Mancx To Take On Elance By Pivoting to Coworks
Mancx, the business Q&A site has pivoted to Coworks, an online freelancing platform with a social recommendation twist to it. According to the company, the decision to make the switch was not because Mancx was not working as expected, but because the market was simply too small, whereas the online jobs market is expanding at an incredible pace.
What differs Coworks from the likes of Elance and Odesk is that they are not trying to offer you a choice from hundreds or even thousands of freelancers. Instead, they focus on your social networks to find freelancers that your friends and connections know and are willing to recommend. Basically they want to digitalize “word of mouth”.
Last Year's Arctic15 Winner, Mancx, Secures $3 Million Funding
With things falling into place for this year's Arctic15, we hear some great news from last year's winner, Mancx. The Stockholm-based company has raised $1.65 million in financing led by Almi Invest and Chalmers Innovation Seed Fund, bringing the total money raised to $3 million. With this announcement, the company also tells us they're opening a San Francisco headquarters.
Mancx has built a community for business answers that allows for private individuals to securely buy and sell their knowledge with others. The platform competes with Quora, the Yahoo-answers for businesspeople, but rather than searching for information and finding something from 2010, on Mancx matches incoming questions with the right people to ensure the questioner gets the fresh and deep information they need. The platform also ensures the answering party gets fairly paid for their efforts. '
Mancx & Viadeo Partner, Bring Knowledge Market To 40 Million More Professionals
Arctic15 winner Mancx has partnered with Viadeo to integrate the company's knowledge transaction platform with the Paris-based professional social network. Coupled with an earlier deal with LinkedIn, Mancx’s “knowledge market” is now directly available to more than 155 million business professionals around the world.
Second Batch Of Arctic15 Pitches (Video)
Here's another batch of Arctic15 presentations, including Mancx, the first place winner. Also in this group we've got presentations by Streamtainment, 300.mg, Fishare, and Kiosked. So clear off the rest of your schedule this afternoon, cancel that meeting, and re-live the Arctic15.
What The Arctic15 Finalists Released
Arctic15 was held almost a month ago and we decided to summarise what the 15 awesome finalists actually pitched and released on stage. This is a little bit of a promotion to our upcoming videos of all the pitches we're beginning to release soon on ArcticStartup from our event. So browse through the 15 finalists presented below in alphabetical order, presented in their own words.
Amazon Web Services Extra Prize For Arctic15 Finalists
Arctic15 was one great event last week. Not only was it great from the view point of attendees and speakers, but we also had some great partners there. A great example of one our partners is Amazon Web Services - they've decided to hand out an extra prize (we actually announced this on stage) to all Arctic15 finalists.
Mancx, Graduateland Win At Arctic15
Close to 400 startup enthusiasts from all over the region came together in Helsinki to witness 15 stellar pitches from companies on stage at Arctic15 yesterday. The day was all about winning and despite the hard choice of the jury to pick one winner - all the companies already won, by getting tons of coverage and visibility on stage for their products and services. In addition to this, Amazon Web Services decided to give a substantial amount of credit to all the 15 finalists (we'll contact you directly regarding the details on this).
Here They Are: Arctic15 Finalists
It's been a tough run up to the Arctic15 conference for startups competing for the chance to pitch on stage. The finalists have now been chosen by the secret jury and they are listed below. Close to 100 companies applied to the competition by the end of July and over the course of August 33 companies made the so called semi-finals and from those, 15 companies came out on top as finalists. The 15 finalists were chosen from video pitches the companies made. This is for two reasons. First, we wanted the companies to have good products and secondly, they would also have to be good in selling and explaining those products.
Mancx, The Knowledge Marketplace, Gets Funded
You often hear that knowledge costs money. With Mancx you can see how the metaphor works when taken literally. The website's users post questions or requests with a price attached to them so that people with the right knowledge can help them save time and energy by providing a quick answer. The website was launched merely this April but it has already closed two funding rounds: a seed investment and an angle investment that are altogether worth over $1.1M. About $170,000 came from the founders, the rest from angel investors Bo Axel Ax:son Johnson, Nils-Robert Persson and Per-Arne Nordlander. The acquired funds will be used to support further development of the Mancx's knowledge marketplace and to make an aggressive marketing push.
