Podio Goes San Francisco
Podio, a Copenhagen-based start-up, is about to officially open up their service to the public. As a build-up for the launch, Podio's team will be relocated to San Francisco between March 21st and 25th where they would host workshops, meetings and networking sessions. The website will be launched on March 24th. Podio has been reappearing in media's headlines ever since they came out of the stealth mode last September. Their mission is to change the way people work and what they offer to that end is a comprehensive enterprise software. Their platform includes all possible tools you might need for your work: from calendar to messaging to contact and task management and more. On top of that, users can easily build their own apps or use those built by others from Podio's appstore. Podio is free for small companies (up to 10 users) and chargers a subscription fee for larger enterprises. Even though the service has been operating on invite-only basis so far, they have managed to attract over 6000 companies, a couple of hundred of which are paying customers.
Podio Closes $4M Round To Grow Sales
Last week, the Danish based Podio closed a relatively large $4 million round in Series A funding. Sunstone Capital led the round. According to Tommy Ahlers, the CEO of Podio, the funds will be used to grow the sales of the company and also finance key hires.
Podio is a new kind of an enterprise software, looking to disrupt how people work. The service has many different features to take an organisations work routines online and ease them with simple to use tools. Podio's tools can be used in a variety of ways - from company intranets and extranets, project management and recruiting solutions, to CRM, business intelligence and company-wide social platforms. We talked to Tommy Ahlers about where Podio is currently and how it intends to grow during 2011.
CLARA Listens The Web Talking
CLARA is a Reykjavik, Iceland based young startup specializing in online business and marketing intelligence. The firm offers automatic monitoring and analysis tools for the web. With CLARA's solution firms can keep track of online discussions around their brands, products, and services on the web. CLARA's system brings data together from news, blogs, forums and comments, and other online content. The idea is to allow "listening" to the online discussion as it happens, and being able to see a clear summary to better understand the end customers.
Nordic Venture Forum: M-Brain
Here's the third startup in a run down of startups that I saw at the Nordic Venture Forum last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark. All the startups present at the forum were seeking either financing from the investors or partners for their business.
M-Brain (FI) - M-Brain is a value-added business intelligence firm operating in the media environment.
M-Brain focuses on media monitoring by delivering filtered, summarized and translated content from the Internet, both editorial and social media. They offer specific aggregated reports from more than 60 countries in 25 languages.
The company claims that it's success factor is its 'unique symbiotic combination of technology and human capital'. This stems at least partly from an in-house tech development that is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Also, members of the R&D team continue to work part-time in the academic EU research projects bringing a wide range of knowledge to the table. M-Brain is also involved in many other EU project which are likely to bring in again new research, and many times also added funding from EU's budget. Along with a few private individual the company has investments from Veraventure.
M-Brain employs 56 in-house trained staff of which 34 work part-time. M-Brain differentiates itself from its competitors by a 'business model that is based both on human expertise and state-of-the-art search technology', where most of their competitors emphasize only one of the two.
The company does not say much about the search technology except that the quality 'results from scalability of human effort, achieved by replacing the mechanical part by technological means, themselves scalable. Query enrichment tools and interactive means of reorganizing the filtered material transform raw data into normalized information. The process and the representation are optimized with regard to human cognition and customer needs, enabling also broader survey of discourses related to an industry domain, resulting in products such as alerts, ananlyses and recognition of emergent relationships and trends' . The only bit I could find out the above I can really say I understood was that the company also employs refined data stream offered by Whitevector and Leiki's semantic filtering tools. That said, the company states that their R&D investments add up to 15% of turnover, which is a very healthy number.
How M-Brain aims to differ from the Google and other aggregators is by rewriting the content instead of only cutting and pasting or taking a bit of the article and pushing it forward in a feed. In the Nordics M-Brain needs to compete with the likes of Meltwater and Cision, but as soon as you enter for example the UK you can find bigger players such as Libraryhouse among others.
M-Brain might have a killer technology and I hope they do, since their editorial does not seem to offer terribly much value based on their blog (in Finnish) where they claim to 'observe the social media and offer perspective, opinions and experiences from the web'. The quality of the analysis throws a dark shadow of their claimed 'human expertise' which accounts for half of their product offering. For pure information aggregation this might not pose such a problem, but for those looking for in depth analysis I'd look long and hard how much bang I get for my buck.
Currently the company is looking for acquisitions from the old media that work in the media monitoring industry. This would allow M-Brain to integrate their technology to these players' organizations which are stuck in the old way of doing things, and thus pushing the efficiency and margins way up. This would also offer the company a way acquire new customers in a quick and efficient manner.
