Second serie of Weekend Reading!
on The Netsetter
on FourHourWorkWeek
on VentureLevel
on Silicon Alley Insider
on Startup Professionals
on Startups.co.uk
Feel free to share links in the comments.
Another round of investment for Newcaste-based startup Quick.tv which just raised another £335.000 to further develop its clickable video technology and market its product.
The company provides professional web video publishers the ability to inject interactivity into videos with a quick click, drag, and drop.
‘Online video has gone from being a consumer driven entertainment experience to a fundamental feature of any website. It’s now recognised by businesses across all sectors as an effective marketing tool.’ Nick Bell, founder and commercial director, says.
The fresh cash will mostly be used for a marketing campaign, in occasion of the new product launch.
The round was led by North Star Equity Investors which already backed Quick.tv in 2006 with proof of concept funding of £60,000 and again in 2007 with £500,000 from its Co-Investment Fund.
Update:We got information from Quick.tv that the round was closed on December 08.
High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) has invested EUR 500,000 into software prototyping company RapidRabb GmbH in a first round of financing.
The startup, a finalist at the Red Herring 100 Europe Award, provides an interesting product that gives business and developers the tools for rapid prototyping of software interfaces and easy-to-lear graphic specifications, early-stage testing and efficient communication.
RapidRabb was founded in 2008 by a young group of designers, developers and economists. It is based in Berlin, Germany.
The High-Tech Gruunderfonds invests venture capital in young and promising technology companies who turn scientific results into economic success, they have a volume of about 272 Milion Euros available. Investors of this Public Private Partnership are the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology of Germany, the KfW Bankengruppe, as well as the combinations BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler, and Carl Zeiss.
Erasmusu is a social network focused on Erasmus and international exchange students. The website is heavily influenced by facebook, with a very similar design and the same functions.
But I have to say they found a good niche and implemented some nice extra features such as:
If you have been\ are \ will be an exchange student, or would simply like to connect with international students coming in your city, I highly recommend to use their service.
The service is in private beta but we have got 10 invites to share with you, the first ten people to comment will get them!
Finally good news for european startups, the times reports that a new development fund is being put together to invest in early stage technology companies.
European Founders Capital (EFC) will have initially £20 millions to play with, but is looking to reach at least the £50 millions mark. The plan is to make early stage funding more available to european companies, imitating the valley’s seed funding mentality.
The fund will be led by two of the most know english tech entrepreneurs, Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman. Micheal is the co-founder of the social networking site Bebo, founded in 2005 and sold to AOL (Micheal and his wife made a combined profit of $595 million from the deal). Brent is the co-founder of Lastminute.com Ltd, an online discount vacations website that survived the dot-com bubble and was sold to Sabre Holdings for £577 millions.
They clearly know what they are doing. They will be joined by Rogan Angelini-Hurll and Peter Dubens. “We aren’t taking institutional money,” Birch said said. “All the money comes from founders – people who have done it before.” Birch plans on positioning the fund between angel investments (£50.000 to £100.000) and venture capitalists which invest several millions per company.
It is really great and refreshing to see such news, and see the stratup-focused funds grow in Europe, joining two pioneering experiments: European Founders and Team Europe Ventures in the effort of promoting and strengthening european entrepreneurship.
Out of the many companies that launched at The Next Web, one that particularly got my attention is yellowBird.
They promise to “rock the movie industry world” and they may actually do it. They have a really cool technology, inspired by Google Streetview, that creates a complete 360° video that can be watched in any flash capable computer, and shared easily on the internet with their proprietary flash player.
“The viewer becomes the Director, who can choose what he wants to see from his position”, says co-founder Rafaël Redczus of yellowBird. He started working on this technology almost 10 years ago, but now all the pieces of the jigsaw are in place. 
“There are unbelievable opportunities for this new dimension in online experiences. Film producers can use it for their trailers on the Internet, city marketeers can use it to attract tourists, dance events become virtually
physically accessible for millions of visitors, documentaries and sports events become probing experiences, whilst this technology will bring about a
revolution in the world of advertising.” Redczus comments “Advertisers are looking more and more to the Internet. This offers them unrivalled opportunities
to present themselves.”
The Groningen-based startup may have actually created something that will change media distribution, not a minor funny technology.
Pictures, video, color video, live video, live internet streaming.. what’s next? This sounds like a good candidate. We will see how these guys do very soon.
According to Marc Groothelm, Managing Director of yellowBird, they are still the only company in the world that makes this concept accessible and available to
businesses. Keep in mind this is not intended at all to go mainstream for consumers, as the “stitching” process of the 6 video streams requires lengthy calculations by extremely powerful computers.
It is great to see such innovative startups in Europe reminding everyone that we aren’t just the artistic continent but we can have a major role in business and technology innovation.
Thanks to the guys of Creating Inspiration you can watch the video of their presentation at The Next Web:
