International Start Ups Archives - Page 7 of 12

Hong Kong Startup: DataField Lets Your Field Workers Go Paperless

Do you run a business with lots of workers in the field? Are they coming back from collecting data with clipboards full of paper? Well Hong Kong startup DataField is hoping to help change that for you and your company.

DataField is a SaaS startup that helps businesses and enterprise with field workers collect data on forms or surveys quickly, easily and digitally. DataField is the perfect solution for route drivers that collect orders while on their route. It’s also perfect for those workers out there collecting data from customers completing surveys. DataField could also be used for political canvassers that are out door to door trying to get easy questions answered.

No matter how big or small the data sample is, DataField offers a paperless way of collecting that data which then also gives companies the option of getting the data back wirelessly in real time.

DataField solves several pain points which all lead to increased productivity. Say for instance you own a food delivery company. Route drivers could use DataField instead of traditional order sheets. When the delivery person is at the customers home delivering their current food order and taking the next, the minute the new order is complete in the DataField system it can be processed back at the warehouse while the driver is on their way to the next customer.

Traditionally, before systems like this, the warehouse wouldn’t see the order sheets until the end of the day when the route driver returns.

We got a chance to speak with Antoine Dercoche co-founder and CEO of DataField. 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:

Paris Startup: HeyCrowd Lets You Poll And Be Polled INTERVIEW

An interesting new startup in Paris is dealing with the realization that surveys are no fun anymore. Startups like Seattle’s PlayMySurvey are the exception not the rule. Paris startup HeyCrowd is all about polling rather than surveying.

This cool new platform allows users to set up their own polls about whatever they like and then poll the crowd. They can participate as well. Users can also participate in any of the other users polls, and then after they vote they can see where they stack up to the rest of the crowd.

HeyCrowd has positioned their platform and mobile app as “the addictive question game” gamifying the polling process rather than making it a long, lengthy list of questions. It could be looked at as a distant cousin to Quora but the questions are meant to be voting/polling type questions rather than long drawn out, ask and answer questions.

When you go to the heycrowd website or download the mobile app, the service keeps asking you questions that originated from the user base. The questions could go on forever if you’d like. HeyCrowd’s website says there are over 41,000 active questions. You can stay at the top of the page and let the questions keep moving up or you can sneak down to the questions you want to answer. You can answer as many or as few as you would like.

You can also ask whatever questions you would like and give multiple choice answers. Your question immediately goes into the rotation.

So far the questions seem playful enough. Once you answer a question it shows you in a graph how the rest of the user base answered.

We got a chance to interview Matthieu Rouif, co-founder of HeyCrowd. Check out the 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:

Australian Startup: School Hours Helps People Find Jobs Around, School Hours

We’re hopeful that either this Australian startup will come to the United States or someone will do something very similar. School Hours is a new startup, based in Australia that helps Australian parents find flexible jobs. Sure not every person that uses SchoolHours will have kids, but all of those using it will require some kind of flexibility.

After checking out SchoolHours even further you begin to realize that people taking night or even day classes can utilize the platform. People with second jobs can utilize the platform. Even those people that have a hobby they pursue at a set schedule can utilize SchoolHours to find the best jobs with flexibility in mind.

It’s no secret that more and more job seekers are taking culture into consideration when looking for those jobs, and of course flexibility in hours can play a big role in that.

SchoolHours is packed with a variety of jobs and a variety of schedules.

We got a chance to interview the founders of SchoolHours. Check out the interview below.

Israeli Startup: Summer Lets You Easily Look Up Anyone On A Web Page

Summer, a new Israeli startup, has designed a way to easily look up the people who’s names you come across on web pages. Using their Google Chrome extension (coming soon to Safari & Firefox), Summer uses a semantic web engine that crawls the web site you’re on and then allows you to look up those mentioned by name on the page through over 70 different sources.

For example let’s take Mark Cuban for instance. Now we realize a lot of websites may link key figures names’ to previously published articles on their site, however when you use Summer, the plugin will quickly check ESPN, the New York Times and several other sources for information about Mark Cuban. When you click on Cuban’s name in an article on nibletz.com a side wall will pop up giving you information on Mark Cuban in a biography format, other story links and links to people that Cuban is somehow connected with. As the startup continues to grow, more and more information will be added.

Ohad Frankfurt, Lior Degani, Shlomi Babluki and Oz Katz have been friends for nine years and they are all co-founders of this unique new startup.

We got a chance to talk with Summer. Check out our interview below:

Google Acquires German Company Nik Software For It’s SnapSeed Startup

While the Instagram staffers were taking their new offices at Facebook on Monday and Tuesday, Google announced that they have acquired German company Nik Software and with that, their photo sharing startup SnapSeed. Instagram officially moved it’s modest staff of under 20 into Facebook’s headquarters Monday where they will be able to integrate and innovate closely with the existing Facebook team.

Nik Software, which has been around since 1995, catapulted in recent days with their picture sharing app SnapSeed. Forbes recently called SnapSeed “Instagram and a lot more”. SnapSeed has more features and more ways to edit and play with photos in the mobile environment.

Nik Software has a few photo apps out there already but none as popular as SnapSeed. SnapSeed boasts 9 million users, which may seem like very little compared to the 100 million that Instagram says they have. However, SnapSeed’s 9 million users have paid $4.99 for the app, opposed to Instagram which is free.

Parmy Olson at Forbes Magazine suggests that SnapSeed may fit in better with Google+. Google+ has a huge community of semi pro and pro-mateur photographers who have taken a liking to Google+ and the fact that they allow you to save high resolution photos directly to the Google+ network.

Vic Gundotra, the Google executive who oversees Google+ said this about Nik Software “We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone…”

Nik Software’s US office is in San Diego. The terms of the Google deal were not disclosed. It’s unclear whether or not Nik Software employees will immediately move to Mountain View or if they’re staying on at all. It’s also unclear as to whether SnapSeed will remain a stand along product or if it will be integrated into Google’s Picassa product.

In regards to the acquisition, Nik Software said “We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures.”

Linkage:

Check out snapseed here

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Interview With Australian Startup: CheckinLine

CheckinLine is a new Australian startup that gives insight into data from checkins for engagement, promotion and insight. It works by virtually camping out for registered fans and gives access to promotions and engagements to those who deserve it most by way of a daily check-in.

The startup based in Melbourne claims that in their own case studies with their platform the average engagement level in 2011 was 69% which is well beyond the average engagement on any other platform. CheckinLine gives a more accurate picture to their clients because one check in equals one opinion. Their end research is more intimate than most, they liken it to having a one on one conversation with a companies most active customers.

CheckinLine seems to be a lot like SCVNGR where the user completes a task upon check-in rather than a blank check in without engagement. An engaged check-in is much more effective than a non-engaged check-in.

The company describes their camping out philosophy like this: “I’ll hold your place for you, but I need you to come back regularly to let me know you’re still interested. If not, I’ll reward more committed users”.

We got a chance to interview CheckinLine below:

Swiss Startup: RightClearing Simplifies Right Clearing For Artists INTERVIEW

Most musicians want to do one thing and that is, play music. Some want to play bars and clubs, others want to play in bands and orchestras, and others want to record and sell their music. One of the issues that stands in the way of an artists creativity is clearing their rights to their music. After all they’ve created a song, they want to make sure they get credit for it.

That’s where Zurich Switzerland based startup, RightClearing, comes in. They’ve simplified and democratized the market for music licensing by providing the technological infrastructure for musicians and content users to sell and purchase licenses. The entire process from searching for songs to creating and paying for binding legal licenses has been automated. Independent artists and labels can now earn money with the usage rights to their music. Advertisers, filmmakers or private persons can license songs for their own use with only a few clicks.

When you think about copyrights and music you may not think to the Swiss however RightClearing is planning a global rollout and founder Philippe Perraux is convinced that they have a platform in place that will become a staple in any artists career. When Perraux graduated law school in 2001 he knew he wanted to continue working on copyright law. What he ran into was an old antiquated system that needed innovation. Now, 11 years later he has that system.

We got a chance to find out more about RightClearing in the interview below:

Austrian Startups: GeoPieces GeoTag Your Content On A Map Of The World The Way You Want

An Austrian startup called GeoPieces has come up with a geo-tagged map based platform to share all of your worldly content. Whether you’re traveling to London to take in a football game or Barcelona for a quick romp through Spain you can now take the content that you produce and put it all together on GeoPieces map of the world.

The idea is great for world travelers or anyone who wants to keep a geo based record of everything they’ve done. The advantage to a site like GeoPieces over traditional check-in and discovery apps is that you can share as much or as little as you want, whenever you want and the way that you want. No other site gives you the freedom and flexibility to do this quite the same way that GeoPieces does.

You can also explore the map and see the things that other users are publicly sharing. You could end up finding the next great piece of art worth checking out or a truly great view on a sandy beach somewhere around the world.

GeoPieces was founded by Erich Drazdansky and Jorg Eibl two entrepreneurs who keep the same crazy founder schedule that startups in the states typically keep. Work, no sleep, more work. That shows in the UI of GeoPieces.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind GeoPieces in 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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Move Over Rosetta Stone, Prague Startup: SpaceTeacher Has A New Way To Teach Languages

When it comes to language learning Rosetta Stone has one of the best reputations and best success rates in town. Well in Prague, David Brhel, Milan Mahovsky and Kamil Mahovsky are three entrepreneurs who hope their startup SpaceTeacher becomes the easiest to use language learning platform in the world.

One of the easiest ways to describe SpaceTeacher is to say that they are crowdsourcing for language. They hope to become the ultimate platform for language learning by crowdsourcing both the content and the teachers.

Co-founder Brhel says that the company is still bootstrapping it but that angels in the area are starting to show interest. The startup is also growing at area accelerator StartupYard.

The core reason for developing SpaceTeacher is that in the CzechRepublic they offer a “one size fits all” type of learning. The shocking statistic is that 79% of the population is not fluent in a foreign language.

We got a chance to talk with Brhel in the interview below.

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: