because it is difficult to sort through and manage in modern systems. According to the cognitive theory of choice complexity, that feeling of load multiplies with each incremental increase in choices and decisions having to be made. In the email world this leads to a complete breakdown, and the trend of email bankruptcy (deleting all email and starting again).

Chronological order became more common on the web as social networks, such as the Facebook, blogs, feeds, feed readers, FriendFeed and services such as Twitter designed around the same paradigm – leading to most recent being most important. Some call it real-time, others call it information overload.

A default view of chronological order presents a natural barrier to the number of information sources that can be managed effectively (Scoble somehow broke the barrier, he is an exception). With only a few dozen feeds, a hundred or so emails a day and following one hundred or so people on Twitter, I find myself constantly behind and not being able to manage. When I am reading these sources, I find myself simply scanning for what is most relevant and most important – for eg. I will quickly reply to an email from a co-worker, while leaving others to slowly creep into the abyss of my archive.

Chronological order needs to be abandoned in favor of relevance. Without relevance, our ability to manage large sets of information is inefficient. The technology for relevance exist today, for eg. spam filters are able to tell us what we definitely don’t want to read. Real world information retrieval and organization is based on relevance, either what somebody else believes is relevant to us, or what we decide is relevant. Newspaper stories are not laid out in the order that events took place and libraries do not catalog their books in the order they were published.

Web applications that present relevance over chronological have proven to be popular. Techmeme hacked RSS, and instead of reading 50 feeds I can have Techmeme read 20,000 for me. Community-powered sites such as HackerNews are similar, they float up the latest content based on what a like-minded community finds interesting. The TiVo hacked television by taking chronological out of the picture and applying relevance.

Email applications have attempted to hack what is essentially relevance into the traditional chronological order. Old desktop email clients introduced folders and filters. Gmail introduced labels, adding a star to a thread and grouping multiple emails into a thread. Yahoo Mail attempts to highlight emails that it believes are from people close or important to you.

I hand over a lot of information to the applications that I use every day, but I am getting nothing in return (other than ads that creep me out). Every time I click a ‘like’, or I re-tweet, or I bookmark a page, or I spend time reading a post, that information can be stored somewhere and used to figure out what information is most important to me. I would happily exchange that part of my privacy for the ability to save a few hours each day and the pain of having to personally sort through all this information.

The ingredients for a personalized aggregator of all information exist today. A working solution would allow me to funnel far more data into my stream, and to not only discover more, but become more efficient. The second by second and minute by minute chronological order paradigm is broken, and like QWERTY, is a legacy from a world where systems were not smart enough to determine relevancy and real networks did not exist.

Original backwards post here

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

San Diego based BrightScope, which launched earlier this year, helps people understand their 401k retirement plans and how to maximize the benefits.

That’s a much needed service: the company says 30% of workers don’t participate at all in their company 401k programs. 22% don’t contribute enough to maximize matching benefits from companies, and 80% of workers have no idea how much they’re paying in 401k administrative and other fees. BrightScope shines a light on all that and helps people take better advantage of these programs.

The company has raised a $2 million second round of financing, led by Steelpoint Capital Partners, to continue to build out the service.

Jim Cacavo from Steelpoint and Tim Tokarsky are joining the company’s board of directors.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.