Category: Tech news

Nike continues its full-court press into basketball quantification with a new signature shoe from King James.

Each of these heavy-duty flashlights is equally capable of delivering a brilliant beam or a deadly blow.

If you’re not keen on looking like a Snork just to capture your adventures on video, then consider a pair of sunglasses with a video camera built in.

Video discovery startup Plizy – which last month relaunched its iPad app and website with a new look and a mission to become a “media center in the cloud” – has announced it’s raised a $4 million Series A round from Atlas Venture. The startup has previously raised $1.2 million in angel round funding. In tandem with its latest funding round, David Marcus, President of PayPal will join Plizy’s board of directors, along with Fred Destin, partner in the technology group at Atlas Venture.

Plizy said it plans to use the new funding to focus on expanding its audience. It’s not clear how many users the startup has but we’ve asked the question and will update this article with any response.

Plizy said the funding will also be used to aggregate more content — including from providers such as Cinemax, Snagfilm and Starz. Its service currently aggregates more than 550,000 movies, 200,000 shows and 100 million videos from the “major video services”, according to Crunchbase.

Lastly, Plizy said the funding will also be used to build out its products across multiple platforms — specifically Android and iOS.

“Video is both extremely exciting from a content standpoint and completely broken from a user perspective. We’re going to solve that with Plizy by centralizing all content in one place for easy viewing and discovery on any device,” said Atlas’ Destin in a statement.

Release follows below

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Plizy, the media center in the cloud that allows users to search, organize, watch and share any content that is available online, announced today it has raised $4 million in a Series A round from Atlas Venture.

Plizy first launched its iPad app in May 2011 to allow users to find relevant online videos based on their individual interest graph. In November 2012, Plizy launched its version 2.0 with a completely new Website and iPad app that offers a brand new experience across videos, movies and TV Shows, and continues to offer content discovery and sharing capabilities with deeper personalization.

With this new round of funding, Plizy will focus on expanding its audience, aggregating more content from providers such as Cinemax, Snagfilm and Starz, and building out its offerings across multiple platforms, specifically on Android and iOS. Plizy previously raised $1.2 million in angel round funding, joined by notable investor and co-founder of Fotolia, Oleg Tschelzhoff.

“We are thrilled to have Atlas Venture as our sole investor because of our long standing relationship with them and their success with companies like Dailymotion – the largest digital media company to come out of Europe,” said Jonathan Benassaya, founder and CEO, Plizy. “As video content is fragmented across many sites there is no easy way for consumers to get access to the content they want. Plizy offers a unique service for consumers to seamlessly search, organize, watch and share any movie, TV show or video online.”

David Marcus, President of PayPal will join Plizy’s board of directors alongside Fred Destin, partner in the technology group at Atlas Venture. Both bring deep experience in web services and consumer facing innovation.

“I have always had Jonathan on my star list of people to back and I was thrilled he decided to go after video after his success founding and launching Deezer,” said Mr. Destin. “Video is both extremely exciting from a content standpoint and completely broken from a user perspective. We’re going to solve that with Plizy by centralizing all content in one place for easy viewing and discovery on any device.”

Plizy is available on web browser (www.plizy.com) and through its iPad app, and content can also be viewed on TVs using the app through Apple Airplay. Plizy currently has partners like Amazon Prime, Amazon Instant Video, Crackle, Dailymotion, HBO Go, Hulu, Hulu+, iTunes, Netflix, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Startups in need of a business model don’t have to drop more ads in their apps. Instead they can drop cookies on anyone who posts or views a hashtag, and get a revenue share from RadiumOne who retargets their users with ads around the web. RadiumOne begins dogfooding today by dropping retargeting cookies from its Pinter-esque site Via.me so advertisers can target users interested in #cars or #Nike.

Cross-web hashtag ad retargeting is brilliant but a bit complicated, so let me walk you through it. It works with Via.me or any site that lets users publish public posts with hashtags  and is integrated with RadiumOne’s retargeting platform. Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and tons of smaller startups could also use the system. Whenever a user publishes a hashtag, or even views a piece of content labeled with a hashtag, the site can drop a cookie about that hashtag onto the user’s browser.

Then when the user surfs around the web, they’ll end up as one of the 25 billion impressions RadiumOne sees each day across sites that host its retargeted ads. Those sites detect the hashtag cookies on the users’ browser that indicate they’re interested in #fitness or #justinbieber. The site pings RadiumOne, whose real-time bidding platform lets advertisers like Under Armor or Ticketmaster compete to reach those users. The highest bidder gets their hashtag retargeted ad shown, and RadiumOne splits the revenue with the site that dropped the cookie in the first place and the one hosting the ad.

Hashtag ad retargeting is a big deal for several reasons. First, it lets startups monetize their traction without degrading their user experience. Rather than filling their apps with ads or asking users to pay, RadiumOne can help them earn money for dropping invisible cookies. That lets startups concentrate on growth, avoid hiring sales teams, and supplement their funding. “This is what Instagram should be doing. Twitter would be getting double digit millions in revenue at least”, RadiumOne founder and CEO Gurbaksh Chahal says. For now the system is in place on Via.me, which brings in 10 million photo posts per month.

More generally, hashtag retargeting creates a whole new way for advertisers to reach users who’ve shown explicit interest in their product. Chahal tells me that says that when they post hashtags “a consumer is allowing themselves to be tagged and discovered” by advertisers. If you post photos of you running on Via.me and tag them #running, or even view them, you’re probably a high-value customer to any fitness company. The data is fresh, opposed to basing ad targeting on something like Facebook Likes, which could be years out of date.

Without hashtag retargeting, a publisher’s site has little idea of who exactly its visitors are. With it, they and the cookie-dropper can both generate revenue. Chahal says “Advertisers renew at a massive rate”, demonstrating that the ads perform well.

Suddenly the March 2012 launch of a consumer image sharing site like Via.me by a programmatic ads company like RadiumOne makes a lot more sense. Chahal explains that a few years ago he settled on the strategy of “we’re not going to deal with third-party data, we’re going to build our own products.” RadiumOne earn ssome cash from dropping cookies at Via.me, but it also shows off the potential of its platform-agnostic retargeting system.

As social media matures and consumer tech gets more crowded, startups may care less about raw numbers of users and more about actually earning money. Chahal says “I think the big thing we’ll see in 2012 is companies moving away from vanity metrics” and towards real measures of revenue driving potential. Not everyone’s a fan of ads or especially retargeting, but the fact is that ad revenue is the lifeblood of consumer tech, and RadiumOne can pump it into any app with hashtags.

Following its €500,000 seed round this fall, Berlin-based music startup Musicplayr, which acts something like a playlist of tracks you build from various cloud services, is now available as an iOS application. The app brings the key features from the online service to mobile, including the ability to explore profiles and discover new music, stream songs and playlists, create playlists, and more.

For those unfamiliar with Musicplayr, the service debuted in 2011, offering users a way to pull tracks from sites like SoundCloud, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and various music blogs, and organize them into streamable playlists. The startup doesn’t have deals with record labels, because it’s only aggregating music hosted elsewhere on the Internet – it’s not storing the songs on its own servers. It’s like a Tumblr blog of embeds, but one that has a play button. In fact, that was co-founder Stefan Vosskoetter’s, a Tumblr user himself, original inspiration.

Initially attracting a core audience of music enthusiasts, Musicplayr now also appeals to those who may be more interested in just finding new music, not organizing it themselves. With a Twitter-like “following” model, users can find others based on how they’ve tagged themselves (i.e., by style of music – “alternative,” “folk,” “electronic,” “hip-hop,” “soul,” etc.). Since its U.S. launch, the startup has grown to around 100,000 users – still quite a small crowd, but one fairly obsessed with music discovery.

When the company raised its seed round and entered the U.S. market this October, co-founder Stefan Vosskoetter told us that an iOS application was in the works, which would also introduce a new feature: music identification. This Shazam-like function, available today, lets users tag the music they hear using  Gracenote‘s technology, and they can then add those tracks to their own playlists.

The app itself is fairly simple to use. You don’t even have to login before beginning to stream music. Instead, the initial landing page upon first launch is the “Discover” section where you can find people’s music profiles to follow and immediately begin playing their favorites. (I wish all apps just let you start using them right away. Love this feature).

Registered users, meanwhile, can tap on the “user” icon on the bottom left to login and access their own collections and those of their followers. Like the web version, Musicplayr offers a Facebook login option, which, incidentally, is nicely done – if you’re already authenticated on iOS, it doesn’t pop up one of those awkward windows where you have to type in your username and password again. It just quickly logs you in.

You can then hop over to your “Home” stream (button far left) to listen to the tracks from the profiles you follow, or return to “Discover” (the globe button) to find more people to friend.

Music streams offer expanded views and collapsed views, the latter which is useful for browsing through long playlists. Beneath each track, you can like, comment or tap the “heart” button to add it to your own playlist. The music identification option (far right button), as noted above, lets you tap or shake your phone to tag tracks you hear in the wild, then add them to your own playlists.

Co-founded by Vosskoetter and Thorsten Lüttger, Musicplayr is free for now, but it may move into “freemium” later on by charging for more advanced features. The app also is a free download, here on iTunes.

Creating a workable Minority Report-like screen isn’t very hard but what about an entire room or building that responds to touch, voice, and movement? Now that’s hard. That, however, is the goal of OpenArch, a project by designer Ion Cuervas-Mons that uses projectors, motion sensors, and light to create interactive spaces.

“This project started 3 years ago when I had the opportunity to buy a small apartment in the north of Spain, in the Basque Country. I decided to start my own research in the small apartment. I am architect and I was really interested on integrating physical and digital layers,” said Cuervas-Mons. “Our objective was to create a Domestic Operating System (D.OS) integrating physical and digital realities.”

The project as seen here is about 40% done and there is still more to do. Cuervas-Mons sees a deep connection between how space defines digital interaction and vice-versa. The goal, in the end, is to create a digital component that can live in any space and enliven it with digital information, feedback, and sensors.

He’s not just stopping at projectors and some computing power. His goal is the creation of truly smart environments.

“I think we need smart homes: first because of energy efficiency, visualization of consumptions on real time will help us not to waste energy. If we introduce physical objects into the interaction with digital information everything will be easier and simpler. They are going to be the center of the future smart cities,” he said.

Cuervas-Mons also runs design consultancy called Think Big Factory where he brings the things he’s learned in the OpenArch project to market. The project itself uses off-the-shelf components like connect sensors and projectors

The group will launch a Kickstarter project in January to commercialize the product and make it available to experimenters. How this technology will eventually work in “real life” is anyone’s guess, but it looks like the collective of technologists, architects, and designers is definitely making some waves in the smart home space.

The WSJ reports this morning that Apple is testing out Apple TV set (as opposed to set-top box) designs, though that testing remains “early stage.” Apple is specifically working on high-res TVs according to the reports, trialling a few different designs, working with a variety of suppliers including Hon Hai (Foxconn) and Sharp on the new TV designs. TV testing isn’t new for Apple, according to the report, and we’ve heard plenty about it before, plus Apple CEO Tim Cook is being far less coy about Apple’s television plans in recent interviews.

Here’s the bottom line: Apple is working on a TV. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has been going on about that for years, and every year they don’t make one he looks a little less credible. But he’s not wrong. The WSJ report only serves to reinforce the idea that Apple has been tinkering with televisions, beyond the first, second and third-generation Apple TV set-top boxes they’ve shipped, for a long while now. Steve Jobs discussed Apple tackling the space in his Walter Isaacson biography, and other sources, including the New York Times, have as much as called an Apple television a lock for a future product launch.

So has anything changed? Or is this still just an R&D project that’s no closer to seeing the light of day? Well, there are some indicators that Apple could be farther along in the process, according to this new report. First, even working with outside suppliers indicates a certain level of maturity, since often Apple works internally long before talking to manufacturing or component partners ever enter the mix. Second, Foxconn has made steps to expand into HDTV production, on the back of a strategic investment by Chairman Terry Gou in a formerly Sharp-owned LCD factory. Current Apple TV sales are also on the rise.

But there’s still a long way to go, as Apple has no content deals in place for a television set, at least not with major cable and media providers. So in the end, while it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apple is actively tinkering with TV sets, no one should be holding their breath about such a device’s arrival, at least not yet.

Today Facebook posted its Year In Review for 2012, chronicling the most important and popular events, songs, movies, figures, technology, and locations of the past year. Most of what you see there is what you’d expect: The Hunger Games, Barack Obama, and the term YOLO were all crucially important to humanity’s development over the past twelve months.

But Facebook is also giving the gift of data analysis to its billion+ users, with a personalized Year In Review on everyone’s individual timeline. Just like Twitter did for its Year In Review.

If you visit Facebook.com/yearinreview you’ll quickly see the top 20 moments of your year, though it’s unclear how Facebook is making these decisions.

On my timeline, for example, my status update to “In A Relationship” probably was one of my biggest moments of 2012, but the time that John Biggs hijacked my Facebook account and posted that “i like corn..” was not. In any case, Facebook included them both. From there, users are also able to share the big moments of their year with an easy Share button.

We spoke to Facebook about the personalized Year In Review Timelines, and were told that the idea is to “give people an interactive experience to look back at 2012. People will notice stories they have forgotten about it, which makes it more nostalgic.”

Facebook’s overall top trending lists can be found here. In terms of technology trends, you’ll notice that Facebook snatched up the number one trend of 2012, Instagram.

RIM posted a mostly toothless smartphone teaser to its BlackBerry 10 landing page earlier this week, but really, what BlackBerry fan could be appeased by that? Thankfully, the folks at Tinhte.vn (the Vietnamese gadget site that came to prominence when it posted early video and benchmarks of the 3rd gen iPad) got their hands on the all-touch L-Series BB10 smartphone and gave it the full photo and video treatment.

Assuming its design is final (if not, it’s very recent — the device sports the recently-renamed BlackBerry World app), the L-Series carries over many of the same aesthetic choices seen in the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha B device. The front speaker and microphone placement appears to be the same as on the tester device, as do the locations of the BlackBerry logo and the front-facing camera. Meanwhile, a quick meander through the gallery reveals that the L-Series comes equipped with a removable 1,800 mAh battery, and well as the usual collection of microUSB, micro-HDMI, and microSD slots.

Overall, the device doesn’t look too bad — it seems to have remained very understated in its design language (which is probably to be expected considering RIM’s enterprise leanings), and the rounded corners make the L-Series awfully reminiscent of that early BlackBerry London image that begun making the rounds over a year ago. Personally, the looks by themselves aren’t enough to make me want to buy one of things, but BlackBerry 10 certainly has potential and that could make all the difference.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me. I’ve included some of the juicier images below, and you can check out the rest of the photos here and here.

Olive, a well established San Francisco-based audio company that makes high-end digital home audio systems, today took the somewhat unusual route of launching its latest product on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The new Olive ONE, as it’s called, is a departure for the company in more ways than that, however: it’s also a much more affordable option with a pre-order entry-level price of $399, and it features open architecture Olive hopes will become a vibrant development platform.

The Olive ONE is a home music player, which can provide access to all music stored on devices connected to your home network. You can optionally add built-in hard drives in 1TB and 2TB capacities to add more storage, and access your music while you’re away via Olive’s Home Cloud free service. The Olive ONE can connect to Miracast-compatible TV sets to let you navigate your collection on the big screen, or you can use the built-in display on the device or Android or iOS dedicated remote apps.

Where the Olive ONE differs from a lot of other home theatre music playing solutions is its audiophile pedigree. The device uses what the company touts as  a “best-in-class 32-bit/384kHz DAC by Burr-Brown” as well as dual HD amplifiers, and can connect via Miracast, as mentioned above, an analog speaker out connection, Bluetooth stereo streaming or Wi-Fi Direct, and it supports those protocols plus DLNA for audio input. It can also playback music from streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and even YouTube, and is compatible with Macs or PCs for detecting network-stored music.

Click to view slideshow.

Essentially, Olive ONE is a high-end Sonos competitor, but one that currently doesn’t include its own speaker (though a stackable speaker add-on, atop which the ONE will sit, is planned for later development). But the real promise of the one, and the reason the company went to Indiegogo to fund it according to Olive Media SVP of Business Development Robert Altmann, is that Olive is hoping to turn the ONE into a platform where artists and developers can connect directly with music-lovers for unique experiences.

The 7-inch capacitive LCD screen resting atop the ONE’s surface is designed to give developers opportunity to build apps for the device’s ONE music OS, as well as provide artists the opportunity to crowdfund their projects and recordings directly through the media player itself. Altmann said in an email that he hopes the ONE becomes a new route for artists to connect directly with their fans, through which they could eventually deliver content made for the ONE platform explicitly. Imagine being at home and enjoying a concert or other recorded live music event you helped fund: that’s something the ONE could potentially enable once it goes to market.

Indiegogo backers will have plenty of opportunity to influence the ONE’s ultimate design, according to Olive, including with color choice and charting a path for accessories and add-ons. The company is looking for $200,000 for this campaign, and anticipates shipping the ONE in July 2013, with an SDK for developers planned for a May delivery.

Applifier, which just launched a new platform for gamers to share replays of their best gaming moments, raised a Series B round of funding led by Finland’s Lifeline Ventures.

The $4 million round also included existing investors like MHS Capital and PROFounders along with one more new one in Webb Investment Network. Angel investors like Zynga India general manager Steven Lurie, Anthony Soohoo, Philip Reisberger, David Wright and Tekes, which is the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology
and Innovation, also participated.

Applifier, which started out on the Facebook platform, pivoted largely to mobile platforms over the last year. The company recently launched a new product called Everyplay, which is a way for gamers to share and replay their greatest moments. Everyplay lets gamers share their favorite titles by recording and replaying sessions of games — like a time they might have gotten a high score.

“This is not something we’re cramming down the throats of users,” said Jussi Laakkonen, the company’s CEO. “They’re playing games they like and they want to show off and brag. In Supercell’s Clash of Clans, I want to show off my raids.”

Here’s an example replay:

Laakkonen adds that watching replays of friends in mobile games is a much more effective form of video advertising on smartphones. He says this type of advertising monetizes three to five times better than standard video ads, which he estimates would result in a $15 to 20 eCPM for publishers. He adds that on the advertiser side, one might see a cost-per-install of around $2 to $2.50.

The company hasn’t disclosed the size of its platform yet, but says that the product has attracted more than 400 developer sign-ups and will come out with its first titles this holiday season. Applifier faces off against a number of deep-pocketed competitors that are trying to create a platform of games that generates real network effects in lowering the cost of acquiring and retaining users. GREE and DeNA both are multibillion dollar Japanese mobile gaming companies that have collectively thrown about $1 billion at this problem in acquisitions and hiring. Facebook is also emerging as another force in user acquisition for apps with new ads in the mobile news feed while there are older stalwarts like Tapjoy and Flurry.

The company says that its old Facebook products are still growing nicely, with a video advertising network that includes King.com, Zynga and SongPop maker Fresh Planet among its clientele.

Applifier also recently released an easier way to integrate its SDK into games on the Unity platform. Laakkonen says it’s a simple drag-and-drop process that takes two minutes (demonstrated below).

CloudVelocity, a new startup emerging from stealth that develops hybrid cloud automation platform, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Mayfield Fund.

CloudVelocity (which was formerly Denali Systems) allows companies to automate private data centers to the public cloud. CloudVelocity’s software, based on the startup’s patent-pending One Hybrid Cloud platform, aims to extend the enterprise data center to the public cloud, by enabling multi-tier applications to run without modification in the cloud and access services that reside in the enterprise data center. In a nutshell, the startup allows enterprises to get the benefits of private clouds in the public cloud.

Users can discover, blueprint, clone, and migrate applications between data centers and public clouds. Currently, CloudVelocity supports full server, networking, security and storage integration with AWS but plans to integrate other public clouds, such as RackSpace in 2013. The beta trial of the Developer Edition cloud cloning software allows users to clone multi- tier app clusters and services, without modification into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 cloud. The Enterprise Edition enables users to clone, migrate and failover multi-tier apps and services into the AWS EC2 cloud.

The new funding will be used to continue developing the startup’s hybrid cloud automation software suite (including cloud cloning, migration and cloud failover solutions).

Navin Chaddha, Mayfield Fund’s Managing Director explains that the firm incubated the idea, and made a bet not only on the technology but also the entrepreneurs. The co-founders founded virtualization company NeoPath Networks, which was acquired by Cisco.

“We believe that CloudVelocity will have the same impact on public cloud adoption as VMware did on the adoption of server virtualization by making public clouds look like internal data centers,” Chaddha explains.

Tomorrow we’ll throw a TechCrunch Mini Meetup in Barcelona, one of the most internationally-minded cities in Europe. Below you’ll find out schedule, agenda and here you can grab a free ticket to the party] as the main free event is now full. It’s because of its diversity that the city has managed to attract a burgeoning number of startup entrepreneurs wooed by the ability of the city to attract talent, in part because of the climate and lifestyle. When you can live just about anywhere and create an Internet company, you may as well do it in a fun place to live. It’s a trend we’ve seen even San Francisco succumb to, as startups move back form the rather bland campuses of the Valley to the vibrancy of the SF’s city living. And Europe’s flexible corporate laws now allow startups to be based almost anywhere.

The #TCBarcelona Meetup is now sold out (tickets were free and were widely previewed such as here) and we will be assessing 15 pre-selected startups that submitted] their credentials first in a session involving investors, and finally in an open pitching competition for the finalists. We’ll also have panels discussing how Barcelona can capitalise on its position. If London, Stockholm and Berlin are hot right now, how does Barcelona – which really is “hot” – join the party?

And it’s already got the building blocks. Initiatives like District 22@, the Barcelona Tech Bridges to Silicon Valley networking events, and Barcelona.IO, have been creating a booming networking scene. That’s why we are putting together a TechCrunch Mini Meetup there. Here’s our schedule for the day:

LOCATION:
Barcelona Activa, Carrer Llacuna, 162, Barcelona [Google Map]
Please bring your ticket and photo id. The main event is completely sold out. We’re not able to let anyone in without a valid ticket (which were free).

About 7 or 8 of these 15 pre-selected companies will pitch for a place to pitch in public tomorrow:

Bizzonia
“Bizzonia is a professional discovery tool that tells you in the HERE and NOW what professionals and business opportunities (events, job-offers) you have around you. With only 4 months in existence, it was already named by FORBES as 1 of the free apps that all entrepreneurs should use.”

CogniCor
“CogniCor revolutionizes the way large enterprises handle customer complaints by providing automatic and instant resolution using patent pending Artificial Intelligence technology. Our software is a cloud-based resolution as a service that integrates directly with the client’s website. Our clients are large enterprises in service sector industries (telecom, airline, insurance, utilities) with high volume and low value complaints. Enterprises save up to 80% operational cost compared to current methods and reduced customer churn. By providing faster and more accurate resolutions we create a win-win for our clients and end users. Scalable to international markets, we aim to be the global provider for complaint resolution. CogniCor is a Wayra accelorated startup, winning first place in Wayra Barcelona Startup Competition in 2012. We are scheduled to deploy our software with Telefonica, Spain’s largest telecommunication provider, and RACC Insurance this month.”

Dinube
“Dinube is a real-time payment network in the cloud enabling payment from any Internet-connected device. As the first merchant-based payment platform, Dinube solves the problem of high transaction costs and securely processes remote M/E-commerce payments as well as proximity payments at the physical point-of-sale. The Dinube platform has been designed to work on any Internet-connected device and is also ready for NFC (Near-field Communication) Contactless payments via mobile phone. Users of Dinube can easily and safely sync loyalty points, offers, cupones with their purchases. Dinube is the first cloud platform with propietary privacy algorithms that incorporate a customizable privacy control dashboard. Dinube is a Spin-out of the MIT MediaLab and has its head office in Barcelona. The Dinube team is made of MIT Computer Scientists and Sloan MBAs, with deep domain expertise in security, strategy and software development. Our advisory board and shareholders are experts in UX, GUI and have worked at companies like Telefonica R&D, SmartDesign and PayPal. Dinube is currently in advanced discussions with major merchant groups and has an agreement with a leading European payments integrator to prepare rollout.”

Feebbo
“What we do is online market research that help companies understand their markets and customers. Also Feebbo is a great tool to get new clients for your business. In less than 15 months we have 50.000 users and more than 1.500 surveys created. Our users earn money thru our VISA card and we have delivered more than 25.000.

Hotel Ninjas
“Hotel Ninjas is a cloud-based SaaS platform that helps hotels solve big pains they have with current technology. Our base product consists of a Property Management System (“PMS”), affordable, cloud-based and easy to use. Hotel Ninjas offers a great alternative to the old systems currently in use in many hotels.
Being a platform, we will offer premium modules such as Revenue Management, Channel Management and more. Currently the long tail of hotels have problems working with good technology at a good price.”

MamboCar
“MamboCar is a P2P car rental startup, but we’re focused in bringing tourist drivers to the car owners. We are from Spain and we’ve launched with 300 cars from private owners in several cities in Spain, and we are offering them to UK visitors, tourists and travellers. Most P2P car rental companies try to clone the Zipcar model with cars from people, focused in rental by hours to people in the city. We’re different, we want to disrupt the model of Europcar or Budget, with cheaper prices, more flexibility and a different experience, much more personal. We will expand to France and UK soon, with cars in this countries.
We’re the alternative car rental, company for travellers.”

Icebergs
“Icebergs – Smart visual organisation. Research is an action that everyone does on a daily basis: Writing an article, planning your holidays, decorating your apartment or just looking for some inspiration. Tools to save and collect all types of content have been a growing need since users tried to select and curate those parts interesting to them: Images, articles, videos, files, etc. But when you think about it, the real problem comes, not when saving, but when going back to that content. How you use, organize, share and understand that content is what matters. That experience is what makes the real difference. Its time to start to enjoy your research, projects and inspiration like you never did before. Icebergs is Co-Founded by Albert Pereta and Cesar Isern. After working between New York and Barcelona consulting and helping startups we decided it was time to ‘burn the ships down’ and start our own. The first Beta of Icebergs is going to launch on late January with an 8 members team. We have our HQ in Barcelona and London, as well as an advisor in New York and another one (the VP of Design at Adobe) in San Francisco.”

Knok
“Knok is a new generation home swap community. Knok takes a great idea, traveling on home exchange, one step further: a technology platform that suggests your ideal exchange partners based on your profile. Knok combines a very easy-to-use site with a smart search algorithm; reinforces the trust in the community through friends’ and members’ reviews; offers an insurance that covers members homes while swapping up to $200.000; integrates Facebook to discover your social connections; and provides a seamless exchange experience, protecting and verifying the identity of members. Home swap is going to be the third common alternative for travel accommodation, after hotels and rentals. Home swappers save on accommodation (for example, 2.500 € can be saved during a 2-week home exchange vacation in Paris), stay in a real home (a bigger and more comfortable space than a hotel room), and enjoy the local knowledge of their exchange partners. Knok is available in 5 languages and is the fastest growing home swap community in the web, with 14.000 members in 147 countries. “

Teleport
“Teleport is the new way to share content with your friends and your devices. With Teleport you can send and receive files faster and easier than ever. Here are a few of our key features.
– Send files to your friends and your devices.
– No uploading to the cloud, just direct connections.
– Audio and video streaming.
– Choose where you want to download the content.
– Crossplatform (Pc, Mobile, Tablet).
Raul and Joan are the founders of Teleport, two veterans on software development and file streaming ninjas. Teleport is a very young company based in Barcelona looking for the first round investment.”

Marfeel
“Marfeel automatically converts any web into the best reading experience for different moments of the day in devices such as the iPad or smartphones. The Marfeel experience encourages a natural, continous and very fluid reading, with no distractions, where content is king. The reader is engaged by discovering interesting content. That makes our metrics soar: 5x avg. reading time, 4x social sharing, 3x revenue increase. All that in no time and no pain. We’ve even prepared a demo for your site: go to “”enjoy.marfeel.com”” from an iPad to check it out. We are a really balanced team of 6 people with experience in Adobe, Microsoft, BBC, Financial Times, etc. We also have the business side covered with a recently joined member who has previously created and successfully exited 2 companies and is also a business angel. We have our product up & running for iPad. We are currently developing versions for other platforms and also acquiring clients. The top spanish economics newspaper is already a client (expansion.com) and we will launch before yearend with around 7 more.”

Nutrino
“We have bad habits! We live in an era of abundance, where careless food consumption is the number one cause of many chronic diseases. Nutrino is a food recommendation engine that learns the user’s preferences, and provides a personalized meal plan for optimized wellbeing. While everyone else is focused on tracking, we are focused on recommending, we are not another tracking tool! Nutrino utilizes amounts of personal data from the user’s profile, habits, eating preferences and social environment to create a personalized plan, enabling users to devise their daily diet, lifestyle and enabling to shop its grocery list online. We created the first scalable service that provides real personalization for users seeking nutrition advice and support. Using our patent pending optimization, crowd-sourcing technologies, and intelligent scraping from across the web to get appealing content, we are giving our users the ultimate health experience. Our Business model? We’ll bridge between users, nutrition supplements and online grocery retailers; providing cost effective sponsorship to F&B brands and restaurants; using the data collected for consumer product companies or health insights. Nutrino is a Israeli/Spanish diverse and talented team of 7 full time employees dedicated to this product working from our headquarters in Israel & commercial in Europe. Nutrino is seed funded and we plan to launch our MVP early 2013.”

Worldcoo
“Worldcoo it’s a crowdfunding website with a new business model.
Our main differences are:
– We link companies to the projects, so companies get also linked with the crowd.
– We don’t take any amount of the crowd donations. We receive a fee from companies.
– We are globally born, centered only in cooperation.
– We are fully integrated in social media, and due to this we can evaluate the CSR impact of our sponsoring companies using our own metrics.
– We only work with top NGOs. Currently we have agreements with Oxfam and Red Cross.
Now we just launched a beta version, so we are collecting the first data. Also we are in contacts with some companies, and we look forward closing a deal very soon. Worldcoo was founded in August 2012. Now we already raised some seed capital, and we may need a first round by mid 2013. Worldcoo is managed by a team of 3 founders, a student in internship and a wide Advisory Board. Also we are building a team of ambassadors, now in more than 15 countries.”

SMADEX
“SMADEX is a Mobile Demand Side Platform. We help advertisers and agencies place Display Ads in smartphones (either Apps or Mobile Webs), with incredible targeting capabilities to deliver the best possible advertising performance and full transparency in the media buying process. We are connected with international mobile ad exchanges, and are able to buy advertising space via Real Time Bidding.
We are experiencing strong sales growth, and are currently serving mobile advertising campaigns with companies like Groupalia, Privalia, H&M, Lancome, Lacoste, etc., in countries like Spain, Italy and Chile.
With our proprietary technology, we are achieving incredible advertising performance results in terms of download and lead generation for our advertisers. We expect to grow internationally both throughout Europe and Latin America during 2013.”

Lhings
“Lhings is the social network of you Things in the Cloud. Lhings is a cloud platform designed to provide access to your things where ever they are and let you manage, share and interact with them anywhere, when you like. Through Lhings you will not only be able to hear what your things say, but also speak to them and give them orders, so that you can effectively act remotely on the physical world. The data generated by your things and devices could be send to any service of your choice (e.g. Cosm, Twitter, Open Sense, among other) and even remotely reprogram them to send the data to more than one service at the same time or change the way your things behave. Imagine a washing machine where you can add new washing programs best suited for your delicate garments. Imagine you could add new sound effects to your loudspeaker and make it reproduce internet music. Lhings can make these possible.”

AGENDA FOR THE DAY

Time: Doors open for ticket holders at 5:00pm for a 5:30 pm sharp start! (All tickets to this free event have now gone – there are none left)

Session 1: Panel – Barcelona’s Entrepreneurs
We have a number of great people joining us. We are delighted to announce the following two people on the panel:

Mauricio Prieto @mauprieto

Mexican in Barcelona via San Francisco. In Internet ventures since 1995. eDreams cofounder & Odigeo CMO. Angel investor. Open water swimmer. ODIGEO is the largest online travel group in Europe, with HQ in Barcelona.

Albert Armengol @albertarmengol

Internet entrepreneur / Business Angel in many Barcelona companies / Doctoralia cofounder & CEO

Session 2: Panel – Investor panel

Patrick de Zeeuw (@patrickdezeeuw)

Founder of Startupbootcamp

Marcel Rafart

Founder and partner at Nauta Capital

Session 3: Pitch Competition (the best BCN startups will compete)
We will have 7 screened companies pitching for the audience.

7:30 pm Wrap up.

8:30 pm TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup After Party (until late).

We have sold out already for daytime event!! After less than 1 day we have sold out for the TechCrunch Barcelona meetup tickets. If you are a company that wants to pitch, you still have a chance to get in by submitting your company to present at the event. Otherwise, please feel free to get tickets for the after party which are listed below.

AFTER PARTY

It will be at the coolest new bar in Barcelona, Ocaña, in Plaça Reial. We will be providing the first few beers thanks to our sponsors. This is where we will kick off from 8pm, and where the networking will take place. Ticket holders will be able to grab a free beer. Others are welcome to turn up, just won’t get a free beer. DJs wil be kicking off at 10:30pm to fully celebrate the Barcelona Startup scene. All people who have a ticket for the official meetup proceedings will be able to reuse that ticket for the after party. If you have a ticket already from the daytime meetup, you do not need another ticket for the after party.

A huge thanks to these companies for hosting us:

BarcelonaActiva

GetApp

CloudWork

MyTaxi

Moritz

EasyPromos

JobFluent.com

Mobile Jazz

Robot Media

Despite bailing them out (and practically owning some of them), the UK government seems unable to force high street banks to begin lending to small businesses again and this is causing a big problem for the economy — the wheels of capitalism won’t grease themselves. The latest solution coming out of the Department for Business Innovation & Skills is to board the P2P lending train.

The UK government has pledged £110 million of tax payer’s money to lend to SMEs through ‘alternative finance’ schemes and today we’ve learned that two P2P lending sites, Funding Circle and Zopa, stand to benefit, with each receiving £20m and £10m respectively.

The capital injection isn’t in the form of an investment. Instead, the British government will effectively become a user of both sites — should it get Parliamentary approval — lending money to small businesses who harness either site’s P2P lending platform, and receiving interest in return. Additionally, the money is being pledged on the condition that it is matched by private lenders using either site who, in the case of Funding Circle, will be required to make up 80% of each loan — and my understanding is that there are other systems being put in place to ensure that the extra money doesn’t distort the overall lender/borrower market of each platform.

In a canned statement the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, said: “Small and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.”

The use of the words “small scale” is perhaps apt. £30 million is a tiny amount in the big scheme of things and is unlikely to move the needle much on the economy. But in the words of one of Britain’s supermarkets, every little helps. To that end, Index, and Union Square Ventures-backed Funding Circle, which unlike Zopa, has targeted SMEs from the get-go, says that in the two years since launch it has lent more than 1,300 UK businesses £65 million through its platform, whilst last month alone it lent £7m.

Today’s announcement comes hot on the heels of Zopa raising another new round of funding, said to be in the “multi-millions”, having previously raised almost $40m. It’s also in the context of another P2P lending development related to the UK government. It’s planning to regulate the P2P lending sector, something that is said to be welcomed by the major players and could provide the legitimacy required to bring this alternative form of financing into the mainstream and really give the banks a run for their money.