International Startup Archives

UK Startup Swogo Launches The “Best Way To Find Products” Starting With Laptops

According to various consumer electronic trade publications the average consumer takes three weeks to make a decision on a laptop. A new UK startup called Swogo is looking to take that decision making time down to seconds.

Swogo says the main hurdle in making a purchasing decision is the way people search for items. Either they have an idea in their mind at what they want to purchase and then go to a consumer electronics retailer for comparison shopping.

Other consumers take to gigantic search engines like Google and Bing. The problem with traditional search engines is that they lead to information and not answers. Sifting through that information and then vetting it against paid ad campaigns can often lead consumers down the wrong path. In this case they either make the wrong purchasing decision or they prolong the decision making process further.

Swogo plans on becoming a recommendation connection engine for many types of products but they are starting with laptops. The site launched on Monday afternoon in the UK with laptops only and plans on expanding their product line and their global reach this year. By the end of 2013 they plan on adding tablets, smartphones, cameras and TVs.

Sure there are plenty of other electronic and gadget sites out there but Swogo says they have an algorithm that aides customers in making their important purchasing decisions,reducing the time down to seconds.

Check out these links:

Swogo is on the web here

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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.

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:

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:

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 Chilean Startup: Imatag

If you own a blog or any other web-based business that produces content than you may want to pay attention to what Chilean startup Imatag is doing. Imatag is making it as simple as it is to tag photos on social networks like Facebook on your WordPress, blogger, or other blogging website,

You may want to tag people from your company, celebrities, dignitaries or others and now you can with the ease and simplicity of Imatag.

The second part of the Imatag platform is a robust analytics set that allows you to track tags and see directly how people are interacting with your web content. This startup based in Santiago Chile and was founded by Nicolas Valenzuela, and Magdalena Maino.

We got a chance to interview Valenzuela. Check out the interview below:
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Israeli Startup: Jinni Is Powering Big National Sites With Pandora Like Movie Engine

You may not have heard of Yosi Glick, the founder of Israeli startup Jinni, but one things for sure you will probably agree with his fundamental principles behind video discovery.

Glick talks in this story with Bloombgerg’s Cliff Edwards about how most video (movie) discovery/recommendation sites have things all wrong. Edwards uses the example of the movie The Usual Suspects. When you watch The Usual Suspects on most video platforms it’s going to recommend Se7en. While both could be characterized as crime thrillers, the audience for Usual Suspects is hardly the audience for Se7en.

Glick’s startup Jinni has put a lot more into discovery when it comes to movies. They provide in-depth algorithms and matching, making it more like a Pandora for movies. Jinni has created an “entertainment genome” that weighs thousands of different parameters to serve up like minded suggestions for movie viewers.

In addition to offering a much more thorough recommendation engine for movie viewers, LG Electronics invested $5 million into Jinni for voice recognition software. The voice recognition software taps into the platform where a user could say “I want to watch a Harrison Ford action movie” and it would serve up Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

LG and Jinni are mum on whether the technology has gone into this next round of smart tvs that the Korean manufacturer is putting out.

They must be doing something right because some of the top companies in the world have employed Jinni’s technology. Best Buy’s movie rental site uses Jinni and Microsoft entered into a deal last September to incorporate Jinni’s software into the Xbox 360 service.

Linkage:

Put Jinni to your own test here at their website

Source: Bloomberg

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Israeli Startup: “Pops” Makes Android Notifications Pop

Remember when downloading ringtones was the hottest thing on the planet? Then after that ringback tones became popular. Well at one time Ringtones was a $7 billion dollar industry world wide. Now, it’s less than a billion. They just went out of style I guess.

Israeli startups have been really good at harnessing the power of the mobile device. Recently we featured SellARing which is an Israeli company that is selling the ringback tone as advertising. Rather than listen to 10 seconds of ringing, you get to hear an ad, get a discount and engage.

This Israeli startup called “Pops” is making notifications more interesting by bringing all kinds of customizable content to notifications. Pops allows you to customize any kind of Android notification that you could possibly have and use content you like to pop up, wake your phone up and alert you of your new message, Gtalk, Text, email or a host of other notifications.

When we talked with the co-founder he told us in addition to major brands like Rovio Mobile’s “Angry Birds”, they are in negotiations with record companies to produce customized “Pops” from users favorite artists.

Pops is free in the Google Play store. Their monetization is through a customized app store where you pick your pops content. A lot of the “pops” are free but there are some premium “pops” available now.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find Pops in the Google Play Store here

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India Startup: MyPurpleMartini Is India’s First Nightlife Focused Social Network

While Saarthank Gupta was studying in the UK he found it very easy to go out and have a good time. Every good club, restaurant and bar had a website and there were a few good portals in the UK to tell you what was hot any given night of the week. When he returned to India, that wasn’t the case.

India does have it’s fair share of good night life including clubs, bars, restaurants and social clubs, the problem is Indian business owners were stuck in their ways. Most of the advertising for Indian nightlife was by word of mouth. Word of mouth is good and free but to really drive patrons to your business you need more than that, especially nightlife.

When Gupta first started MyPurpleMartini it was more of an information site with limited interaction. Since September 2011 they’ve pivoted and become much more social.

“I have always been an avid party goer. While I was in the U.K it was very convenient for us to go out partying to a place we liked going to, as everything there was online. It just took a couple of minutes and we knew where we were heading on a particular night. When I came to India, I saw a big gap when it came to information regarding nightlife/ events/ parties. In India, at that point, it was all about word of mouth publicity. To see the response in the Indian Market, we initially started an information based website but with the phenomenal success in its initial phase and seeing the potential for the social media, hospitality and lifestyle space in India, we re-launched MyPurpleMartini as India’s First Social Networking Nightlife & Lifestyle portal in September 2011. The response has been amazing so far and I hope it continues this way,” Gupta told Indian website Yourstory.com

More after the break
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European Startup: Gambitious Hopes To Be The Kickstarter For Games

While Kickstarter is a great place for projects, it does have it’s drawbacks, which we experienced first hand and why we had to go with Indiegogo for our project. One of the main drawbacks to Kickstarter is international projects. While there are folks building international projects and have no problem delivering perks/rewards to U.S. backers, Kickstarter uses Amazon payments for collection and disbursement, and Amazon payments doesn’t work outside of the U.S.

Well a new European startup hopes to take some of that pain out of European project starters, specifically gaming focused projects. Gambitious is a crowd-sourced funding site for gaming projects. It’s a very lucrative market. With just U.S. based gaming projects over $10 million has been raised and funded using Kickstarter.

While Gambitious has a lot of the same fundamentals as Kickstarter, the company actually lets you buy into the gaming project. Not only did you help fund it but you will receive royalties from it as well, you will in essence become part owner of the game. This could prove to be a great opportunity, especially if you choose to invest in the right games.

As Joystiq suggests, instead of receiving a copy of the game in advance or a lunch date with one of the art directors, you’ll actually own part of the game.

Gambitious won’t be ready for another 4-6 weeks as they are planning an E3 launch.

Linkage:

To learn more about Gambitious click here

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source: Joystiq

Startup Quick Byte: Buddy Beers

For Startup Quick Byte we’ll take a look at Buddy Beers based out of Berlin Germany. Buddy Beers takes being a friend to the next level by enabling people from even countries away to buy drinks for their friends. The concept is pretty easy, you buy a drink for your friend with the app, they’ll then receive an email and link to the app, if using an iPhone. Show the bartender at the bar in question, then hit redeem and you are now just waiting for the bartender to make the drink your friend just bought you.