Alex Guest: YouNoodle

Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Hottest European startups of 2010 Q1

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.

Up 39% to 53.

Friday, 2 October 2009

Fastest Five Risers and Fallers in European Tech

For a while I've been staring at TechCrunch Europe's Top 100 chart. Powered by YouNoodle, this chart suggests which start-ups are hot and which are not. See the TechCrunch article for an explanation of how it works.

The Hot Handful

1. Monitise (35/100, up 14.6). Set up by a highly experienced team, London-based Monitise claims to be the world's leading mobile banking and payments partner. Founded by Alastair Lukies (CEO), formerly co-founder of epolitix.com, and Steven Atkinson (CTO), who has held senior positions at Vodafone, Informix and the MoD.

2. Spotify (76/100, up 9.4). Needing little introduction, this music-streaming darling of the digerati has been shooting up the chart recently, following news of the $50m investment by Wellington Partners and the Li Ka Shing Foundation. It's still below Deezer, it's French counterpart, separated by just 3 points.

3. SoundCloud (56/100, up 8.2). German SoundCloud is an online platform for music professionals to collaborate, promote and distribute their music. The company raised €2.5m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures earlier this year.

4. Distimo (15/100, up 7.1). Founded just this year in the Netherlands, Distimo provides analytics for mobile applications, across app stores. They are generating good media coverage with a clever PR strategy, including producing reports on the state of the mobile app sector. Although at the lower end of the league, Distimo is the fastest mover in percentage terms (up 89%).

5. Playfish (88/100, up 6.1). Second in the TechCrunch Europe league, London-based Playfish is one of the top creators of free games for players to interact and compete on social networks.

The Cold Clutch

1. Adconion (41/100, down 23.6). The biggest mover in number terms, Adconion Media Group is a performance-driven online advertising network. The company had a great year in 2008: it ranked second by comScore's global ranksings; and pulled in an $80m Series C round from Index Ventures and Wellington Partners. According to YouNoodle's algorithm, 2009 has been harsh.

2. Scoopler (15/100, down 14.3). Scoopler is a real-time search engine for discovering what people are talking about on the internet right now. It's in an exciting but really competitive space. $15,000 seed funding from YCombinator is unlikely to be enough to win against Google's own efforts. It's score has halved and it struggles to make the cut.

3. Joost (44/100, down 11.5). There's nothing new to be said. Falling from a great height, Joost proves that great founders are not a sufficient condition for a start-up to succeed.

4. Badoo (85/100, down 10.3). UK-based badoo offers standard social networking features and allows it users to pay to make themselves more popular across badoos network. Although slipping ten points, badoo is still in the top ten TechCrunch Europe rankings. With a steady 750,000 daily unique visitors, it can't compete with the scale of the major social networks but it's revenue model might deliver a decent profit.

5. Dailymotion (86/100, down 10.2). Paris-based dailymotion was supposed to differ from YouTube by virtue of including professional content. Not so anymore. The last two years have seen its traffic halve from 3.0m to 1.5m. But don't write it off yet. It remains one of the top five European tech start-ups.

Reversals of fortune are frequent so I'll be revisiting the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 from time to time.

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