International Start Ups Archives - Page 8 of 12

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

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”. Here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

Israeli Startup: Managed For Mimi Provides Content Solutions For Your Company Brand INTERVIEW

So you’ve got your own company and everyone around you has a blog. This isn’t a new situation for today’s business owner. More and more businesses are adding blogs with actual content as part of their web presence. Content can be anything from a CEO’s daily ramblings, to content related to their business type.

More often then not, you’ll find great travel blog entries on hotel and airfare booking sites. If your favorite insurance agency has a blog they may talk about events they are going to sponsor and insurance needs. If you run a hunting and fishing store your blog may contain your personal hunting and fishing exploits or tips on the best gear to buy.

No matter what your business is, blogging and social media are some of the best ways to market yourself and your company.

The problem faced by most business owners though is that they are too busy to write a blog every week or every month, much less everyday. That’s where startups like “Managed For Mimi” come in. This Israeli startup helps provide, aggregate and churn out branded content for others’ sites.

We got a chance to find out all about this lucrative new startup, growing up in the Startup Nation. Check out our interview with “Managed For Mimi” below, and no we didn’t find out who Mimi is.

Swedish Startup: Studemia Is A Collaboration Platform For Students INTERVIEW

We are finding more and more great educational, student facing startups, are coming from overseas. Take Prague startup MySchoolNotebook for instance. Their platform allows students to easily take notes, share notes, sync notes and reference notes on and offline, digitally, in a super easy to use platform and a graphically appealing UI.

Today, we’ve got an interview with Swedish Startup Studemia which allows students to collaborate in a Google Wave/Asana type fashion with the focus being on students in either college or high school.

Now you can collaborate with friends and schoolmates in the same class or across the ocean. As they explain in the interview below it’s a seamless sharing platform for students to share resources and keep projects organized.

Studemia allows students to organize projects by project or by course. Also, just about any kind of media can be uploaded to the platform.

They’ve built the platform for students by students. Studemia’s co-founders; Vilhelm Josander, Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark are all students themselves and realized the need for a platform like this, specifically geared towards students, quickly and have been working on it ever since.

Check out our interview below:

Lithuanian Startup: Vidiget, Teach Or Learn Anything INTERVIEW

Lithuanian startup Vidiget is all about peer to peer learning. Whether you have a skill you want to learn or you have a skill you want to teach, Vidiget is the platform to help do that.

In this day and age it’s so hard for people to take courses after work. Now it’s easier to learn and teach things online where you can have 1:1 time with the teacher and at the same time you don’t have to leave the comfort o your own home. Whether you’re looking to learn how to crochet, make biodiesel fuel, the importance of Twitter, how to draw, how to play guitar or any other form of learning and teaching, Vidiget is the platform to do that.

In the U.S. we have California startup TeachMeo doing just about the same thing. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what happens if Vidiget expands outside of Europe.

The idea for Vidiget came when Vidiget’s co-founder Vytis Duknauskas was teaching himself how to program. He wanted to teach himself all kinds of programming but found he could also benefit from legitimate courses. However, what he found was either too expensive or didn’t pass his litmus test for a course he could take and the learn something.

Check out our interview with Duknauskas below:

Swiss Startup: bguided Is Your Social City Guide INTERVIEW

Zurich startup bguided is a social city guide for urban dwellers and visitors. The young but healthy startup is a personalized recommendation engine which combines social graph data mining and machine learning. bguided helps people find, organize, and share the cool places they love all in one place. It’s part discovery, part recommendation and part social local mobile.

We got a chance to have a quick interview with bguided founder Andreas Lorenz, check out the interview below:

Interview With Danish Startup: Rating WorkPlace

Workplace ratings startups are starting to pop up all over the country and now apparently, around the world. Now, thanks to the internet, people who are interviewing for jobs get the opportunity to vet the employer as much as the employer can vet them.

Startups in the United States like California based startup Worker’s Count, allow employees to rate their workplace either by name or anonymously, in hopes that these ratings improve culture and quality of life at the work place. Some workplaces fare well on ratings sites, while others have their dirty laundry aired out amongst millions on the web.

Denmark startup Rating WorkPlace, functions similarly to Worker’s Count. Employees can rate their workplace for culture, benefits, job satisfaction and more. They can choose to do it anonymously or by name. Steven Moller, Rating WorkPlace founder, is hoping that by offering his service, people will no longer work in bad environmens.

We got a chance to interview Moller below. Please note that Moller is from Denmark and English is not his first language.

Canadian Startup: SWVLE Talent Discovery Tournament Style INTERVIEW

Talent discovery is a tough nut to crack. How can you judge whether someone is truly talented or not. There are a few startups in the talent discovery space and most of them are based on recommendations. Now of course recommendations are great, especially if you can get top shelf people in your industry to recommend you, but how can you tell your personal story?

You can make as many self YouTube videos as you would like, and those are great, but the next question then is how much talent do you have over the next guy?

SWVLE, a new startup brewing in Nova Scotia, is tackling that problem in a head to head, video to video bracket system. It’s like an all out talent tournament.

In terms of talent you can be talking about the next marketing rockstar or the next actual rockstar. When you use SWVLE it doesn’t matter what kind of talent you have you can put yourself up against someone else in your space, and let SWVLE work it’s magic.

What magic is that you ask? Well we needed to find out so we went right to the source and we interviewed SWVLE co-founder Sam Doyle. Check out the interview below:

German Startup: Carpooling.com Plans For US Expansion, INTERVIEW

Ridesharing is big overseas. There are a few standout startups working on ridesharing in the United States, including Iron Yard Labs startup RidePost. Established German ride sharing startup Carpooling.com is preparing for a big expansion in the US.

Carpooling.com has grown from 41,000 riders in it’s first year to well over 4 million today. They currently operate in 40 countries with their app available in 7 languages. Carpooling.com allows the rider to select someone to share a ride with based on vehicle, comfort, location and cost. This feature set insures that every rider gets to where they want to go, and how they want to get there. If you need to go 70 miles down the countryside you may want to ride with someone with a comfortable. If you’re just trying to get 15 miles to work you may be ok in a minivan. With carpooling.com the choice is yours.

Carpooling.com sees huge growth potential in the United States market. In their research they found that there’s an average of 3.75 seats available per car (not sure about that .75 part but ok) and over 3 trillion miles traveled per year. Now that startups like couchsurfing.com and airbnb.com have made it normal to share space with complete strangers, hopefully ridesharing startups can do the same for cars.

In our interview below carpooling.com tells us about their ridesharing startup, building a startup in Munich Germany and how they went from mitfahrgelegenheit.de to carpooling.com. Check out the interview below.

Copenhagen Startup: ClickATaxi Going Global Immediately, INTERVIEW

The transportation hailing app space is a hot one. In the United States the clear winner is Uber. They’ve expanded to many major cities across the country with plans for even more. Uber is being hit with a lot of challenges though because they are utilizing hired limousines and sedans rather than taxis themselves and they operate in a gray area when it comes to taxicab regulations. We actually use Uber quite a bit on the sneaker-strappend nationwide startup road trip.

In the UK, Skype backed HailO is the big taxicab hailing app. They recently received $17 million in funding to expand across the pond to the United States where they will go head to head with Uber.

A new Copenhagen startup is looking to shake up the whole space by launching globally all at one time. ClickATaxi is trying to build a network of worldwide cab drivers to make one all-inclusive app. ClickATaxi CEO and founder, Soren Halskov Nissen, thinks it’s ridiculous for travelers to have to have multiple taxi cab apps and then have to remember which countries or which cities each app works in. By taking on the entire world from the beginning they hope to quickly build scale with travelers.

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

Swedish Startup: Jobylon Looks To Simplify The Job Search INTERVIEW

The job space is ripe for a good disruption. Monster has been one of the kings of the industry for quite some time. A new startup in Sweden is looking to innovate in the job space. Jobylon’s founders want to simplify the job seeking process while allowing job hunters more options to connect with employers over things that could matter when looking for their next career.

Jobylon integrates social media, job bounties, and the cultural component of the job search to become a “one stop shop” of sorts for job hunters.

We got to interview Jobylon CEO Aref Abedi who tells us how Jobylon is different than any other job site out there. He also talks to us about Sweden’s startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Prague Startup: Pickerio A Community For Sports Picks

Sportspicks.cz is a Czech startup that offers sports picks for sports betting from some of the top betting professionals in Prague and the Czech Republic. The best sports pickers offer their picks in a premium package of 30 picks at a time so that those who bet on sports can get the best handful of picks to place their bets on.

According to their founder Jakub Chovanec, SportsPicks.cz has done pretty well but he wanted to branch out to the rest of the world. Not only that but he wanted the opportunity to crowdsource picks from the best amateur sports pickers as well. That’s why they created Pickerio.com

Pickerio is a social network of sorts for people that enjoy sports betting. As an amateur sports picker you can write blog posts and add your favorite sports picks to share with your followers and the community. As you prove yourself as a sports picker opportunity opens up for you to start selling your sports picks to other sports gamblers.

Chovanec is relying on the experience of sportspicks.cz to pave the way for a more community based site. While online sports betting is technically illegal in the United States, buying sports picks is not. You could equate this to the several traditional publications that exist out there for sports betters and folks who wager on horses use to base their decisions on.

Pickerio’s unique quality is the fact that amateur sports pickers can actually gain traction and start making money on the side by offering up their picks (provided they are panning out).

We got a chance to interview Chovanec about Pickerio in the interview below:

UK Startup: Mapov Has A New Way To Find Hotels, INTERVIEW

Sure sites look HotelTonight and Hotels.com are awesome places to shop for hotels while on the go by price and features. The problem is you have to toggle between their apps and your maps app when trying to plan out your stay. Even with the ability to drill down on the hotels.com app for iPhone and Android, by address, or venue, to get real distance and directions you need your map.

Mapov makes it easier to find hotels, and the best deals on hotels by adding a hotel layer on top of your existing Google Maps. They also harness the power of TripAdvisor for reviews, and multiple sites for the best rates. It’s like Kayak, meets hotels.com, meets priceline meets Google Maps.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind Mapov in the internet below.

Romanian Startup PagePeeker Provides An Easy Platform For Screenshots INTERVIEW

As an Apple and Mac user for over 25 years I’ve never really had to go elsewhere to find a screen shot. My fingers just inherently go command+shift+4 anytime I need a screenshot and we tidy them up in photoshop. Apparently though, it’s not as easy for those of you using a Windows based machine. Thank goodness for startups like PagePeeker.

PagePeeker is a Romanian startup that makes screen shots and thumbnails a breeze. They bill themselves as the first commercial provider of full page screenshots. Now in all fairness full page screenshots can be tricky even for a Mac. They also offer a superior two step thumbnail generation. Everyone needs a great place to find thumbnails, just take one look at the train wreck of a slide show that our theme creates.

PagePeeker keeps things quick. In fact they are so quick that they keep a current graph on their website that shows the load time for their site, often times with very little load at all.

Does this mean no ones using the service? Well according to PagePeeker co-founder Sorin Vinatoru, they have plenty of customers and their process is so efficient the load time is often next to nothing. This is important in the fast paced blog and websphere.

We got a chance to interview Vinatoru in the interview below:

London Startup: GreenLight, Not Just Another Social Discovery App INTERVIEW

Everyone could use more friends right? Well now that finding friends has turned to social networks and everyone wants to be the match.com for friends, social discovery has become a common household phrase (at least in startup circles).

Most social discovery platforms use your social graph to determine who you need to meet. For instance, before being acquired by Facebook, Glancee would use your likes and interests on Facebook to match you with likeminded people close by. We quickly realized how faulty this process was.

Case in point, I signed up for Glancee, and used it at SXSW. Now for whatever reason, when Mark Zuckerberg got a new puppy named Beast, I liked him on Facebook. Shortly after that when I attended SXSW this year I was matched up with 30 people who also liked Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy. Maybe we should have started a fan club and had a drinking party or something but really that raw data algorithm is flawed.

Gaz Evans, one of the co-founders of GreenLight, tells us that their social discovery platform is better. They actually ask personality driven questions about each user in order to match them up with other users. They also tap the users social graph so some of their likes are built in, but overall this may be a good alternative to other social discovery platforms.

We got a chance to interview Evans and the team from GreenLight, check the interview out below. You better read it quick though, before the next social discovery platform comes along.