Analysis of the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 reveals the startups that have accelerated fastest during the last three months. This is a quick guide to the hottest European startups of Q1 2010, based on YouNoodle's success-prediction algorithm.
Voddler Billed as the Spotify for video, the Swedish company's mission is "to provide high quality home entertainment on-demand". Currently only available in its home country, it's basically a VOD site that will compete with the likes of Hulu and SeeSaw. They claim to have over 400,000 members and streamed 1 million films in January. Their catalogue carries 839 movies, 192 TV series and 143 documentaries. The service is ad-supported, which could lead them into the same difficulty plaguing other video and audio streaming services.
Their TC Europe/YouNoodle score increased a stagerring 92% to 50 points in Q1.
Graze The service allows "British office workers to improve the way they eat at work. They can order tasty food online and get it delivered to their desks." Each box costs from £2.99, including delivery. The company raised £1.4m in funding from Octopus Ventures in July 2009 and has William Reeve (LoveFilm etc) as a non-exec director.
It's score is up 57% to 28.
aka-aki networks Winner of two Webby Awards in 2009, this Berlin-based mobile social networking service "lets users discover and connect with members as they go about their days." The idea is that you can connect with other users who are in proximity to you. An interesting take on location-based services, more real-time than FourSpam or Gowalla. It's totally free, including the iPhone app. The startup has received an undisclosed sum of funding from Creathor Venture.
Up 56% to 31.
Songkick A graduate of Y Combinator, Songkick is the online database of concerts for music enthusiasts. The service allows you to track your favourite artists and venues, keeping you informed of any new gigs that are happening. It can scan your iTunes library to make it quick and easy to load your data. It then has links to ticket vendors, from whom it takes a commission. The company has a total of $4.5m of funding, including $3.5m in Series A from Index Ventures.
Up 44% to 39.
uberVU In these times of social media ROI, uberVU tracks the buzz from all over the Web around a story in near real time. Its service is on a subscription basis, beginning at $30/month for its basic offering. The startup was a winner of Seedcamp 2008 and has secured a further €400,000 from Eden Ventures.
I have deleted my Foursquare account. Not being able to log in was a problem that was limiting the experience. The bug arose soon after I discovered that I was the first to check in at my gym. So the sweet glory of becoming mayor of my sweat-room was snatched from under my pinkies by a piece of dodgy programming.
The idea behind Foursquare (for my less geeky readers) is that it's a kind of location-based social networking iPhone app that enables discovery. As well as collecting 'badges' and gunning for 'mayorships' all over town, you can share and receive suggestions for things to do in different places.
And the best bit, you can ping your friends and your whole Twitter cabal. My Tweetdeck increasingly tells me that X is at [pizza chain], Y is at [coffeeshop chain] and Z is at [train station].
Sorry, Rich!
Moonfruit was lambasted for its marketing campaign and yet somehow we're allowing Foursquare to fill an otherwise interesting, useful and entertaining stream of tweets with individuals' mindless attempts to become mayor of their local crack house. There is no value to your entourage of these tweets but I don't want to stop following these otherwise interesting people.
Foursquare says to establishments, look, you can offer special discounts to the mayor, or anyone who checks in. That will encourage people to keep coming and to check in more often in order to get a cheap cardboard pot of frothy warm brown milk.
That's not a novel business model, which is why I think it has real potential to thrive. In the meantime, I'd really like an end to the growing Fourspam.
Ines connected with Amina, 2007 from the series 'Connected' by Catherine Balet. Two teenage girls, two iPods, a phone, a Mac and, out of frame, a television. Welcome to Generation iPad.
The picture, which won third prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008, tells of a whole new way of consuming media (as well as revealing an emerging social culture where media consumption is dominant over interpersonal activity - but that's for the behavioural psychologists to explore).
Despite 15 years of supposed digital democratisation, the millions of videos on DailyMotion, pictures on Flickr and blog posts Dugg, the majority of the content on the Internet is produced 'professionally'.
Meanwhile, an article by Jakob Nielsen in 2006, corroborated in a study by Rubicon Consulting in 2008, showed that 99% of web users are either silent lurkers or just occasional contributors, while
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.
That leaves the vast majority of people to consume content. For Generation iPad, the media is not experienced as it was by their parents, choosing between print, radio and television, by accessing simultaneously two or more types of content by means of 'tech' devices.
This is where the iPad comes in. It is not designed for those who know their Drupal from their Joomla, it's for the 99%, who have no idea what a content management system is anyway. The iPad is for Generation iPad, the middle-class, educated late teens and early twenties, who have grown up listening to music, playing games, chatting online and watching TV simultaneously.
SeeSaw has been a long time coming. It's what the BBC's Project Kangaroo became after it was forced by the Competition Commission to sell it off and Arqiva acquired it. Now in beta, it's due to go live to the public in the next few weeks.
The first impression is of something that has been thrown together very fast. The typeface is unpleasant and the layout is difficult to navigate. What is most obvious immediately is that there is very little content on the site. I can only expect that much more will become available before public launch and that it will continue to increase thereafter.
Programme discovery
The challenge for SeeSaw is going to be in programme discovery. The intention of Project Kangaroo had been to make available the entire archives of the Beeb, C4 and Five. If it becomes reality, it is a huge amount of content to sort and a very difficult task to display it to the viewer in a meaningful way.
At the top of the page is a 'carousel', a style of menu deployed by many of the Video On Demand (VOD) players, including Joost, Hulu, Livestation and the iPlayer. SeeSaw are using it to highlight a small amount of featured content. There is a challenge to keep this fresh and interesting for the individual viewer and there is currently no way for the individual to provide preferences.
Below the carousel is a box offering catchup TV. Although it does not specifically state it, this section has links to programmes that have recently aired. There are only seven shows on it, all from Channel 4 properties. This leaves big questions about the role of SeeSaw in catchup television - as opposed to archival - and where the content is going to come from: just Channel 4 or will it include Five and BBC material? Kangaroo was supposed to carry anything older than what is available on the iPlayer.
The box beside it "If you really love TV..." seems to me totally redundant. I cannot understand its purpose. There are three further boxes below: 'Classic comedy'; 'The best years of your life?'; and 'Critically-acclaimed modern drama'. These categories seem to be entirely arbirtrarily chosen and the content within them is unexpected. Girl Who Cries Blood is in 'The best years of your life?'. The category does have a '?', I admit.
Meanwhile the top navigation bar has: Categories, with a limited number of them; Channels, containing BBC, 4oD and Five, only the last of which is a channel; and a search box. In principle this makes sense but the sub-menus need to be extended.
Choosing what to watch
Clicking on a channel provides series names, showing by default 'Featured'. These appear to be a random assortment. It is not clear whether these will remain constant or how they will be updated. There is, once again, no option for individual filtering. You can select by A-Z.
I chose the first programme, The Line of Beauty. The programme page is quite nicely laid out but also the easiest part of the interface to get right. There is a video screen at the top and below are the programme details in a column next to an episode menu. There is some guidance both on the screen itself and at the bottom of the page referring to strong language and scenes of a sexual nature.
On clicking to play, a guidance note pops up, asking me to confirm my age. In small type there are links to setting up parental controls and 'find out more' presumably about parental controls. The parental controls, if they're going to be part of the service, should be much more evident. There are links to them in the footer but even if you scroll down, you might not see the reference in the tiny writing.
There are frequently two ads followed by a programme sponsor. This is frustrating but I doubt that SeeSaw will fill all of its inventory if the service takes off, meaning that double spots disappear. Clicking on an ad, hoping to pause, I was taken to the brand's page that should make sense commercially but these sorts of click-through deals are few and far between, largely unproven to generate revenue for publisher or advertiser.
Video streaming experience
You click to play and the lights go down. I like this. It's not a novel idea - Hulu has it, for example - but it's good. Moving your mouse brings the lights back up.
There are frequently two ads followed by a programme sponsor. This is frustrating but I doubt that SeeSaw will fill all of its inventory if the service takes off, meaning that double spots disappear. Clicking on an ad, hoping to pause, I was taken to the brand's page.
Some sites have toyed with adaptive bitrates, which means that you get a quality of stream that adapts to your downstream bandwidth, as it varies. It is possible with SeeSaw to fix Low, Medium or High bandwidth by moving the mouse over the screen when the ads have finished and the programme begins. These should just be under the screen, as should the volume and 'full screen' controls.
The screen size is fixed, unless you opt for full screen. This is a weakness. I particularly like the way Zattoo manages screen size, so that you can set it to whatever you like, regardless of the bandwidth that you have chosen.
That said, the flash-based video is of good quality and consistency, even at low bandwidth.
Final words
I'm left disappointed by SeeSaw. Arqiva bought the assets of Project Kangaroo but it isn't entirely clear what they picked up with that bargain. The user interface is poor. The available content is minimal, although I expect that is temporary. There are no social aspects, even just for sharing what you're watching on Facebook, let alone a proper integration with it or Twitter. Project Kangaroo was expensive to develop.There are some very significant challenges for SeeSaw and it appears from the beta that there is still a lot of work to do.
Radiotjänst, the Swedish equivalent of the UK's TV Licensing Authority, has come up with a new viral video campaign to get people to pay their broadcasting fee. I can't imagine anyone will be persuaded but it's great that you can be the hero in your own video.
Here in the UK, a Conservative government, should they win the general election, is likely to scrap the TV Licensing Authority and fund the BBC through general taxation. This change would save around £150m in collecting costs per year.
I've no idea how much Radiotjänst paid for the viral campaign. If you know, please share!
I'm starting up an Internet venture - so I keep an eye out on the London tech scene. Here I air my views on digital media and anything else techy or entrepreneurial. More...
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