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A pair of Slovenian computer programmers, a stonemason from London and a Dutch-American based on a boat in Amsterdam are among the winners of Seedcamp, the week-long event to foster European entrepreneurial talent.

The organisers decided to invest €50,000 in six of the 20 teams that took part rather than five as had originally been planned due to thee quality of the entrants.

Saul Klein, Seedcamp founder, said: "Seedcamp is about helping as many promising companies get off the ground as possible and we felt that for this year six was the right number."

These include Kublax, a personal finance website that not only aggregates different bank accounts and credit cards, but can ensure that each is updated with new transactions automatically. It aims to improve on the kind of services provided currently by Microsoft’s Money software, creating a considerable competitor from day one.

Other winners have similarly bold ambitions.

Rentmineonline, created by Amsterdam-based Ed Spiegel, aims to do for the rental market what eBay has done for buying and selling items.

Continue reading "And the winners are …"

We spoke too soon - the Silicon Valley well that keeps dishing up new Web 2.0 companies appears not to be bottomless after all.

This morning we reported that this year’s "coming out" season in the Valley, where new tech companies and products jostle to get attention, is going to be hectic. Some 150 new companies and products are scheduled to be unveiled at three big showcase events in California over the next six weeks. Bubble, anyone?

We worried about whether there would be enough good ideas to go round, but Munjal Shah of Like.com, who is now safely past this launch stage himself, reassured us: "There are probably enough to cover all three."

Turns out that may be too optimistic. Late yesterday we got an email from O’Reilly, one of the backers of next month’s Web 2.0 Summit, on the hunt for candidates for its own "launchpad" event. While the judges "have received some submissions, they’d like to see more," it said, adding:

Know any cool start-ups with Web-based technology that are looking for funding? Or existing companies that haven’t gone public yet?

Let’s see. I make it about six weeks to the event. All we need to do is find a couple of good Web developers, cobble together a fancy app to run on Facebook, pull an appropriate name from this Web 2.0 name generator, and it’s off to the races. Anyone with me?

Alan Cumming, the British actor, has become internationally famous through his Hollywood role as Nightcrawler, the superhero who helps save the world in the X Men films.

He is now playing a minor role in the salvation of European entrepreneurs by letting his London apartment be used for the Seedcamp party, ending a week of activities for 20 budding start-up teams.

Seedcamp has a long list of famous supporters, including the founders of Skype, the global internet telephony service, and Fon, the world’s largest wifi network supplier, as well as senior executives from Google, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com, came to the event today to share some of his advice at a lunchtime question and answer session.

Among his pearls of wisdom was the recommendation to always raise more money than you think you need and to pitch to the venture capitalists you are least interested in first so that at least you can learn from the experience, even if you don’t get the funding.

For the 20 start-up teams, who hope to walk away with €50,000 of funding, today was the all-important pitching contest, where they got 15 minutes to sell themselves to the Seedcamp investors.

The winners, who will get a further three months of mentoring support as well as the cash, will be announced on this blog on Friday.

Continue reading "Seedcamp reaches its closing stages"

So those who queued for days for an iPhone before its launch on June 29 have now been made to look double doofuses by Apple.

Not only did they wait needlessly when there were plentiful supplies, but a price cut just 10 weeks later means they paid $200 more than necessary.

For those that didn’t really want the phone, but the elements that made it the “best iPod ever” ( Steve Jobs’ description), it’s even worse. They could have saved $300 and got the new 8Gb iPod touch for $299.

The touch looks a winner with its touch-screen and wi-fi that brings internet browsing to a media player.

The new nano also sees Apple finally get it right with its most popular model – it can now play videos, sophisticated games, has more storage, a much better display, a full-metal jacket, better interface, cooler colours and 24-hour battery life for playing music.

The original iPod was renamed the “classic” today, but it is looking more like the “prehistoric” squeezed between the nano and the touch. The only thing in its favour seems to be storage – 160Gb for $349. Jobs emphasised you could store 40,000 songs on it, but who has 40,000 they need to carry around with them?

The only other disappointment in the presentation was the lack of any content announcements – the anticipated availability of the Beatles catalogue failed to materialise.

There were also no new video deals to accompany the nano’s empowerment, only a bitch from Jobs about his row with NBC, which is moving its content to Amazon.

Making an individual ringtone for his iPhone out of John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance”, he said: “That’s for when NBC calls.”

Well, it had to happen. Lulu has just sued Hulu.

Never mind that the former is an online book publishing company, the latter the name just adopted by the new joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. On the consumer internet, truly original - and suitably catchy - names must be getting hard to find.

"We like the idea that it rhymes with itself," a Hulu spokesperson was quoted as saying last week. Seems they didn’t check what else it rhymes with. Can lawsuits from Xulu.com and Boohoo.com be far behind?

Facebook sought to reassure its users today as it announced that their Facebook pictures and user names would soon begin showing up in online search results. By explaining its move to open its site to search engines well in advance, Facebook was attempting to avoid a hubbub like the one that erupted last year after it began displaying profile updates, relationship changes and other personal information in a centralised "news feed" on users’ profile pages.

That move sparked an uproar as users inveighed against what they considered to be an excessively intrusive new feature. Facebook’s explanation - that the information displayed in the news feed was no different than what users could already see by digging through friends’ profiles - fell on deaf ears, and Facebook was forced to backtrack.

Facebook was right, of course - its news feed wasn’t displaying any information that was not already publicly available to users of the site. However, the move created a feeling of lost privacy by removing an important layer of obscurity between Facebook users and their friends.

Google’s move earlier this year to publish detailed street-level images of addresses on its Google Maps service prompted similar concerns. Fans of the service said concerns about privacy were overblown, since Google was taking photographs from public streets. But it wasn’t so much the photographs themselves that concerned some users, it was the aggregation of so many street-level photographs in such an easily searchable form. Put another way, it was the loss of obscurity, not the invasion of privacy, that prompted the most concern. 

Most Facebook and MySpace users are happy to give friends, casual acquaintences, and sometimes even complete strangers access to profiles where they list personal information such as phone numbers, email addresses, or the status of their relationships. The sites themselves encourage this, since it drives traffic and results in more connections between users.

If social networks and search engines wanted to take stronger action to address users’ privacy concerns, they could  require users to opt in to having their profile information shared more widely. But that will not happen unless users demand it, and so long as the ienternet’s emphasis on openness remains, that is unlikely to happen. In the meantime, the onus will fall on users to educate themselves about the risks of disclosing too much personal information. Facebook and other sites provide an array of tools for users to take privacy into their own hands. They might do well to use them, rather than relying on the illusion of security through obscurity.

How bad a dent could the mortgage mess eventually make in the earnings of internet companies? As we reported last week, this has been very much on the internet companies’ radar screens, though the impact seems not yet to have filtered through.

Early estimates point to some wide variations. According to Henry Blodget, some 13 per cent of the revenues of the four biggest US internet companies is at stake.

In contrast, Sandeep Aggarwal at Oppenheimer today comes up with a far less alarming analysis. He reckons the mess will only trim revenues at Google and Yahoo! by 0.6 per cent this year and around 1 per cent in 2008.

Why such a big disparity? It all depends on your guess as to how big a chunk of online advertising the mortgage business represents. Also, Blodget reckons the impact will spread beyond mortgages, as related businesses that are tied to the housing market cut back.

Either way, the mortgage saga will be one of the first tests of how resistant the new search-driven online ad market is to external cyclical shocks.

Martin Varsavsky, the Argentinian founder of Fon, the world’s largest wifi network, loves Europe so much that he has made Spain his home. But he finds himself a pariah in his adopted country.

"A lot of people in Europe think entrepreneurs are thieves," he told participants at Seedcamp today, having dropped in on the week’s events between flights from Madrid to Beijing.

Mr Varsavsky, who attracts 300,000 a month to his blog on entrepreneurship, is no Eurobashing American. He tried living in the US, he admitted today, but said he didn’t like it, and criticised those in the US who still believe Europe as an expensive museum.

This is probably why his words should be taken seriously by those that believe Europe is somehow superior to demonise those who seek to create wealth.

Continue reading "Selling entrepreneurship to Europeans"

The great and the good of Europe’s internet industry came to London today to give their blessing to Seedcamp, a week-long course to give fledgling businesses a fighting chance to make it big.

Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype, the global internet telephony business, Marc Samwer, founder of Alando, the German online marketplace now sold to eBay, and Charlie Muirhead, co-founder of Orchestream, the internet security business, shared the opening panel debate about getting started in business.

Seedcamp itself is a start-up venture with big aspirations. Saul Klein, its founder, told us that he has funding to run repeat its London incubator event several times over the next few years and said he would like to stage Seedcamps in other European cities.

You can see our video from the first day, including interviews with Zennstrom, Klein, and several Seedcamp finalists, here.

A debate has already started on the web about whether this is the right way to stimulate entrepreneurship in Europe, a continent more famous for long holidays than dynamic new businesses. Should not other things be done to change the cultural attitudes that prevent risk taking in the EU?

Continue reading "A new Eurovision?"