London Archives - Page 2 of 3

Continuously GeoTag Video With UK Startup RouteShoot

Geotagging is nothing new, we’ve been able to do it on our iPhones and Android devices for the past few years. You can geotag a tweet, a Facebook status message, Instagram photo and photos that you post to just about any social network. Geotagging allows the creator to mark where their photo was taken or their checkin was made.

Videos can be geotagged as well, however it’s typically one geotag at the beginning of the video or associated with the link for the video.

UK Startup RouteShoot has developed away to use your smartphones gps in conjunction with it’s video camera to continuously geotag a video. Say for instance you are hanging out in South Beach and start a video at your hotel, if you keep the video going down the A1A and then onto the beach, RouteShoot would allow the geotags to change to correspond with the different locations you were at while the video camera was rolling.

What’s more is once the video is uploaded the route is tracked in a line. A viewer can click the line on the geo mapped route and pick up the video based on the location if they wish, or watch as the locations change throughout the recording of the video. The video also shows a “you are here” symbol on the map as the video is playing.

RouteShoot was created by co-founders; Gary Wilson, Adam May and Andy Pym. Wilson and May have years of experience in the highway maintenance field while Pym has experience in highway engineering. We got a chance to talk with Wilson about RouteShoot. Check out the interview below.

MyMzone Bringing London’s Street Markets To Life Online

Etsy, the crafter’s online marketplace has been around since 2005 and is one of the most visited sites for homemade wears. A new London startup called MyMzone is hoping to disrupt that, at least across the pond.

MyMzone is hoping to become the curated online market place showcasing unique and authentic items handmade, handcrafted and designed by merchants selling in local markets in London. That’s actually the part that differentiates the platform from Etsy.

Back in August we interviewed Nashville startup Street Jelly. The premise for the company founded by Frank Podlaha is to take street performers and put them online to make real money for virtual tips. MyMzone is hoping to provide an avenue for street and market merchants hawking their ways in London, and put them online as well.

MyMzone co-founder Ravi Jay says he’d describe MyMzone to his Grandma by saying: “Grandma, Remember going to Portobello Market in 2006 and not buying that gorgeous handmade sweater from that lovely young woman because we did not have any British Pounds on us? You know what, she is still there and continues to hand made amazingly beautiful sweaters. Finally, you can see her online along with all the other goodness from local markets of London.”

It’s an interesting proposition for a city that has upscale street markets with handcrafted items you could find on Rodeo Drive in the United States.

Check out the entire interview with Jay below.

UK Startup Eyejusters Changing The Vision In The Developing World

I know right about now you’re wondering why in the world we are covering an eye glass company on nibletz, the voice of startups everywhere else.

Well truth be told this is a special eye glass company. First off they’ve developed a new technology that will greatly benefit those with varying degrees of bad vision.

Secondly, they’ve found a way to make their eye glass technology make an impact and a difference in developing countries.

First off, Eyejusters has created a new technology for those folks that need glasses to see. The technology they’ve developed is called “SlideLens” technology. This allows the user to change the actual lens within the glass frame. Say you need one strength of reading glasses in the light, and another when it’s not so light. This can be achieved by simply turning a dial.

The real neat thing about Eyejusters is how their product is changing the vision in the developing world.

The premise behind Eyejusters is to turn the knob on the lenses until the user is comfortable seeing out of them and they improve your site. Once the user finds the comfortable spot the glasses are working their optimum with no real eye exam to boot. That’s why the Eyejusters product is so valuable in developing countries.

Many people in these countries can’t afford regular doctor’s care, much less a specialist like an Opthamologist. With SlideLens technology and Eyejusters the folks in developing countries don’t need an opthamologist the eye exam is actually built into the glasses.

We got a chance to talk with Owen Reading, one of the co-founders of Eyejusters about their startup, product, social cause and how they’ve approached the product itself in the same way any startup would. Check out the interview below.

UK Startup: Spacehive Brings Civic Crowdfunding Across The Pond

As crowdfunding continues to grow in popularity, we’ve seen more and more “civic” crowdfunding sites pop up in the United States. Back in August we brought you an interview with Kansas City startup neighbor.ly and also during the summer we reported on Tampa startup Citizinvestor.

Now our friends across the pond in the UK are getting into the civic crowdfunding space. UK startup Spacehive is offering people in the UK the opportunity to crowdfund civic minded projects. These can include anything from planting a garden, to developing an open neighborhood wifi.

Crowdfunding was sparked and started in the United States with sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. In the UK there are already sites crowdfunding startups, like our good friends at Up And Funding. The civic crowdfunding space is new for them though.

Crowdfunding typically exists in two models. There’s an all or nothing model, where the crowd has a goal to raise and projects are funded once all of the money is raised. Other sites like Indiegogo allow people to raise money for projects but every dime goes to the project’s founder regardless of whether or not they hit their goal.

With Spacehive it’s the all or nothing model. Someone with a civic project will go online to their site. Once they create the project and the project is approved by Spacehive, they are free to raise money to their goal. The funds for the project will only be released once the goal is hit giving backers a little more piece of mind that the money is going to what it’s intended for.

We got a chance to talk with the team from Spacehive, about their civic crowdfunding platform and their cool name. Check out the interview below.

Animate Your Ideas With London Startup Powtoon

There’s another new presentation tool in town. This time it comes to us from across the pond in the UK. The new animated presntation platform is a London startup called Powtoon.

This startup with a silly name, promises to “supercharge your presentations and videos” according to Powtoon co-founder and CEO Ilya Spitalnik. Spitalnik tells sproutsocial.com that the Powtoon team focuses on “less is more” and that their startup has been designed by designers for non-designers.

Many people looking to create presentations either only know the basics for Power Point and Keynote or get overcome with frustration trying to use features to make their run of the mill presentations less run of the mill. Powtoon offers a whole suite of tools that are easy to use and basically “drag and drop”.

While there are alternatives out there to the current presentation programs Spitalnik says they only add a limited amount of features or their non-intuitive and “far too complex”

Powtoon offers users three ways to use the service. You can start with a 14 day free trial, opt for monthly billing or a per use version.

Their monthly plans start at just $9 a month for “fans” without the ability to download, and fully co-branded with Powtoon. An agency can go monthly at a rate of $247 per month.

While no one building a startup wants to pay anything for services, the costs associated with Powtoon are much better than outsourcing a presentation which can run between $5,000 and $20,000 per presentation. The Powtoon website also boasts an educational program and the ability to make some extra scratch by reselling Powtoon’s services.

Powtoon offers even the most non artistic types the ability to create eye popping presentations. When considering the cost of a presentation, also take into consideration the goal of the presentation. Paying under $50 to create a presentation that could yield you an investment of millions of dollars is a no-brainer.

Linkage:

check out Powtoon here

Source: Sproutsocial

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Build Your Own Video Games With UK Startup Construct 2

Have you ever wanted to build your own video game? Maybe you’re a gamer and thought you’d love your own game but didn’t know an ounce about programming? Well there’s a UK startup that’s come up with a do it yourself platform for creating video games. The startup is called Scirra and their product is Construct 2.

Through Construct 2’s easy to use interface you’ll drag and drop your game characters, game play moves and more to make a fully workable video game via HTML5. After that Construct2 gets you ready to export your new game to a variety of devices and a variety of platforms.

The system that Ashley Gullen and has brother have created makes it possible for people with no programming experience whatsoever to produce “awesome games”.

Construct2 creates Windows based games and was the follow up to Gullen’s 2007 game creation tool now dubbed “Construct Classic”. The classic version allowed people to create games in the DirectX 9 platform.

We got a chance to talk with Ashley’s brother Thomas Gullen. Check out that interview below.

Don’t Forget The Flowers An Interview With London Startup BelateMeNot

Have you ever forgotten a loved ones birthday? Are you one of those guys or gals that can’t even remember to send flowers. Well fear not, there is a London startup called BelateMeNot that will make sure you never forget the flowers again.

As you can imagine from the descriptive introduction or from the company’s name, BelateMeNot is a flower scheduled delivery service. It’s designed for people in a committed relationship or maybe someone who sends flowers to their family on scheduled days, to order the flowers one time for eternity and forget about it.

Lawrence Suss, a serial entrepreneur since high school, founded BelateMeNot to help men and women everywhere, who forget to send flowers. He likes to think of his startup as “relationship insurance”. No worries either, your loved one won’t receive a card that says “sent from BelateMeNot the scheduled delivery service” they’ll just think you remembered the flowers this time, and you’ll score major points.

We got a chance to talk to Suss about BelateMeNot and London’s thriving startup scene. Check out the interview below:

London Startup FlatClub: AirBnb Meets Couch Surfing Meets LinkedIn For College Students

So what do you get when you take two Israeli guys, move them to London and mash together AirBnb, CouchSurfing and LinkedIn? You get London startup FlatClub.

FlatCub is a network for college students and alumni to find temporary housing situations amongst their friends, friends of friends and trusted acquaintances. FlatClub connects college students from all over with each other to offer spare bedrooms, couches, and even apartments. Say you have a year round lease on an off campus apartment and you’re not going to be at school during the summer, you could use FlatClub to find a trusted renter.

FlatClub utilizes the social web, requires users to be college students, and provides a safe and secure payment system for taking the payments for booking.

The growing startup closed an undisclosed Series-A round back in May from a syndicate of non-traditional VC’s. They are also a product of the London Business School Incubator. But even with the security of a Series-A round and the backing of an incubator like the London Business School co-founder and CEO Nitzan Yudan is far from done the hard, sweat equity type grunt work.

Yudan is planning a US expansion to the top 30 universities and plans to do it with a road show across the country. He’s looking to generate as much buzz as he can. Yudan feels that FlatClub offers a safer more secure way of finding temporary accommodations. By requiring users to be college students or alumni there’s an element of security already in place.

FlatClub also provides an element of real social interaction. Students and alumni renting accommodations will see how they are socially connected to potential renters and vice versa. Also for those students and alumni that are renting rooms, they’ll get the in person interactions that you can’t find with similar services.

We got a chance to interview Yudan. Check out the interview below.

UK Startup: SurveyMe Offers An Easy To Use Mobile Survey Platform INTERVIEW

Business owners are constantly looking for the best way to get customer feedback with the best possible return. According to many surveys, comment cards, even ones that offer incentives, see around 1% return or engagement. Surveys that print out on receipts and direct patrons to websites aren’t very effective either. That’s why many companies have found the need and desire to take their surveys to the mobile device.

UK startup SurveyMe solves the problem of creating surveys just for mobile devices by offering an easy to use platform for business owners to design mobile surveys. In fact, even business owners with minimal web experience can create good looking, easy to use and easy to navigate surveys. SurveyMe has tried to make their platform easy enough to use, so that if you know how to use the internet you can create a survey.

SurveyMe is another great startup with a husband and wife co-founders, Lee and Nicola Evans. While this is the Evans’ family’s first internet startup they’re no strangers to owning a business. The Evans were the original owners of The Bear Factory in Ireland, a brand that was eventually bought out by St.Louis giant Build A Bear.

While they’re not making bears, they’re making their survey platform as easy as letting a three year old create a bear, and the UI as appealing.

We got a chance to talk to Lee Evans. Check out our interview below:

UK Startup: omoii (oh my) Is A Disruptive Search Engine INTERVIEW

The search engine is a hard nut to crack. Back in the earliest days of the internet most of us used infoseek, Lycos and then Yahoo. Then, as we all know, two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to create Google. Companies both big and small like Microsoft and Duck Duck Go, have all tried to compete with Google.

Some of those competitors have carved out a good niche, more so with Duck Duck Go rather than Bing. Others are trying to attack Google feature by feature. Some search engine competitors are looking to offer an alternative to the way Google serves up results. One of those companies is a startup in the UK called omoii (pronounced Oh My).

Omoii is hoping to go beyond the keyword and offer a more robust, and accurate list of search results. The hope is that by offering a better search results algorithm, web searching will be more targeted and offer advertisers a better audience.

We got a chance to talk with Steve Pritchard the founder and chief architect of this unique new search startup. Check out the interview below:

Put Your Email On Steroids With London Startup: Tray INTERVIEW

London startup Tray is an email companion app that pumps up the productivity of your email. Imagine if when you checked in on FourSquare, your email automatically started delivering your out of office notification. Then, after you checked back into the office your email was restored to normal. That would be amazing wouldn’t it? Well that’s just one of many, many functions that London startup Tray adds to your email.

The functionality that Tray adds to your email is really pretty incredible. You can set rules for email that go well beyond your current email client. For example you can tell Tray, if “John” emails me after 8pm send it to my mobile. You can tell Tray, if Mary, Mike or Stacy emails me a link to read, add it to Pocket so I can read it later. Another example of a very useful Tray rule is, if my email inbox gets too full, send an auto responder saying that it may take a while to get back to people.

Tray began as an idea to make group emailing easier. After talking to email users, Dom Lewis, Rich Waldron, and Ali Russell, the founders of Tray, they decided to make email much more powerful.

We got a chance to interview Dom Lewis about Tray and building a startup in London. Check out the interview below:

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London Startup: EmbedTree Gives You A Bird’s Eye View Of Web Content INTERVIEW

We live in a world of social media. Nowadays sifting through all the tweets, instagrams, YouTube videos and other social content can take hours if not days. Many people have turned to one social media dashboard or another in hopes of procuring the content you actually want to see. A London startup called EmbedTree is hoping to make that process easier for you.

EmbedTree says they give users a bird’s eye view of the web. Their unique platform serves as a filter for social media sites like Twitter. They liken themselves to a hybrid between an aggregated content blog and a “handsome Twitter feed”. The EmbedTree platform takes the cluttered mess of tweets and sorts them out in a way that makes more sense.

The startup is still in it’s early stages, but they offer a great demo of what EmbedTree will look like, here. For their demo they’ve aggregated content from TED,Mixcloud,Instagram and YouTube and made it much more visually appealing and easier to interact with. In fact the two co-founders, Richard Morgan and Matt Rawson met while working at Mixcloud.

We got a chance to interview the team from EmbedTree. Check out the interview below:

Can’t Wait To Crowdfund Your Startup? Try London Startup: Up And Funding

Crowdfunding is all the rage these days. Kickstarter seems to be one of the quickest way to get a tangible product startup, movie, or book off the ground. The downside to Kickstarter is that you can’t invest in businesses and startups.

The JOBSAct was passed earlier this year and the SEC is currently working on the rules and regulations that will apply to those crowdfunding their startups. Until the JOBSAct, to legitimately invest in a startup as an accredited investor you typically had to have a net worth of over $1 million dollars excluding your residence. This made it tough for those that wanted to invest in startups but didn’t monetarily qualify from an accreditation standpoint.

There’s no doubt that crowdfunding for startups will be hot but truthfully it probably won’t officially roll out until the spring of 2013, regardless of what others are saying.

If you’re jonesing to get started with crowdfunding your startup, you could incorporate across the pond and then use UpandFunding which is a UK based crowdfunding site that’s starting to pick up some serious traction.

UpandFunding isn’t just about startups though, you can also invest in established businesses and establishes businesses can go to upandfunding.com to raise capital at anytime for any need. UpandFunding, because they are based in the UK, can already allow small, crowdfunded investments for actual equity.

We got a chance to talk to UpandFunding in the interview below:

23 Year Old Peter Johnston Catching The Eye Of The Worlds Top Ad Agencies With London Startup: Hedgehogg

To get in the door at the world’s top agencies like Ogilvy, Weber Shandwick, TBWA Chiat Day and M&C Saatchi you have to be the cream of the crop. To join one of the top agencies in their design arm you have to know design, really know design. That’s why at 23 years old, having Weber Shandwick on his resume gives Peter Johnston some credibility, especially because at Weber Shandwick he was a Senior Digital Designer.

While Johnston has a keen eye for design and he can create pretty things, he noticed, what a lot of others have started to notice, and that’s that it’s very hard to procure content that’s of equal caliber. It’s not that there aren’t great content producers out there. The world is filled with bloggers, writers and journalists. The problem seems to come from a lack of time and focus.

Hedgehogg is a new platform that cures the problems created from lack of time and focus. Hedgehogg does this through a managed crowdsourcing platform of professionally created content. All this, the brainchild of 23 year old Johnston.

Hedgehogg, which is based in London, puts content creators together with content users and vice versa. However, Hedegehogg limits your writing topics to just three. This way the creators only write on three focused topics, presumably the ones they know the most about.

The platform is a two way street as well. Today’s creator may be tomorrows user and vice versa.

Johnston described it like this:

“There is a colossal amount of information available online and I struggled daily to find relevant information quickly that I could actually rely on as being credible. It’s a really simple concept, write on three topics you are professionally versed in, and follow others who write on similar, we aren’t the only ones who need a platform like this.”

Each user has a dashboard where they manage their topics and can only write on three topics. Apart from the usual social channels links, the interface is minimal, offering users two choices, to create and discover. Users can post articles on their chosen topics, including image and video. They can then search the database of articles via topic or tags. Plain and simple, right?

After talking to agencies and professionals, the team at Hedgehogg realized that there was a need for an internal content sharing tool also. Leo Ryan, Group Head of Social@Ogilvy said “we are excited about the potential Hedgehogg has, we are working closely with the team to see where this product can go, it is a what-you see-is-what-you-get platform, and is seamless and easy to use”. Social@Ogilvy are now using Hedgehogg to take applications from start-ups wanting to attend their Social Spin event at this year’s Social Media Week by asking start-ups to write an article.

Hedghogg is currently in private beta but it’s definitely a startup worth watching in 2013.

Linkage:

Check out Hedgehogg here at hedgehog.gg

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