International Start Ups Archives - Page 6 of 12

Australian Startup Releases New Dual Screen Video Platform For Event Organizers

If you’re throwing a big event, like we are, than you know that the audience at home is just as valuable as the audience on site. Event organizers are constantly looking for the best way to stream their events online and give at home viewers a similar experience to what those on site are seeing.

Australian startup Cogent has launched an exciting new video platform, primarily targeted towards live events. The platform called Eventer, is a dual screen video platform. This allows viewers at home to partake in the direct feed video from the stage and possibly watch the audience or a slide presentation at the same time. There are currently other video startups working in a similar space, but none so focused on events themselves.

Eventer has already been tested in Australia and in the United States. The San Francisco Music Tech event was the first US event to test out Eventer. The event’s co-founder Brian Zisk said that the event saw viewers at home staying engaged for 40 minutes at a time. In Australia, the Sustaining Women In Business conference also tested out the technology and it worked well for them too.

The unique platform delivered by Cogent and Eventer allows viewers to see everything in real time. Viewers at home can see the slide transitions and any special effects that may be happening on stage.

We got a chance to talk to the team from Eventer, check out the interview below.

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.

Paris Startup AIRTAG Is All About Mobile Shopping INTERVIEW

A startup in Paris called AIRTAG is offering a complete suite of mobile shopping tools for retailers and e-tailers. The startup was founded by Jeremie Leroyer and Cyril Porteret who also cofounded Haiku which was sold in 2004 for $10 million euros.

AIRTAG’s complete suite of products has every facet of mobile shopping covered. AIRSHOP enables shoppers to order and pay in advance for groceries and fast food using their mobile phone. AIRFID is the rewards and loyalty card arm of the company. AIRPASS is a mobile wallet of sorts adding loyalty cards, gym keytags and even transportation passes. AIRTAG kit is the companies development tool kit for developers to interact with their PayPass applications.

The company’s stable of clients already includes McDonald’s, McCafe’, Reebok, Dior and many other globally well known brands. This has prompted AIRTAG to deploy offices throughout the world including a recently opened office in New York. They plan on adding partnerships in both the US and Canada from the New York office.

Mobile shopping and payments have grown into a huge industry and right now it’s still anyone’s game. Google got off to a very rocky start with Google Wallet. Three of the four major US wireless carriers teamed up to help create ISIS an alternative to Google Wallet which was supposed to have seen a larger national footprint heading into this years holiday season.

According to the co-founders of AIRTAG, Japan is light years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to allowing smartphones to manage people’s lives. Since selling their first startup to Japanese investors both Leroyer and Porteret have spent a lot of time in Japan where they noticed everyone used their phones for everything including bus fare, key locks, and payments. AIRTAG’s hope is to help replicate that system across the world.

We had a chance to interview the AIRTAG team. Check out the interview below.

Israeli Startup: Hopflow Launches Beta For Content Sharing Platform

Hopflow is a new content discovery and sharing platform based in Tel Aviv. The startup was founded by Erez Pilosof the cofounder of Walla which is Israel’s largest internet company, equivalent to the likes of Yahoo in the United States.

With Hopflow users are served up content “automagically”. The platform automatically matches users to content that they would like and allows the end user to stream that content. Unlike other socially driven discovery platforms, Hopflow doesn’t require the user to manually follow other users. Their aggregation algorithms find and serve up the content with very little extra input needed.

On Tuesday the startup announced they’ve entered into beta on both their web and mobile platforms.

As consumers seek simpler ways to receive and share more relevant and personalized content, traditional aggregation platforms and social networks have been slow to evolve. Hopflow saves users time and effort, as well as improves content discovery by eliminating the need to manually find and follow generalized sources and filter through uninteresting or irrelevant information.

Hopflow’s network also provides a new ecosystem where content creators can break through existing online social barriers and get discovered by like-minded people. Unlike with other social networks, Hopflow doesn’t require content creators to get people to manually follow them, because every post they create and share is automatically distributed to relevant users in the Hopflow community.

Hopflow’s ‘automagic’ technology aggregates and organizes news, blog and multimedia content from all over the social web and automatically presents it through a simple, image-rich platform according to specific topics. Users can then easily re-hop (share) to their social platforms or ‘like’ the content they receive. The platform is designed to continually learn from this activity to fine-tune and deliver an even more targeted and personal experience.

Of course they realize that social discovery and aggregation is by far a new idea, but with the Pilosof behind it, we’re sure it’s different.

“The social web is full of content platforms that force people to manually follow and filter through sources and information. In this contextual age, people want tools that are simple and provide targeted information,” Pilosof said in a statement. “We believe that discovering and sharing stories about the things that interest you shouldn’t be tedious and time consuming but rather fun and easy. Hopflow eliminates unwanted noise and allows users to sit back and enjoy a beautiful image-based ‘flow’ of relevant content outside of their current social networks.”

Added Mr. Pilosof, “At some point, we’ve all experienced the frustration of being overwhelmed with too much information on our social network feeds. A portion of the content we receive when we follow individual sources is personally interesting, but a large amount quickly becomes ‘noise’ that forces us to manually organize the information or eventually decide to un-follow the source. Hopflow completely rethinks the follow model and aims to lead a paradigm shift based on following interests.”

Linkage:

Check out Hopflow here

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Denmark Startup: Story Planet Wants To Become A Global Story Telling Platform

At this day and age there are several different platforms to get your own content out to the internet. There are social media outlets like Twitter, that allow you to post short form content. There are places like Facebook which allow you to share longer, more intimate content. There are self blogging platforms like Tumblr. And, for those who like to write a lot on a specific topic there are full form blog platforms like Blogger and Word Press.

A new Denmark startup called Story Planet, is hoping to become a global platform for story tellers to mesh all of their media together and tell their story. From what we can tell Story Planet rests somewhere between Tumblr and Blogger/Word Press. It’s going to be the perfect place to have longer, more media rich blog or content offerings without the formality often associated with a Blogger or Word Press blog.

Story Planet is taking their idea to become a global story telling platform seriously, they already have a team presence in Copenhagen, Singapore, Brighton, and New York City. This gives them an accurate pulse of several startup areas and a way to push their product out on not just multiple countries, but multiple continents.

We got a chance to talk Bjarke Myrthu co-founder of Story Planet. Check out the interview below.

We Talk Mobile Payments & Brazilian Startup Culture With 500 Startups’ UniPay

We’re continuing our series of interviews with the latest class of Dave McClure’s world famous 500 startups. One of the reasons we love 500 startups is because of McClure’s commitment to startups in and outside of the valley. Sure the top secret lair and command center for 500 startups is based in the valley but McClure targets startups anywhere and everywhere. He’s also known for his geeks on a plane startup events that are literally all over the world.

Fitting right into McClure’s rockstar requirements is a mobile payments startup from Brazil called UniPay. Mobile Payments definitely aren’t new. Brazilian startups aren’t new either, however when you put them both together it does become a new concept. This is partially because credit card payments in Brazil are a beast in themselves. Unipay’s co-founder Tahiana D’Egmont tells us in the interview below that because of bureaucracy, high fees and an ambivalence with trust that runs in the Brazilian culture, electronic payments are a tough nut to crack.

UniPay is addressing the needs of those smaller merchants that don’t have access to credit card processing. If Payfirma is the “Square” for Canada, than UniPay is aiming to become the Square for Brazil.

Check out our interview with D’Egmont below. She tells us all about UniPay but she also tells us about Brazilian startup culture. One of the things we found most interesting is that most Brazilians are deathly scared of their ideas being stolen, and “fail fast” doesn’t work in Brazil, just yet because Brazilians are afraid of failure.

Read the interview below, D’Egmont does remind us that she’s new to the states and he’s still learning English.

Romanian Startup Appscend Streamlines App Building For Performance

A Romanian startup called Appscend is already one of the most popular app development houses in the country. They have 250 apps published in the Google Play and Apple iTunes App Store already. The startup employs 12 people at their home office in Romania and they plan on expanding this year into the US (New York) and Latin America (Chile).

Appscend offers their app development customers a more holistic approach to app development with the ability to go multi platform/cross platform and native at the same time. They’ve also taken the best pieces out of over 100+ development tools and streamlined them with a focus on performance when building out apps on any platform.

Sebastian Vaduva, Appscend’s CEO and co-founder told us:

finding the right tools for each phase of the app’s lifecycle is by far the most time intensive and resource consuming process for businesses trying to embrace mobility. This is the reason most of them fail or they postpone the process.

Vaduva says that with his companies “Ignite Markup Language” they’re able to produce and develop apps up to ten times as fast with no learning curve. They also provide a cloud based content system that Appscend customers can access directly giving their customers the advantage of being able to update their app without needing the original developer’s help.

Check out our interview with Vaduva below.

Berlin Startup: Versus IO, The Comparison Platform, Adds 240 Cities To Compare

The internet is great for comparison shopping. Every major online retailer like Amazon, Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse and everyone in between, offers some kind of side by side comparison of products. Just about every time I go to make a major electronics purchase, I comparison shop something online.

Well Berlin startup Versus IO is a comparison platform for just about anything in the world. Sure you may want to compare the iPhone 5 vs the Samsung Galaxy S 3, or the Galaxy Nexus vs the iPad Mini. But what if you wanted to compare other things? What if you wanted to take a European vacation and wanted to weigh France vs Italy. Well Versus IO allows you to do that comparison too.

Versus IO added 240 cities to compare using their platform. Just go to their website here and enter each of the two cities you want to compare (as seen below) and voila, instant comparison.

While the site is still in Beta the folks behind Versus IO plan on continuing expansion in to a wide range of verticals. Versus IO has been set up in such a way you should be able to compare just about anything.

Adding comparisons for things like hotels, cars, airlines, department stores and other things people use everyday will definitely make Versus IO a goto site for information. Review sites like Yelp are great but with Versus IO you can get the comparison info and do your own research based on the things you’re looking for.

With their new city comparison Versus IO used over 100 factors in their criteria for comparison. Including:

Education – universities
Crime rates – murder
Climate
Infrastructure – airports, stations
Safety – smoking ban
Economy and business – GDP
Culture – museums, art galleries
People – population, salaries, ethnic groups
And many more…

The results screen is graphically rich but once you drill down you can see where each city met in terms of those criteria factors. For the comparison that we tried, Baltimore vs Caracas, we saw that Baltimore was “Pro” for 17 reasons and Caracas was “Pro” for 12.

The comparison actually took milliseconds but the information returned was plentiful. The top reason to choose Baltimore over Caracas was the higher proportion of women. Baltimore is 53.4% women where Caracas is only 50.5%. Versus IO also found that there are 72.37% more Facebook users in Baltimore than Caracas. Surprisingly, we found out that Caracas has more murders than Baltimore.

Versus IO isn’t just a cute expansion on the hot or not concept, it does exactly what the founders say it does.

Now that they’ve implemented cities and made a step away from traditional electronics comparisons they have plans to increase their comparison engine to 640 verticals. In the coming year Versus IO plans to add real estate, food, credit cards, TVs, banks, plastic surgeons and motorcycles.

Linkage:

Go try it for yourself here

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500 Startups Unveiled Today: Meet Australian Startup Kickfolio The Easiest Way To Test iOS Apps

The startups that were selected to convene in the top secret 500 startups lair in Mountain View California this fall were revealed today. Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups along with Paul Singh have assembled another cohort of ass kicking, startup crushers, including Australian startup Kickfolio.

The rare breed of talent chosen to undergo the top secret 500 startups program come from all facets of the tech world. There are publishing startups, web tools, integrated browser plugins, analytical startups and even developer resources. That’s the category that Kickfolio fits in.

McClure and his team pick startups for a variety of reasons, undoubtedly the fact that this team has a co-founder named Diesel, must play into the flavor of startup monsters McClure is currently working on. Couple that with the fact that these Aussie founders swear Kickfolio is the best way for developers to test iOS apps and you have a recipe for startup inhalation.

We got a chance to talk with that particular founder, yes the one who goes by Diesel. Check out our interview with Diesel Laws below.

Create Your Content, Build Your Brand With Halifax Startup eOLIO

A new startup has sprung up in the town of Timberlea Nova Scotia, just outside Halifax. The startup, called eOLIO, is a content creation, sharing and brand management tool that helps connect people with great content to businesses. The idea came from founder Traci Johnstone after she went on the job hunt and realized there wasn’t a good product online that showed her perspective employers the breadth of her creativity.

Branding, social and web identity are of paramount importance in today’s job race. Everyone has great resume items that show themselves off in the best possible light. How do you translate that to what you can do from your inner depths? Where does your creativity fit into all of this.

Naturally, most employers across the world vet candidates online, through Google searches and through social media. With eOLIO they can also see your creativity. The platform also directs businesses and perspective employers to what you want them to see first.

“eOLIO is about personal branding and our digital reputations — because how we represent ourselves online matters.” Johnstone said to us in the interview below.

As Johnstone prepares to launch her startup at the end of November, she took a few minutes to speak to us. Check out the interview below.

Australian Startup Yolpme Is Crowdsourcing Social Media For Jobs INTERVIEW

With the recent surge in job related startups, founders are getting more and more creative with resources for recruitment. We’ve seen great socially charged recruiting and job startups like Barrel of Jobs in Washington DC. We also recently interviewed Employtown in Denver, they offer a reverse job market that’s definitely worth checking out.

Today we’re bringing you the story of Australian startup Yolpme. Yolpme is a new recruitment platform that is combining crowdsourcing with social networking. Yolpme uses crowd sourced referrals through targeted media channels to find the best talent for companies.

To increase the value of the candidate and to make placement more likely, Yolpme offers referrers a referral fee of 3-5% which means that on a position that pays $100,000 the referrer could see a reward of $3,000. This is a value proposition to the referrer, definitely worth checking out.

Yolpme is also working to put a ranking in place for referrers so that referrers can’t just spam open positions. Companies will be able to see the ranking for the person giving the referral which will reflect on the potential quality of the candidate.

Right now Yolpme is available in Australia but they are hoping to expand to the US and Europe next year. We got a chance to talk with the team behind Yolpme. Check out the interview below.

Walk Thru’s Made Easy With Israeli Startup WalkMe

By a show of hands how many people out there have “walk thru” still on their to-do list. Everyone wants to do a great walk thru for their company, business or startup but many people have the hardest time getting this project off the ground. Either they don’t think they have access to the resources to create great “walk thru’s” or they don’t think they can afford it.

Well a startup in Tel Aviv called WalkMe is about to solve both of those problems for everyone.

No matter how easy or complex your task is, WalkMe wants to provide you with the tool to create an easy step-by-step “Walk thru” guide to everything.

Walkme is a simple to use plugin. Once you have it installed you just move about your screen in the natural steps it takes to do whatever process you want to teach. As you begin to complete each step you write what the step is, how to do it and add your text balloon and move on to the next step.

You can easily create “walk thru” instructions while you’re creating your WalkMe walk thru.

Anything from how to complete an order, to how to change your password, can easily be explained using Walkme. If you want to show someone an easy to use trick on your own website, you can create a WalkMe “walk thru”. Basically if you can do the task you want to teach, and if you can use a mouse, than you’re in business.

We got a chance to talk to the team from WalkMe about their easy to use tool. Check out the interview below:

Meet Romania’s Mobile App Developer Referral Startup: BigBangJobs

Job boards are a dime a dozen these days. The job board was a space once owned by just two online companies, Hot Jobs (Yahoo) and Monster.com. Now there are job boards for just about everything and everywhere. It’s innovative new career minded sites, and category specific platforms like, WorkForPie and Path.to that are prevailing in the United States.

But what about outside the U.S.?

Well Romanian startup Big Bang Jobs is trying to solve the problem of connecting mobile app developers to people hiring mobile app developers in a way that cuts out a lot of the clutter found on more traditional websites.

BigBangJobs is a two way street. They function as a place where great mobile developers can find exciting new projects to work on, and where startups and established companies can find the perfect developer for their project. BigBangJobs is a mobile web developer community.

Unlike many other startups, BigBangJobs has a revenue model in place. After a quick vetting process, those developers that wan’t to participate in the program are admitted free. Those companies listing projects pay a one time fee of $99. While that may seem a little steep, BigBangJobs is looking to produce real results and get mobile app developers to work as quick as possible, in situations they want to be in.

We got a chance to talk to the founder of BigBangJobs, check out the 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: