Folks, start your engines

The ride-sharing, car-sharing, do better with transportation, save our planet game just heated up with the news of Zip Car’s acquisition of the car sharing service, Streetcar. And, with the international exposure (CNET article) of flinc out of DEMO Spring 2010 – it emphasized a number of other ride-sharing start ups already in the process of modifying drivers and passengers behavior. There are some established players here in Europe like France’s Comuto which is already cash-flow positive to Karzoo with its pan-European focus. Other newer start ups still in stealth mode (although not so stealth since we know about them) are Geogoer and Boston’s RelayRides bring a unique solution to the concept of ride-share and car-share.

flinc currently is in a pre-pilot stage but has a project underway to enlist the world in determining where they should roll out – if you want to participate check out the Where’s flinc tab on their website. But if you want to try out modern car-pooling and you are in France, check out Comuto. Having used the service here in France, I can honestly say that it works and is a great way to get around. They have a really nice iPhone app too.  They have a map that shows you where you can go and the list of rides (with prices) is unending. We have a friend that goes from Paris to Bordeaux each week via Comuto. Urban rides or suburban rides -  it is about getting from point A to point B – all you need is a lift, or to give someone a ride. These apps and services are hoping to help you  save on fuel costs and change the way we think about commuting and transportation. Not to sound too sappy, but it also comes with a feeling of doing the right thing and there is nothing wrong about that. - JLH

Tags: carpooling, Carsharing, Comuto, DEMO, flinc, Geogoer, Green, Karzoo, RelayRides, Ride-share, Zip car, Zipcar

Java stuff

We recently met Tricastmedia - a start up based in Glasgow that has powerful SDK to create apps in Java. What we found out about this self-funded start up was that they are already cash-flow positive. Silently chugging along, they have been making Twitter and email clients for some pretty big names out there and all on the power of their development tool, TWUIK. In Q3, they will launch their own app store with a bundle of new apps, so check back later for that news.

For some reason today, Monday, we liked hearing from a company that had a solid piece of technology that is making money. Sometimes, you miss that in all the hot air that floats around out there. - JLH

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Tags: Java, Programming, Software development kit, Tricastmedia, Twitter, Twuik

Comment away

Recently, we posted a blurb about ANGA cable and a panel on conditional access at the show. One of the companies we mentioned in the post sent us an email about how we “missed the boat” on why their company was on the panel. And to this we say: comment. That is what the comment feature is for, to comment.

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Tags: ANGA Cable, Conditional access

Indoor positioning & your transformation to an asocial geek

We had the chance to talk with a several VCs and tech experts in London about the future of location and  its place in the world.  Lots of discussion, agreement and disagreement, but the one thing everyone agreed on was location and indoor use. In other words, a mall, a school building  — essentially INSIDE a structure.

Now, instead of a long rant about how unrealistic this probably is – both from a usability point of view and in light of more mainstream adoption of augmented reality apps by businesses and consumers — we give you this article on indoor positioning that sums it up:

…..In the meantime, your wife will simply ask some friendly person for directions, and you’ll be stranded there earnestly button-pushing like an asocial geek.

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Tags: Augmented reality, Nokia

A pimped out ANGA Cable 2010

I don’t know why, but we are looking forward to ANGA Cable in a week. On the heels of IPTV WF in London and then right in between IBC, we see this as the last big push companies will have before they pull out all the stops for IBC in September in Amsterdam.

This year MTV Networks and Discovery Networks are sponsors of ANGA – which means that the focus on content just got even more intense. Naturally this brings us straight to conditional access where there is a quirky panel comprised of Nagravision, Kabel Deustchland and oddly ActiveVideo Newtorks. Seems like they missed NDS and Viaccess. The show is fully booked this year with a strong focus on the Connected Home.

Despite being heavily weighted with German cable companies, if the discussions are half as interesting and lively as they were at IPTV World Forum, we are in for a good few days. — JLH

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Tags: Conditional access, IBC, IPTV, IPTV World Forum, Nagravision, Viaccess

The Happy Day of TC Geek n Rolla

As Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe said, he felt he was coordinating the Great Escape in reverse. It is true. When volcano days were upon us last week and were overlapping with TechCrunch’s Geek n Rolla event on April 21, everyone was thinking about how to get from mainland Europe to the UK. Train, ferry, car in chunnel – several options.

Strange really. It was just a one-day tech event. We had all been there before, but this year something was different. Maybe it was the speaker line up – jam packed with the establish order of VCs but laced with the new order of up and coming VCs from Sitar Teli, Doughty Hanson; Michael Jackson, Advent, Ashish Puri, Partech and Katy Turner and Andy Chung, Eden Ventures. Plus, we had Morten Lund as the keynote talking about being up and down and up again. There was also an “unplugged” element at play – dozens of start ups were forced into three minute pitches with an immediate Q&A right after their pitch – because of this, the room was alive – not a lot of passive listening going on there.

Despite the problems with travel, most of the speakers made it – Morten Lund by car with his Tradshift team and girlfriend; the Bambuser crew drove all the way from Sweden and Cedric Giorgi (Goojet) came via the last Eurostar ticket. Dozens of start-ups selected to pitch drove to ferries and trains from Sweden, Italy and even Slovenia. Yours truly even drove to the ferry in LeHavre and took a train up from Portsmouth. Everyone found a way to be there.

There was something about that enterprising spirit to get there that permeated the event. And on a number of occasions, I heard people comment about how this says something about the start-ups that did NOT make the effort to come. Interesting.

But the lessons learned this day were about drive, motivation, focus, honesty and friendship. The whole entire day, as Bindi Karia, Microsoft Biz Spark, pointed out, was buzzing with electricity.

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Tags: Andy Chung, Bambuser, Cedric Giorgi, Eden Ventures, Goojet, Katy Turner, Mike Butcher, Morten Lund, TechCrunch UK

When good intentions go awry

When the Next Web Conference was started five years ago, it had the promise to elevate the Netherlands high tech/internet scene into prime time. Founded by three Internet entrepreneurs with moderate success within their country’s borders they sought to make an event that would showcase the future of the next web with speakers and start up competition. Super idea. Unite a small band of Dutch start-ups, sprinkle in some other pan European start-ups and have some wild parties, and poof, you have an event.

But then something happened. This year they went mad on their moderate amount of power. Despite their speaker line-up which includes the ubiquitous Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon, they muddied the waters by “selecting” two companies as finalists for their start-up rally that they personally owned. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out – a simple pass through Crunchbase revealed the owners and investors of those companies are the three founders of The Next Web Conference (see their photos proudly beaming from the company profiles) – Patrick, Boris and Arjen. The judges of these finalists, as they proudly tweeted, were themselves. And in an editorial post by one of the founders Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten he claimed that they were unbiased in their judgement. After a small outrage on Twitter and comments posted on The Next Web and TechCrunch, he begrudgingly removed only one of the companies, Twittercounter, which to be fair is not even remotely close to material that will make up the next web. The other company, Pressdoc remains – maybe because there wasn’t enough outrage by the lemming-like following that the founders have or because they just didn’t want to. After all, it is their show and these are their companies  — so they can do what they want, right? 

In the end, this type of blatant favortism makes the Next Web Conference just another coin-operated tech event that has copied the formula that Le Web and TechCrunch have made successful. But if they want any hope at building their show into a legitimate prime time player, they must avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Tags: NextWeb, TechCrunch, Twitter