StartupInMe Is A New Type Of Aggregator For The Startup World
We are always on the lookout for interesting news and startups, especially those coming from the people and teams we have already covered on Arctic Startup. From Utopic.me and its founder Jüri Kaljundi, who recently unveiled the new look of Utopic.me, we caught wind of a new news aggregator they've put together called StartupInMe.
StartupInMe is a news aggregator and Q&A community for startups. The basic idea is to provide startup enthusiasts and experts a destination to share opinions and remain up to date on all news associated to the global startup scene. While that might classify StartupInMe as “just another startup news aggregator”, you may enjoy it due to its tight focus, and the slow culture shift prevalent on other popular aggregators.
Yodiz Adds A Social Flavor To Project Managment And Team Collaboration
Project management is definitely not one of the most exciting tasks if you're forced to use the most boring and non-interactive methods of collaborating with your team. First of all, lots of solutions out there involves too much for users to read, and secondly, most of these management and collaboration tools aren't really user friendly. On top of all that, these first two factors are already too burdened by you having to deliver at 100 percent efficiency. While many startups are stepping forth to make this a bit more interactive, Yodiz already is speeding the task of adding “Interest” to the intensity of project management.
WeatherMe Makes Weather Forecasting More Localized
Weather news can be of immense value, but with my personal experience with weather applications, I find them a bit difficult to trust. Firstly they aren’t very accurate, and secondly they are more for general areas than specific locations. I guess my complaint is that you can’t really be in control of receiving notifications and alerts based on your specifications. WeatherMe is one weather forecast and alert service that keeps customization at its core.
The startup was launched at the Garage48 Tartu and promises to generate accurate weather model for the users. The service relies on providing users with notifications when the weather in their vicinity reaches a certain condition. These notifications are sent in a time frame of 2-24 hours in advance, giving you ample time to react to changes in the weather. As mentioned, most of us already rely on the existing weather forecasts, but those aren’t short term. With WeatherMe you have that option to be as specific as you want, and to be notified whenever you want.
RentMama Your One Stop Online Car Rental Destination
RentMama is focused on helping you find the right car for your convenience. While assisting users with car rentals, RentMama looks for big and small rental companies who have your specified car available. And it isn't limited to cars in just one region-- the big idea is to save travelers the few extra hours they spend searching for best deals on Google to find the best car rental deals during their visit. RentMama achieves this by bringing all car rental companies under one banner. Users benefit by having to visit one place to find the best deals.
Amooz Gamifies Loyalty Cards And Check-Ins
Success often follows where service providers or vendors improve their consumers’ experience. By gamifying the process of interaction with their brands, merchants can reward customers with points that can be redeemed as bonuses. This processes already exists on smartphones, bit currently other products aren’t interactive enough. Amooz steps in by improving your experience at cafés, bars and restaurants.
The Latvian startup partners with restaurants, bars and cafés to help users receive credits on their smartphone. The procedure is pretty simple and focuses on making the user experience interactive and can be explained in a few steps:
Interview: Gísli Kristjánsson, COO Of Greenqloud
We recently talked about Greenqloud, a cloud storage startup with a focus on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Cloud) services. We took the opportunity to get in touch with Gísli Kristjánsson, COO Greenqloud to get a better insight about the startup and understand what makes them unique. Gísli rightfully thought that it is essential to clarify the understanding of Cloud Computing, and before we post the short Q/A, we would love to share the definition of Cloud Computing as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Why Use A NFC Enabled Device When mCASH Lets Your Mobile Accept Payments?
We have witnessed the evolution of how we purchase items around us. From the days of cash as coins, then paper and plastic money to the latest NFC enabled payment methods, all seem to have eased things out one or the other. The evolution has come about as per the needs of the time, and lately the need for change has increased dramatically. One startup from Norway, mCASH, plans to bundle all payments into your mobile device.
NFC, non-NFC, credit or debit, why carry extra luggage or purchase a dedicated devices when it's dubious whether the point of sale would even accept it or not? While NFC might become a common method of mobile payments, I am not buying the idea, primarily for the fact not every region worldwide can implement the system. What mCASH does is liberate you of the task of getting yourself a new hardware or implement a new technology. Keeping it simple is what mCASH focuses on, why burden merchants and clients with excessive burden?
Send High Quality Unlimited Multimedia Messages For Free With Jongla
We talked about Jongla a couple of years back. The Finnish startup promised to leverage the personal capabilities of the mobile devices and become personal marketing tool. The startup offers smartphone users the ability to send unlimited text messages, videos, images etc across the globe for free. Sounds quite a useful tool for bulk marketing.
The core issues or problem addressed is with the limitations that we have when it comes to the size of the multimedia files we share via SMS or MMS and the quality that we do share is awful by all mean (could be my personal opinion). With Jongla, users are freed of this size and quality limitations with the traditional methods. With Jongla you can share all these files directly to their friends. So this means another application, another setup file, a whole new registration or account association. Well not exactly.
uTales: Everything's Interactive, Why Not Stories?
With digital books expanding beyond print, even outside the bulky desktop computers and laptops to the lighter e-book readers and the tablets, book lovers have more than one option to read books. I mean if everything is available on the go, why not books? uTales, a Swedish startup leverages the existing technology to create digital picture books for kids. The bigger advantage here is to make the book reading experience more interactive and thus interesting.
The startup germinates from the founders’ experience with bed time stories, the art of story telling that so many of us have enjoyed in our childhood and want to preserve the same for future generations. The idea is to engage, inspire and educate kids by bringing high quality picture books to the young ones globally. How exactly?
Hiddenhint Takes A Cooler Approach To Find A Special Someone
Who doesn’t have a secret crush once in a lifetime? Unfortunately, many have trouble expressing the emotions to their crush. The reason being nobody wants the crush to crash their reputation by becoming public. True that, I would rather keep affection for someone to myself than to say it out loud putting my reputation at stake. If there is a secret way to express this, who wouldn’t want to make use of it? Hiddenhint does exactly that.
Now there are a lot of other traditional methods, such as tossing a random note on a girl's desk, putting a nice card in her bag, etc but in the age of social media and apps, gadgets, etc it sounds too old school. Hiddenhint makes a note of this and adds a bit more modern and anonymous touch to it. But how exactly does it work?
Business Collaboration Startup, TeamLab Takes Your Office To The Cloud
Managing work and teams at your workplace is quite a daunting task. Factors like communication, collaboration, and management rely heavily on the effectiveness of whatever system you use. Choosing the right office system is important, because the more efficient this system is the more productive your team can become. The Latvia based startup, TeamLab, comes with a similar agenda; to connect teams, improve efficiency at work and speed up the the management tasks.
Write A Letter Today To Receive It Tomorrow With Letter2Future
I miss out on knowing what I planned last year. How much of it has been achieved and what hasn’t been? While a personal diary with all records and an online to to list there is nothing like a letter from your own self dated from last year. Letter2Future takes care of that.
The startup hails from Lithuania and is a non-commercial project aimed at helping you send your letter to the future. “Thoughts materialize better on paper” is indeed a wonderful phrase and ensures whatever you thought or planned is available anytime without risk of being forgotten or altered. The startup enables you to compose a letter today, on anything you want write, be it a plan, a promise that you make today or just share with your beloved how much you love them today. Once written you can assign a future date when the letter is to be delivered. Great, there is some more news to make it better.
MySellr Transforms Your Facebook Page Into An Online Store
We have long lived with the word e-commerce and it won’t be wrong to request for a change in the naming convention, especially regarding social networks. Probably something like social commerce would do the trick. This is largely owing to Facebook, the network that has made brands more social. MySellr, is an Indonesian startup with Swedes on board, that tends to make the connection more important.
The startup provides an application within the largest social network, enabling anyone to start a fully functional e-commerce website from their fan pages on Facebook. This basically takes the challenge of distribution out of the question as you're around a lot of people. 800 million to be exact.
Zerply Adds Premium Themes
We reviewed Zerply a few months back, calling it the next generation professional network. We weren’t wrong as the recent flare in its usage has been immense, maybe we are following all those who are part of Zerply, but we see the name more often in our timeline. The professional network is beginning to monetize its platform and has taken another step towards it with its premium themes.
Its growing catalog added themes from Mike Kus, a renowned web designer and another one by Kyle Steed. The theme by Mike Kus is sleek and offers a quick overview of your social links and contact information on the top. In short where it matters the most.
LoudEvents Is Matchmaking Service For Artists And Live Music Venues
LoudEvents is a matchmaking service. Don’t mistake it to be the same as boy finds girl, boy likes girl and they get connected eventually. The service comes as part of a startup - LoudRevolution - and its claim to fame is its ability to help artists find the best venues for their next performance and find a fellow artist to perform with in that venue.
46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
Startup Crib: Tuubio
Startup Crib is a series of posts dedicated to start-ups' offices. The visual tour around a start-up’s office gives readers a real-life picture of how and where entrepreneurs work and gives a chance to meet the team behind the company. Different offices have their own perks and peculiarities so sit back and enjoy!
This week in Startup Crib series we feature Tuubio, a Finnish start-up based in Helsinki that is building the future of radio. Founded in early April this year, their product is still in stealth mode, though they are launching a closed alpha test of Android application in early August. In this video, Jens Sørensen, co-founder and CEO, shows us around their office in downtown Helsinki.
Startup Crib: Endomondo
Startup Crib is a series of posts dedicated to start-ups' offices. The visual tour around a start-up’s office gives readers a real-life picture of how and where entrepreneurs work and gives a chance to meet the team behind the company. Different offices have their own perks and peculiarities so sit back and enjoy!
This time the company in focus of Startup Cribs is Endomondo, a Copenhagen-based start-up that is developing a sports-tracking application. The app tracks your work-outs in real-time, helps you set up and achieve sports goals, see sports activities of your friends and set up and track competitions. Launched in 2009, Endomondo's app has now received more than 3 million downloads. You can meet their team and see their office in the video below.
Augmented Reality On A Whole New Level: 13th Lab Showcase Ball Invasion
What is the connection between a rover exploring Mars and an iPad 2? Both devices are capable of identifying their surroundings with the help of a camera and some software. 13th Lab has built that software for iPad based on theory originally developed by NASA. The technology was first used to automatically navigate rovers on Mars and then it was employed for military and healthcare applications as well as by big utility companies. 13th Lab was the first company to adapt the technology for consumer products. To showcase what it is capable of, they launched an iPad game - Ball Invasion. It's a simple shooting game but it takes augmented reality to a whole new level: it uses iPad's camera to recognize the environment around you so that bullets bounce off the walls or any other objects in your surroundings. Ball Invasion went live as a paid app ($1.99) last Monday and by now it's a #2 paid app in Swedish AppStore and is a featured app in AppStores in US and Canada.
Interested To Work At A Startup? Join One At CopenhagenStartups
There is nothing like being an entrepreneur. Of course that’s a bit challenging for many - especially to let go off the comfort of a monthly paycheck, but many aspire to be one. The problem is not everyone is bound to be one and even less are bound to be successful. However, there are many people searching for jobs each spring as they leave their schools behind, be it high school or university. CopenhagenStartups is a new initiative to help people find a job at a startup, something not many might have thought to be a viable start for a career path.
B2B Gets More Social With Ziliot
Social networks generally bring the idea of making friends to people's minds, but that trend has rapidly evolved. Businesses are beginning to user this for marketing and engaging their customers to help build a better brand image and professionals have taken this up to collaborate with others across borders. There is no end to possibilities on the web and it has made things a lot more efficient, at least in terms of communications.
Update: PremiumFanPage Now Handles Direct Translations Of Twitter Feed And Facebook Pages
ArcticStartup covered PremiumFanPage back in January when it was launched at the CES ‘11. The venture is the brainchild of Jani Penttinen, CEO and founder of XIHA Life and is based on XIHA’s multilingual social media platform. This means your content on numerous social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs can amalgamate at one single fan site via a platform that offers real time translation.
Flockler Lets Your Audience Engage And Create Stories
Perhaps the worst issue with everyday articles on news are quite dry, primarily for the fact that the content is written by one person. Although there are comments section available and the integration of social media buttons that enable sharing on Facebook or Twitter, you can’t really alter content in any way. You can mention the errors in a post, make a very valid point but then wait for the addition to be made if the writer sees the error and more importantly make the amendments within the article.
Interview With Johan Haataja, Founder TruthFeed
We talked about TruthFeed sometime back and its introduction of new features that included the Twitter Bot and the Historical Development. While we personally believe in doing our bit of reviews on startups and tools it is always a good idea to get in touch with people behind and interview one of the team members. We therefore decided to get in touch with TruthFeed’s founder; Johan Haataja to learn his part of story on the newly introduced features and TruthFeed itself.
Interview With Taaniel Jakobs Of Zerply, "Making Professional Networking Less Formal"
We talked about Zerply, a California based startup with roots in Northern Europe that aims at letting you present yourself in a more professional way with profile pages that integrate with numerous other social profile that you already have. The startup announced the release of their endorsement widget. The widget lets you display your tags on any website so visitors can get an idea on who you are and more easily endorse you.
Wordy Professional Editing Gets Wordier: Multiple File Uploads And New pricing
Publishing content online might be considered to be the easiest job for many but for those who mean serious business, pushing content online is a matter of great importance. Many bloggers out there would readily agree to this when they switch from writing for their personal blog to someone else’s. You have to adopt to a certain standard, the perfect writing style and tone of voice, just to name a few. We reviewed Wordy, a startup that takes up the responsibility of all your editorial nightmares by providing you a quick, standardized and cost effective solutions. Write, submit, pay and publish with confidence. Quite simple. Recently, they announced new pricing and features to their service.
TruthFeed, Now With A Few New Features
Experience sharing social startup, TruthFeed made entry to help users make better decisions as well as share their experience with a global audience. TruthFeed is easy to use, helps you with making the correct choices or decisions and it has made some updates. We covered the company earlier in this post.
Uplause Crosses 2 Million Audience Mark
When we called Uplause the Real World Massively Multiplayer Crowd Games, we weren’t wrong at all. The developers who create games for large events to enable the audience to collectively play interactive mini games. Uplause has recently made news with registering a milestone of hitting 2 million users.
Tradeshift Opens Up Its Arms, Brings Its Apps To Developers
Tradeshift, the Danish firm that has been in reports quite often here at ArcticStartup is making itself more useful with the announcement of bringing their applications to developers. To put it out more clearly, this would enable developers to build applications within the Tradeshift ecosystem.
The Lift Release Brings HD, AirPlay And Many More Features To 23Video
Denmark based 23Video that helps users build full featured video sites has making a lift. 23Video has announced the coming of the Lift Release. The update will help users with more advanced options to make video sites a better and more efficient. The Lift Release brings quite a lot of features making the service a lot more usable for companies requiring video sites.
