International Start Ups Archives - Page 10 of 12

London Startup: StreetPin Takes The Community Bulletin Board Mobile

By a show of hands who’s old enough to remember the community bulletin board at the grocery store? Sure there are probably some grocery stores that still have them, but they don’t fill up like they used to. Everyone has resorted to some kind of app or some kind of social network.

Well London startup StreetPin is looking to bring the community bulletin board back in a social, mobile sort of way. It’s actually a novel concept. They are of course building it in London and hopefully they will scale up large enough to adopt here in the U.S.

Now we know that Craigslist has a community section but StreetPin is more about short little pin up notes that are looking for reaction, remedy and answers as quick as possible. It’s kind of like a simplified version of both Craigslist and Zaarly all rolled up into one with a sense of urgency and immediacy about it.

We got a chance to talk with StreetPin co-founder and CEO Tim Buick about StreetPin. He gives some great examples of how to use the new service in the interview below the break.

UK Startup: Parcel Genie, Simple Mobile Gift Giving

Simple is good, right? If that’s the case then you’re going to like the ease and simplicity built into UK gift giving startup Parcel Genie. Sure it’s got a “blah” name but remember Parcel may be much more glamorous in the UK, you know the way they add that “u” to colour it makes it more colourful (and boy does spell check hate it).

Parel Genie is available on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone 7. It makes sending gifts to your friends as easy as sending instant messages and texts.

“We are pioneering the concept of gifting as communication,” says John Taylor, CEO and co-founder of ParcelGenie. “With our service, people can respond to news from friends, co-workers and loved ones — an achievement at work, a personal goal achieved, a quick thank-you, or someone not feeling well — with an immediate, low-cost real little gift and personal message. ParcelGenie closes the gap between thought and action, making it easy to do something meaningful to deepen emotional connections with the people in our lives.”

With Parcel Genie you send small little gifts, almost like chotzkes to your friends and family via their mobile number. If you know their actual address you can enter it for delivery. If you don’t have their address or don’t have time to fumble with it, they’ll receive a text message notifying them that you’ve sent this great little gift and prompt them for their delivery address.

In Europe the service is called Parcel Genie and there’s a Parcel Genie app in the iTunes App Store, Google Play Store and whatever it is they call the app store in Windows Phone 7. In the United States and other countries Parcel Genie is actually a white labeled partner service for some of the major e-commerce sites out there. If you see a “send an instant gift” or a “ping” button it takes you to the Parcel Genie service on behalf of that partner.

The company’s website says they are totally international and are opening an office in California. Their management team includes Sir Chris Powell, an actual knight, who achieved knighthood for his role in British advertising.

Their CEO is Dr.John Taylor, who is an actual doctor ;). Taylor actually thought up the idea for Parcel Genie back in 2006. The management team rounds out with CTO Dr. Richard Tolcher and Bruce Garvey (who is a real Bruce).

What we like about this startup:

Well sending vouchers, gift cards and other executables seems so generic. Sending real presents with flower arrangements and cards is so, well 2006. We like the immediacy of Parcel Genie. We also like the fact that Parcel Genie eliminates the problem of “I would send someone a gift but I don’t have their address”.

Exploring their gift store a little more gives way to cool key chains, coffee mugs and even boxes of Jelly Belly’s, I mean who wouldn’t appreciate a box of genuine Jelly Belly’s.

Linkage:

For more on Parcel Genie click here

Download it in the Google Play Store here

Here they are in the iTunes App store

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One Of The Coolest Little Tech Startups Is In Winnipeg Check Out Po-Motion

I was combing through over 5,000 emails from the last week and saw a pitch from Po-Motion in Winnipeg Canada. They said “please help it’s hard for us to get coverage out here”. So after I had them send back a one sentence pitch, and they sent back a full pitch, I was like, ok that’s what Po-Motion is all aboat (intentionally spelled wrong).

Po-Motion is affordable,customizable easy to use interactive floor and wall software. It’s like the Nintendo PowerPad on crack, but really without the pad, or the console. You simply connect your web cam and a projector to po-motion’s proprietary software and you’re literally off to the races, the ice rink, the dance hall, or wherever else your imagination takes you. Just check out this video so you understand what I’m talking about.

PO-MOtion is affordable, customizable, easy to use interactive floor and wall display software which responds to physical user activity. PO-MOtion is patent-pending, and includes a family of products to allow the audience to connect with the client’s message on an emotional level. A combination of award winning design, artificial intelligence, gesture controls, and motion tracking are used to make interactive advertising displays, promotional signage, and educational games for clients like Google Tokyo, Air New Zealand, and museums around North America.

PO-MOtion is designed for consumer grade electronics, making it accessible to a much wider market than competitive products. The Motion Maker customization tools, (available now), and contributor features, (launching next month), are free to try and allow a community of software users to create and share interactive floor and wall content through the PO-MOtion online platform.

What are some practical uses?

– Crazy video game
– an amazing version of Twister
– Dj’s bars and clubs will love this technology
– Science centers, museums and exhibitors
– Amazing golf games
– Amazing inter actives at restaurants and retail (check out the rock pond on their website)

and so much more.

Now here’s the best part, Po-Motion makes it easy for people with minimal programming experience to harness the power of their software. It’s also not bajillions of dollars. They have several very affordable plans for creating what you’re going to do with po-motion.

Lithuanian Startup: GigBasket Moves To US To Launch Job Pinning Site INTERVIEW

The two Lithuanian co-founders behind startup GigBasket have moved to the United States to launch their job “pinning” platform. GigBasket allows users to save job openings to a users GigBasket account from virtually any site in the world.

If you’re familiar with Pinterest and the “pinning” concept of being able to go to any website and “pin” something which then posts that something to Pinterest, then you will automatically understand how GigBasket does the same thing for jobs.

The platform works in two different ways you can add a job manually that you may have seen online, or you can add the bookmarklet to your browser by simply dragging it to your bookmarks bar and then hit the GigBasket button anytime you see a job you find worthy of applying for.

GigBasket allows you to create your own profile after logging in using your linked in account. GigBasket also pulls through data from your LinkedIn account to make keywords for your job search.

Rounding out the simple, but feature packed site are an interview calendar and a dashboard that shows you what jobs you’re “tracking” and what jobs you’ve “applied to”. It makes it extremely easy to remove a job if you’ve either lost interest or the job has been filled.

We got a chance to speak with Eddy Balcikonis, co-founder and CEO of GigBasket in the interview below. He tells us about the GigBasket platform and why he and his co-founder Eugene, moved to America to launch this very useful startup.

Australian Startup: Attendly, CEO Offers Infographic: What Founders Should Be Able To Do

Attendly is an event registration and ticketing platform focused on the needs of event managers and web developers. It’s fully white labeled so the event organizer can adopt Attendly’s technology as their own and let Attendly run the background for any well attended event.

The Melbourne Australia based startups CEO and founder, Scott Handsaker is a world traveler, black belt in Taekwondo, sky diver, and he doesn’t eat meat or fish. More importantly he is an entrepreneur and a founder himself. As such he has developed this inforgraphic to show the things that Founders of any startup should be able to do.

The highlights include, understanding a term sheet, cold calling c-level executives, and writing a novel. Check out the info graphic below and see how you measure up to this interesting infographic.

Linkage:

Check out Attendly here

Help a brother out here

Toronto Startup: Kytephone Is A New Android UI Just For Kids

A Toronto startup, that was also a member of the winter Y-Combinator class, is hoping to lure parents who are equipping their children with Android powered smartphones. The startup is called Kytephone and it provides a new “launcher” or “UI” to Android phones that it is installed on, with parental controls, great kid friendly graphics and access to apps and functions that children of any age could use.

The best part about Kytephone is it’s customization ability. What Kytephone does, is it allows parents to lockdown certain things on their children’s Android phones. In some cases it could be for younger children so they don’t go off and dial 900 numbers by accident and in other cases it can be customized for tweens or teens to restrict access to features that could get them in trouble.

Kytephone allows the parent to customize access to just about every function of an Android phone. For instance Kytephone could be set up for a younger child, say 4-7 who could use the Kytephone UI to make calls to mom, grandma and brothers and sisters. They could also have access to the phones camera for taking pictures, and maybe a few games.

For tweens and teens, Kytephone allows the parents to set parameters for texting times, and even game playing times. When time is up, the child could be restricted to just texting mom and dad, and they may have to wait until the next day to finish that level on that game they played for an hour.

Kytephone has also found that some of their users are installing the Android app onto phones of senior citizens and elderly folks who may not want the bells and whistles of a full fledged Android smartphone.

There are all kinds of companies out there that are offering some sort of software, similar to Kytephone however it seems that in customization and design Kytephone may have a leg up. In fact one of the competitors, Play Safe, has very similar functionality to Kytephone because their founder, Beakit.com reports, was in the Y-Combinator class with Kytephone co-founder Renat Gautaullin.

Kytephone has since graduated out of Y-Combinator and moved back home to Canada where they are part of the RyersonDMZ Incubator.

Overall Kytephone seems a little more customizable and a lot more robust than competing products. It’s also not tied exclusively to a carrier which means down the road if a user got a new Android phone on a different carrier they could just download Kytephone again and reuse it.

Kytephone is available free in the Google Play store. Gautaullin reports that they are working on some premium features, like timers to close off certain types of apps like games, and other things in the pipeline.

Linkage:

Find out more about Kytephone here

Download it here in the Google Play Store

Source: Betakit

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” please help us out if you can

Vancouver Startup Thinkingbox: touching consumers and corporations alike

via thinkingbox.ca

Everywhere Else: Thinkingbox is Vancouver based startup with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles. They bring touch to the advertising space. As they state in their about page, “As a true interactive house, our focus is to provide a 2-way communication for all brands.

[DISCLAIMER] I HATE ADVERTISING, I felt it was necessary to mention that prior to going into this article. I believe it is a necessary evil as it provides us with great and useful information for “free” (ala Google) or provides an income for sites like ours (however modest, in our case extremely modest). I tend to have ad blocking on most of the computers I use and on all my Android devices. The reason is simple – very often ads get in the way of the experience. Either through pop ups that have impossibly small close buttons or by being rudely smartly placed by those who run sites like ours.

I have to admit that a company such as thinkingbox could be what changes my view on some advertising. One thing that has always been missing in most ads, I believe, is the actual ability to truly communicate with the companies. I don’t know if thinkingbox can change that just yet. What they have managed to do is make advertising campaigns more personal by adding interactive elements to in-store displays, billboards, and building full featured digital campaigns. They explain what their focus is, “Serving the advertising industry we focus on alternative media such as Touch Screen Billboards, 2-Way Interactive Campaigns, Touch and Motion Storefronts, Mobile and Tablet Applications and everything digital.”

I have wondered how long until all the different forms of advertising would converge into a unified experience. Thinkingbox is pushing towards that idea. Once they can provide websites like ours with advertising that can really pull our readers in we hope that the (extremely modest) ad income might be able to become something better – like decent.

We will be following up with them and hope to have an interview with the founder Amir Sahba and/or Director of Interactivity Natalie Elbracht within the next couple of weeks. I’ve included videos to some of their recent work. You can find their portfolio here

Starbucks – My Starbucks Rewards Interactive Display :

Starbucks “My Starbucks Rewards” Interactive Display from thinkingbox on Vimeo.

Approach: Thinkingbox implemented a fun, whimsical and engaging interactive application which was prominently featured as a touch-interactive display window. Animated falling stars beckoned passer-byes to engage, touch and explore. Players can make the stars follow their finger, collapse into a gravity well or explode off the screen. Delightful animated details such as motion blur and bouncy spring motion enhanced the whimsical nature of the piece. The application was deployed and ran on both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Another example is from the Nike #KobeSystem brand. In thinkingbox’s words,

Scope: This custom app was featured along side the Nike Kobe VII System basketball shoes at a downtown Toronto Nike retailer. Customers could try out Nike shoes and then watch funny commercials featuring Kobe Bryant himself, explaining the Kobe System to various celebrities. These videos were compressed and optimized into the app that would also capture metrics on how well the app was able to engage customers.

Approach: A rich multimedia experience was required to showcase the Kobe System brand. An iPad was chosen as the medium because of its portable multitouch capability, multimedia options and ease of development.

The Kobe video can be found below:

Linkage:

Thinkingbox

Nibletz: On The Road Again – We like Ramen but we love Dinner For Two

Toronto Startup: Verelo Keeps A Watchful Eye On Your Website INTERVIEW

If you’re a web based startup or small business web uptime is crucial. These days if you’re down for even two minutes, it can cause a world of hurt. A customer can go to your website, see its down and then send that information out to the social web.

If you’re launching a startup it can be worse. Launching a startup is one of the most competitive sports in the world. If you’re down, again only for a short time, new users, competitors and the media can stumble upon a down site and never come back.

There are services out there that can cost hundreds of dollars a month. There are also services out there that are free but will send you spam from every SEO business on the planet. In comes Verelo a service that will monitor and protect your website, providing piece of mind.

We got a chance to talk with one of the co-founders of this Toronto startup. Check out the interview after the break.

Vancouver Startup: Hootsuite Partners With HubSpot

It’s pretty hard for me to think of HootSuite as a startup since I’ve been using their innovative Twitter and social media tool going on three years, but alas they are. The Vancouver startup has announced a strategic partnership with HubSpot.

Through this partnership Hootsuite will directly connect social media to generating, managing and nurturing leads. Twitter has now become a player in the lead generation market. More and more small businesses, startups and even big brands are using Twitter as a tool to attract customers. Some are even using Twitter to sell things, even as large as cars.

“Social media spending is on the rise. We watch as companies invest significant dollars into driving marketing campaigns using social networks as the next marketing platform,” says Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite Media said in a release. “Through this partnership, the professional marketer can finally follow up with social media leads, nurture relationships in real time, and close deals easier than ever before.”

“We built HubSpot software to make marketing easier, and then expanded it by launching the world’s largest marketing software marketplace just under a year ago,” said Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot added in the same release “Of 60-plus apps we’ve seen, HootSuite is building one of the most exciting. Plugging social media management into HubSpot’s end-to-end marketing software makes social accountable for generating leads, customers and true ROI.”

Hootsuite and Hubspot are teaming up together on July 12th to try and break the Guinness Book Of World’s Records, record for the largest webinar ever. The Webinar is entitled “The Science Of Inbound Marketing”. They are actually gearing up to try and beat the HubSpot who earned that record last year when they held a webinar with 31,000 registrants.

Linkage:

Try out Hootsuite it’s been a lifesaver for us, here

Check out Hubspot Here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from Canada

Interview London Startup: ColourDNA Discovery Of Things In A New Way

If you’re a starutp pitching “discovery” these days you need to make sure you have something unique, fresh and disruptive. London based startup Colour DNA is one of those startups.

Colour DNA isn’t about the things your friends like, it’s about the things that you like.

Once you sign up for the service you pick a color that matches your personality or your favorite color (it’s colour because it’s the British spelling). From there you use an icon with your colour and a heart symbol to mark all the things that you love. Sounds simple so far right?

Then through their property algorithms, ColourDNA matches your likes with other likes across the network. All of these places, foods, events and things also get their own colour based on the spectrum of colours that everyone who loves them has used.

So now you get matched with the things you love and ColourDNA matches you with the people you have the most matches with. Then, ColourDNA takes the things those people love that you don’t love and matches you to those things as discoverables.

Now ColourDNA has helped you discover things and share your things with others. Pretty simple huh?

There’s a lot more to it then meets the eye. Ben Poynter, Co-Founder and CEO of ColourDNA told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year:

“We are all about discovery new things to enjoy in life based on your interests.. and a few other factors like your favourite colours. We think the interest graph should be about making it easy to discover new things that you’ll love through personalisation, much like Facebook has made it easier for you to re-connecting with your friends.

“I think Pinterest has done a great job as a beautiful and intuitively designed curation tool. We are less a curation tool, and much more a discovery tool… A key feature for us is that a user doesn’t need to know anyone to get an immediately rewarding experience from their unique actions. We push you personalised recommendations by unlocking how your interest graph overlaps with other users, so that you can discover great new things that you would struggle to elsewhere without having to spend a considerable amount of time endlessly browsing.”

Once you download the app itself you’ll see how all of these different aspects of Colour are relevant in ColourDNA. Check out our video below as well:

Linkage:

Check out ColourDNA at their website here

Here’s more of our coverage of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012

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India Startup: Milaap, CrowdFunded Loaning For India’s People

Milaap is a new startup in India that allows anyone in the world to loan money to people of India for anything from solar power,clean water, building toilets, training and more. What sets this apart from traditional crowdfunding or even donations, is the fact that the money collected is a loan and is actually paid back.

With Milaap’s business plan not only can anyone help make things better for people in India that can’t get traditional loans, but they can recoup their money as well, and then reloan if they wish to.

We got a chance to talk to Shubhashree Sangameswaran about this innovative new international startup, check out that interview below.

What is Milaap?

Milaap (www.milaap.org) is the first online platform that enables anyone from across the world to lend to India’s working poor for causes such as solar energy, clean water, building toilets, vocational and artisanal training. Since it’s a loan, not a donation, you get your money back once the borrower repays.

We believe that while a handout is good, a hand-up is even better. Donations create a huge impact, but their lifespan is short-lived. When you give a loan, on the other hand, you encourage the borrowers to be enterprising and responsible with the money, and if you re-lend the money, it can successively help more borrowers!

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The founders are Anoj Viswanathan, Mayukh Choudhury and Sourabh Sharma. Sourabh and Anoj have their roots in the same university, National University of Singapore (NUS), and have known each other for 6 years. They are all entrepreneurs; Anoj has worked with SKS Microfinance and D.light Design. Sourabh worked on and sold his first start up, MicroAppli, to OnMobile, while Mayukh has worked with Ernst& Young and D.light design.

Where are you based?

We are based in Bangalore, India, and we are incorporated in Singapore. We fund borrowers from all over India though.

How did you come up with the idea?

The idea for Milaap was born when Anoj, one of our co-founders, saw what a difference solar lighting made to underprivileged households in Orissa while working at SKS Microfinance. He realised that one of the reasons such products failed to make a bigger impact was because loans for these were unavailable at low interest rates. He teamed up with Sourabh (who having sold the product of his first startup was looking to build a consumer-facing internet startup for social impact) and Mayukh (who was trying to build loan programs for small scale retailers and kirana shop owners selling lighting products in rural Uttar Pradesh) and started Milaap in June 2010.

So is the idea behind Milaap to do business loans, general loans or is it more like American cash til payday loans?

Milaap focuses on the huge opportunity to weave microfinance around livelihood services. Our loans focus on bringing financial inclusion to over 700 million Indians who live on less than $2 a day: the people at the base of the pyramid. We hope to create sustainable and increased incomes that provide for their unmet needs through our loans.

What is the problem you are solving?

The people we target, those who earn less than $2 a day, find it difficult to access capital for their needs. The cost of capital from mainstream financial institutions is too high for them to afford, especially on loans for amounts between Rs 5,000 – Rs 50,000.

We provide access to affordable credit at almost 50% less than existing credit sources available to such small value borrowers, ensuring that they see value in the service and maintain their credit worthiness. We eliminate the usual wait associated with grants traditionally, and we enable our lenders and borrowers manage their own requirements as and when needed through a transparent and structured system.

Most importantly, we aim to create economic impact. Each Rs. 1 lent on Milaap creates at least Rs. 9 in economic impact, and helps lift families out of poverty.

What is your secret sauce?

Our secret sauce is that we focus on positive stories and creating opportunites rather than focusing on the problems. Our stories are grounded and we believe in steering clear of romanticism.

Share one or two of your great stories about how Milaap is helping the people of India?

We have seen many stories of change on Milaap, and all of them are dear to us. However, if we just have to pick two, one would have to be Sridevi’s story.

Sridevi is a female entrepreneur from Bangalore. She took a Rs. 50,000 loan to expand her artisan business. She started her business 10 years ago, and has since provided employment to the destitute women of Bangalore’s slums. With her loan, she bought new equipment and is now able to employ 60 people in her unit. You can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/QZDA7p0YgxI

We also have Parameswaran, who had no access to a toilet at his home a year ago. He would carry his disabled daughter everyday so that she could relieve herself. Milaap changed his life. He got a loan of Rs. 10,000 to build a toilet, and now, he does not have to carry his daughter to the fields anymore. You can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/2vAYmtmmlQY

What is your plan to scale up?

We ultimately aim to make microlending a part of people’s everyday life. We plan to tap into social media tools to our advantage. In future, you will be able to browse through borrower profiles right from your Facebook account and make a loan.

We hope to make our presence felt in the retail sectors online and offline as well. While you shop online, recharge you cellphone online, or even eat out at a restaurant, you will be able to lend a few dollars to Milaap.

We have also launched payroll lending with a few corporates wherein employees can simply opt to have a small amount from their monthly pay given out as a loan to Milaap. This is simple and hassle-free. Since this is a loan, 100% of the money comes back to them.

Are credit scores and factors as hard in India as they are in the US? What do you need to do to qualify to get a loan through Milaap?

In India the poor do not have collateral to access loans from banks. The rural poor tend to be excluded from financial banking systems and most of their financial transactions happen informally. Usually for large sums of money, they rely on local moneylenders and lending clubs.

Milaap uses social collateral as an approach to overcome this. Group-based loans where individuals serve as guarantee for each other is an approach we employ. Other mechanisms to ensure repayments are making loans in the name of training institute for an education loan and or the artisan training institute for artisanal loans.

What are the safety features to protect the lender?

Milaap follows strict policy measures to cover all risks to our lenders. Our standards and processes have been laid out with the advice of our highly qualified advisors, who have significant experience in microcredit and financial services.

Our field partners are selected after rigorous due diligence to ensure that they have a grounded understanding of the borrowers needs and capabilities. Our field partners have a strong market presence and over three years of experience interacting with borrowers. As a result, we have been lucky to have a repayment rate of 100% to date.

In the off-chance that a borrower defaults on a loan, we offer a 20% first-loss guarantee through our field partner.

What’s next for Milaap?

Our goal is to redefine the way people think about charitable giving, not a one-time write-off but make it ubiquitous and part of our everyday activities, making it more engaging beyond financial transactions.

On the ground, we hope to expand to offer loans in all parts of India and ultimately make essential services accessible to all. Once the basic needs are taken care of, that’s the beginning of real, positive change.

Where can our Indian readers find out more?

They can visit our site, www.milaap.org, and read our blog: blog.milaap.org for all our updates. We are also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Milaap.org and Twitter as @milaapdotorg. Be sure to follow these channels and make a loan!

Linkage:

Find out more about Milaap here at milaap.org

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Toronto Startup: SocialBungy Is A DIY Promotional Platform For Social Media INTERVIEW

Canadian startup SocialBungy is a unique do it yourself platform to hold contests, sweepstakes and other engaging promotions across Facebook, Twitter and even micro-sites. SocialBungy promises not to be a template type tool, but offer all kinds of customizable options to help any size business launch promotions with real gaugeable ROI.

As much as we love reporting about startups “everywhere else” we also love it when we can talk with startups that offer a real benefit to other startups like SocialBungy. If you’re a startup and you’ve been evaluating some of the top level PR agencies out there, you’ve probably found that some of them have minimums per month in the tens of thousands of dollars. With SocialBungy you’ll be able to take your own idea and match it up to the services SocialBungy offers and not break the startup bank.

But SocialBungy isn’t just for the startup. They have programs for startups, small businesses, large brand and even agencies. SocialBungy is backed by the marketing and promotional experience of founder Mike Barwick who spent years in marketing and then launched his own social marketing firm.

“Our goal when launching the company was to make campaigns launched online sexy and engaging again – an area I think other like-minded companies are starting to lose focus on,” says founder Barwick said in a statement.

We got a chance to talk with Barwick more in-depth about SocialBungy, check out the interview after the break.

Microsoft Funds Russian Startup Pirate Pay To Shut Down Bit Torrents

Microsoft has invested in Russian startup Pirate Pay. Pirate Pay was designed to shut down torrent distribution of copyright protected works. This of course has the internet freedom fighters in a tiff, especially because Pirate Pay was able to attract such a significant investor.

According to this report from Torrent Freak, in early tests, Pirate Pay was able to shut down tens of thousands of downloads. Of course in the grand scheme of things, that’s not nearly as many as they would like.

“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

Bit torrent files are costing the movie and recording industry billions of dollars in revenue, despite the fact that physical cd and music media sales are still topping the download business.

Microsoft invested $100,000 into the company. With Microsoft’s investment Pirate Pay was able to continue working with Direktcya Kino to protect the film “Vysotsky. Thank God I’m Alive”. The film is distributed by Sony Pictures. In the case of this project 44,845 transfers were stopped.

Pirate Pay isn’t the first company that is “protecting” studios from torrent files. MediaDefender was actually the first company to take on the daunting task. MediaDefender has recently re-branded itself as “Peer Media”

Also, it appears that Pirate Pays main tactics aren’t original either. They won’t reveal how their technology actually works but Torrent Freak and many other websites and forums say that Pirate Pay floods the torrent sites with fake versions of the protected media, which discourages the downloading of the actual file. While it cuts back the illegal downloads, actual versions of the films actually make it to the torrent sites and then are easily identifiable as such.

The music industry actually started employing this tactic back in Napster’s heyday. While the folks running companies like Pirate Pay think they are solving the problem, they don’t realize that in most cases if a torrent file can’t be downloaded it doesn’t translate to going out to the store to buy the same title.

Source: TorrentFreak

Ukraine Startup: activegift, Never Get The Wrong Gift Again

After reading the headline you’re probably thinking that this Ukraine startup is just another gift registry platform, nope! If you had to give activegift some kind of label, a reverse gift registry may be your best bet.

Co-Founders Artem Sukhoroslov and Max Krylov have created a gift platform that insures you don’t get someone the wrong gift.

Here’s how it works:

Say your birthday, bar mitzvah or Christmas is coming up. You would sign up for activegift and let your friends and family know you have an account there. From there your friends would sign up too. After they sign up they would think of gifts they want to get for you. activegift then anonymizes the gift ideas and sends them back to the recipient. The recipient then gives the gifts a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The recipient can thumb up or thumb down multiple gifts so that they don’t automatically know everything they’re going to receive.

The gift purchaser then gets informed that the recipient has completed their activegift list and with a push of a button they can purchase the gift right there online. See insurance that you will never again buy the wrong gift.

We talk to Artem and Max about activegift and starting up in the Ukraine. Check out the video from TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, below: