SoundCloud Reaches 10 Million Users
SoundCloud has just announced it has reached 10 million users. SoundCloud is a music startup currently in Berlin, but its roots lay in Sweden where its two co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are from. We've covered the music service in the past as well a couple of times and they've definitely been one of the more interesting startups in Europe in the recent months. Just a few weeks ago the company closed a, reportedly, $50 million finance round.
New Tools To Refine Your Ideas
Last week, entrepreneurs (or those wanting to become one) received at least two new tools to refine their ideas. Both Hackfwd, a European level pre-seed investment company and Plan2Biz, an Icelandic company, came out with simple web tools to help people define their ideas and take a step closer to starting a business.
Rebtel Being Blocked Again In Germany
Rebtel, the Sweden-based VoIP company, is being blocked again in Germany by E-Plus. Rebtel is letting E-Plus bypass their foreign calling rates by giving a cheaper alternative to calling expensive foreign numbers - through VoIP. Alexander Drewniak wrote about the incident in the company blog.
It seems this is an annual issue with Rebtel. They were blocked in Germany last year as well, exactly around these times of the year. Last year it was O2. Needless to say, but this sort of activity is against EU regulations and also the consumer contracts with E-Plus.
E-Plus is the third largest operator in Germany, so the problem isn't a small one. Furthermore, Alexander has written the blog post that Rebtel has some 3 million customers who will want to defend their rights for cheaper phone calls. I'm sure E-Plus will get their fair share of contacts from consumers in the coming days if they won't resolve the situation to Rebtel's favor.
Twingly Expands To Germany
Twingly, a Swedish blog search engine, similar to Technorati, but a spam free one and aimed at the European market, is expanding to Germany. Recently Twingly landed its first German customer for its flagship product, Twingly Blog Stream, a service that shows which bloggers have written about each article on the newspaper's website, when it signed a deal with the leading business newspaper Handelsblatt.
Twingly has been launching many much talk about services lately and is now pushing strong into a major European market with Twingly Blog Stream. This is no small feat as according to Twingly's CEO, Martin Källström, "[...] German blogosphere is one of Europe's largest, it's an important market for us. Our search engine, covers nearly half a million blogs in German."
After landing the German deal Twingly has its Blog Stream service on 75 major media sites in no less than 11 countries all around Europe.
Martin Källström boldly claims that Twingly's goal is to be the number one blog search engine in Europe, adding that currently more than a quarter of the company's turnover is from other countries than Sweden, but that he expects that the percentage will grow to nearly 80 percent.
One easily gets the false idea that they are aiming to build a #1 landing site for (blog) Search like Google's. This is never meant to but be there in the background when all the money will be collected from partnering with all the major media sites that have all the eyeballs across the continent. A smart, lucrative and at least so far a successful strategy.
Swedish Rebtel being blocked in Germany
Rebtel, a Swedish and Luxembourg based startup offering cheap international calls over internet, is pushing itself hard to conquer the VoIP market. Some might say that even a bit too aggresively as their phone numbers were blocked in Germany by O2.
However, as Alexander Drewniak writes in his blog post, this sort of activity is against EU regulations. He is also asking customers of O2 to send an e-mail or contact Jaime Basterra the "boss in Germany" about this and let the company know how the customers feel about this sort of activity. He goes on to make a Churchill type speech regarding the future:
The fact remains, old operators will always cling on to their decreasing margins, lock-in contracts, hidden charges, big offices, expensive TV-commercials, and out-dated methods but they cannot stop the future of calling. When internet now meets telecom, operators are going to have to change or die. Internet stands for transparency, consumer value, openness and change. Values that clash against the business models of all telecom operators.
It'll be interesting to see how this works out. We'll be following the activity closely.
