Best Tweeshes: Crowdsou...

To celebrate the start of 2012 Belgium based agency VVL BBDO created a crowd sourced piece of music, powered by Tweets. Tapping into the thousands of wish tweets that are sent from all over the world at this time of year. Users simply added the hash tag #tweeshes to all new year wish tweets. These Related Digital Buzz Posts: Ben & Jerry’s Fair Tweets Campaign V Australia: 4320 Tweets, 3 Days In LA Polar Tweets: By Toronto Zoo

Takeaway.com Picks Up €...

Some interesting news from The Netherlands: online food ordering and delivery service Takeaway.com has been delivered 13 million euros – roughly $16.6 million – by Dutch VC Prime Ventures . With the additional capital, the Dutch company behind the food ordering service aims to continue its international expansion, after starting local websites in a number of European countries (including Belgium, Austria, the UK and Germany). Takeaway.com basically lets hungry people order food from vetted restaurants online – from websites like Pizza.co.uk and Thuisbezorgd.nl or from mobile apps (iPhone and Android). So far, the company has partnered with over 9,000 restaurants and claims to generate over 100 million euros in annual order revenues (serving over 3 million customers). Takeaway.com was founded in 2000 by Jitse Groen, and competes heavily with Just-Eat.com (which claims 20,000 restaurant partners and 4 million monthly orders) in Europe.

@louisck Reports His Co...

It’s always heartening to see an experiment in disintermediated content succeed and it could have happened to a better guy. Louis CK began selling his one-hour comedy special on his own website for $5 a pop last Sunday and, as of today, he’s reporting he’s made over $500,000 from 110,000 downloads. This is a profit of over $200,000 on a concert that cost him about $170,000 to film and edit (most of that paid with ticket sales) and a website that cost $32,000 to build (which suggests that I’m in the wrong line of work. Carlos Mencia: Call me. I know HTML). He breaks down the finance below: The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again. Basically he’s proven that someone with a dedicated fan base (arguably a huge one) can make his or her own way in the world without the studio model. This should make a large number of folks who “curate” content for sale very, very nervous but it also points to the need for modern entertainers to understand every little thing about their industry. You can’t just be “talent” anymore unless you really want to be. However, by lying back and waiting for a “producer” to make things happen you’re risking a loss of financial opportunity and artistic control. You often can’t have it two ways but, to be fair, not everyone can be Louis CK. To his credit, Louis learned quite a bit from the experience. He spouts philosophical below. I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood. Amen, Mr. CK.

Welcome To Belgium, Spo...

Confirming rumors that started circulating earlier this week, music streaming phenomenon Spotify has finally made its way to my home country of Belgium , and is also launching today in Switzerland after debuting in Austria yesterday. That means Spotify is now available in 12 countries, 11 in Europe and the United States. Not much else to report for now. If you’re in Austria, Switzerland or Belgium, check out Spotify’s pricing plans (ranging from absolutely free to €9.99 per month) and enjoy.

Scanadu Raises $2M: “Ch...

Meet Scanadu , an innovative health tech startup I daresay you’ll be hearing a lot more from in the future. It’s not the easiest of tasks explaining what the company is building at this point, but let’s call it a personal, mobile, auto-diagnostics product – they refer to it as a Medical Tricorder. Founded in January 2011 by a team of entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds, the roots of Scanadu actually go way back. One of the company’s founders, and its chief executive officer, is Walter De Brouwer – something of a legend here in Belgian entrepreneurial circles, and beyond. He says he had the basic idea for a personal health monitoring service back in 1999 when he was working at the renowned Starlab research institute, which he jump-started alongside MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte . And from watching Star Trek. “Sci-fi stories are business plans in disguise,” De Brouwer tells me, referring to the invention of the mobile phone, which was inspired by the Star Trek communicator. “I’ve tried to build the Tricorder once before, in 1999 at Starlab, but the technology was too immature.” De Brouwer says the idea resurfaced in his mind in 2006, when his son was hospitalized for 3 months following a serious accident. So he conjured up the idea of using one’s smartphone as a personal doctor of sorts, leveraging many of the things modern cellphones can do to help people auto-diagnose and manage many of the easily identifiable health conditions that may arise. Scanadu’s first product, the ‘Medical Tricorder’, is built specifically with parents with kids in mind, and to help avoid expensive trips to hospitals based on insufficient information and/or anxiety. “Today, the health tools in your home probably consist of a thermometer and a box of band-aids. We can do a lot better,” says co-founder and COO Misha Chellam. The company has worked with IDEO to create a video that captures its core vision well that includes the quote I used for this posts’s headline, albeit paraphrased. You can watch it below. Scanadu has raised $2 million from a network of global angel investors, including Playfish co-founder Sebastien De Halleux, and is currently moving the team from Belgium to the San Francisco Bay Area (the lab is being established at NASA’s Research Park). The company is building a core team of biomedical engineers, software and hardware developers, and AI specialists. They also have a Medical Advisory Board that includes Stanford-affiliated Dr. Daniel Kraft and Dr. Jordan Shlain , founder of Healthloop and Current Health. Scanadu is currently seeking technology partnerships with telemedicine and diagnostic technology startups, and hiring more people to join its quest to build a personal ‘pocket doctor’. Crunchbase SCANADU Company: Scanadu Website: scanadu.com Scanadu is sending your mobile phone to med school with the aim of creating a commercially-viable medical tricorder in the next 3 - 5 years. Healthcare is rapidly becoming quantitative, a number’s game - see the quantified Self movement. Patients as well as doctors will be overloaded with ‘big’ data. This will open up a massive market for auto-diagnosis. But this market needs a tool, just like the mobile market needed a mobile phone. The tool will be called the medical... Learn more