Estonian Accelerator St...

The new Estonian accelerator program Startup Wise Guys , backed by the Estonian government-owned Estonian Development Fund and some former engineers from Skype, has just announced the seven teams it will be working with. Two of them from Estonia and one from Croatia, Ukraine, Germany, The Netherlands and UK. Wise Guys received over 200 applications, and will provide the shortlisted projects with an extensive startup developing program. The projects will be supported by a squad of international mentors. The program starts on April 23 and includes three steps: shaping (3 weeks), building (4 weeks) and selling (3 weeks), supported by Wise Guys mentors. There will be an Investor Day in Tallinn on June 30th, followed by one in London on July 6th. Startup Wise Guys, launched few months ago, is a joint effort of the players in Estonian startup ecosystem to bring international mentors to Estonia and attract talent across Eastern Europe and CIS countries. The first members of the new Startup Wise Guys family are: Monolith (Croatia) This is a machine powered by an Augmented Reality Engine that turns regular commercials into movie-like experiences. There are many possible use for Monolith, for example: in a clothing store you can try on a new collection in front of the Monolith, even without going to the fitting room; or, you could have a movie-like experience of your favorite story, movie or game just in front of the Monolith. Monolith is the first fully integrated augmented reality advertising device combining a hardware solution based on Kinect and a proprietary software platform for creating, distributing and measuring AR ads. Their first customers are a local Croatian soft drink company and will work for the Lenovo store in Zagreb. Moojoo (Germany) Mojoo let´s people discover, organize & share local events, based on their interests and curated by their friends and tastemakers. It is a social discovery site for local events and things to do, curated by your friends and people who share your interests and your lifestyle, by leveraging word-of-mouth conversations on the social web. Think Pinterest-meets-Twitter for your local life, creating exciting and memorable moments every day. This could be a powerful formula: the hand-curated quality of a visual event & lifestyle magazine plus the speed of a blog plus the personal relevance of a social and local network. Thats moojoo! While people spend about 90 % of their time and money offline, the social and mobile market size is about to rise to $30 Billion by 2015. There is a huge potential for the next stage of the web aiming to connect people online in order to organize their life offline. 75 % of people already use the internet to organize things offline. People have about 6 h daily leisure time in average, which we want to help them to fill best possible. Like A Local Guide (Estonia) This is like a local guide travel site where reviews are written by locals and creating your personal city guide takes only a minute. It helps people to create high-quality personal city guides that compile tips from locals into personalized travel guides that can be created quickly. Instead of browsing through hundreds of listings they have to look through only those places which fit their interest and budget. Their goal is to create an active community of local editors all around the world and offer local activists and travel bloggers a new medium to share their favorite places in their hometown. The market is the whole independent travel sector, who travel longer and spend more money in destinations. They are offering businesses that have been selected by editors an opportunity to highlight their listing with different features, like allowing direct booking of accommodation or tours, adding more photos, advertising their events (parties, live music, concerts etc), answering to customers more personally and letting people know about their specials (discounts, happy hours etc). Wellbeing In the City (UK) Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle through intimate communities & Wellbeing marketplace. Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle. People are not living balanced lifestyles – Lacking time, energy, confidence and freedom – Forced to choose between competing needs of work, family, friends & self – 80% of people feel stress at work, but can’t find help in learning how to manage – Need to be inspired and supported by people they can relate to. Their solution is a social place that balances lifestyles. They are trying to get people to become addicted to positive, engaging and healthy living. Monday52 (Ukraine) Monday52 helps people to have a better career by sharing their work experience and comparing it to others. Employees can rate their employers and get personalized job recommendations. Monday52 wants to prove the idea on a few pilot markets before expanding further. These markets are tech companies in Estonia and Ukraine. The business model is not yet clear, two big ideas so far are HR analytics and lead gen for recruiters. Their direct competitor is Glassdoor.com in US. Monday52 thinks that their edge is that they think you can’t get trustworthy reviews and ratings with real people (e.g. anonymous) and that’s what we’re going to do. In terms of a biusiness model, there are lots of “workplace rankings” from Hewitt to BBB and regional bodies. Unlike those folks, on Monday52 employees will get actual value out of participating in a survey. WappZapp (The Netherlands) They bring your daily dose of video on the web. By turning your device into your social remote, you can zap videos to any webTV. Your personal TV portal. Flipboard meets spotify for video. With WappZapp you zap your way through the best internet video, track your favorite shows and share cool stuff with friends. Best of all, you can turn your iPad or iPhone in to the remote to zap any video to your internet TV. WeatherMe (Estonia) WeatherMe aims to boost farming production by combining farming science and weather data in a simple way. Farmers today are not benefitting from farming science because it’s complicated. For example only 4% of farmers use some kind of an information system to determine what pesticide to use. They use guesstimates and research has shown that these decisions are not always optimal. The product: They will create field and crops management system that is simple to use because it has most of the data, like weather inside already. The farmers will have to input less data manually and therefore are more likely to start using an electronic system for field management. With that, farmers will get a greater yield from their fields because they actually use the farming methods modern science provides through the system. 1Knows (Estonia) 1Knows is your personal eLearning manager which guides you on your life-long learning path. They aim to enhance your professional self via gamification. Based on your interests, 1Knows combines free as well as paid-for training, lessons and milestones to end up with a better and smarter you.

Foursquare Adds Bios To...

Foursquare today rolled out the ability for users to add short personal “bios” to their profile pages on the site. These bios are limited to 160 characters or less, and can be imported directly from a user’s Twitter account or written from scratch. It’s another small step in Foursquare’s progression from a fun app that plugs into sites such as Facebook and Twitter to a more self-contained, standalone social network in its own right. Since the company secured $50 million in funding at a $600 valuation last summer, Foursquare has been steadily adding new features such as restaurant recommendations and passive location detection aimed at fleshing out the app’s user experience and increasing its stickiness. The addition of bios is in that same vein, as it could get people to start following other Foursquare users that they don’t necessarily know in real life based on their interests. Just like people often use Twitter to follow strangers who say interesting things, people could start to use Foursquare to follow strangers who go to interesting places. This already happens, of course, but the addition of bios encourages it more. Foursquare's new profile pages, with the new "bio feature Overall, these moves seem to be working: Its user count is growing worldwide , and investors seem pretty happy with Foursquare’s evolution as well. As our own Eric Eldon reported earlier this month, Spark Capital is said to have bought up as much as $50 million more of the company’s stock from its employees. But this is no time for the three-year-old Foursquare to relax. Apps in the social location mobile space (also known gratingly as SoLoMo) are hotter than ever, and new entrants on the scene such as Highlight and Glancee are getting lots of buzz . Small, iterative feature additions like today’s show that Foursquare is keeping up its own hustle as the competition continues to grow.

LinkedIn Adds Follow Bu...

If you’re in the Business to Business business, then you need a new LinkedIn Follow Button on your company website. The new button makes it simple for people to follow your company updates and news through their LinkedIn feed. To add it to your website or blog, visit the LinkedIn developer page and get the code in two clicks. You can get an “In Follow” button with or without a follower count. LinkedIn has also made the company follow button accessible throughout the social media site. You’ll find it on any company profile page, in a pop-up from any company employee, or straight from the search results page. Remember, the follow button works both ways. Click it to stay in touch with companies you do business with (or would like to do business with) or use it to keep tabs on your competitors. With company and people updates streaming on to your homepage and top news stories curated to match your interests, LinkedIn is working hard to become your first social media stop in the morning. All I really need to become a big fan is a redesign of the profile homepage. Can’t say specifically what it needs, but its not working for me as is. Does it work for you?

Washington Post Tests P...

If you’re tired of seeing the same news as everyone else, The Washington Post is now experimenting with personalized headlines. That experiment is called Personal Post, and it’s available at personal.washingtonpost.com , where you’ll see a river of content that you can customize. If you’re already a member at WashingtonPost.com, you can log in and the site will offer headlines tailored to match your previous activity. If not, you can choose from of The Post’s “starter streams,” like National Pulse, Washington Life, and Sports Nut. “Out of the tens of millions of readers that come to the Post every month we know that each one wants to consume a particular type of news,” says Katharine Zaleski, Executive Director of Digital News, in the Personal Post press release For a first-time user, Personal Post can seem like just another collection of articles, albeit one that focuses on a specific collection of topics. Over time, however, readers can give The Post more information about their interests, which in turn will lead to a more customized feed. If there’s an article you don’t like, you can hit a button to remove it from your stream, or to see “less of this,” or to remove the entire topic from your interests. As you’re browsing the site, articles also have a “more” button, which allows readers to say that they want to see more of a certain type of article. Last fall, The Post launched the Social Reader , an app for reading and sharing stories on Facebook, and it now has 15 million subscribers. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Vijay Ravindran says Personal Post and Social Reader have very different aims, since Personal Post’s recommendations are completely private. What they share, however, is an aim to “help us understand the various ways readers want to consume news.” Other newspapers have also experimented with personalized content. Most notably, The Wall Street Journal is working with startup Gravity to personalize the content on part of its front page. (Gravity is also providing the personalized TechCrunch recommendations to the right of this post.) So I wondered: If the test is successful, could The Post follow suit and personalize content throughout its site? “We’re not sure how an experiment like Personal Post will manifest, but this beta can help provide a clearer picture,” Zaleski tells me.

Bottlenose 2.0: Taming ...

There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate real-time communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the real-time communication happening between their customers. What’s more, sharing has really gotten out of hand. The ease of real-time communication and sharing has now outpaced our ability to filter the noise into non-teeth rattling signals. There are hundreds examples of real-time data interpretation applied to outputs of noise, and social media dashboards are the answer to the social sharing part of the problem. We just covered Nimble , a company that’s essentially taking on Salesforce with an enterprise equivalent of social CRM for the little guys, i.e. startups and SMBs. Bottlenose today released their own v2.0 of their intelligent social media dashboard, and it’s an interesting and more visual alternative to Nimble. MG covered Bottlenose last year when the company was still in stealth mode and was just focusing on funneling Twitter streams. Co-founded by Nova Spivak, who’s already become known for his data plays, like Twine and Live Matrix, and Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose now filters Twitter, Facebook, and RSS, creating a unified stream that puts those networks in one place. The goal, though, is not only aggregation, it’s about understanding what each message is about at a granular level so that it can build a robust profile about you and your interests to help you discover relevant information you might have missed, new friends, articles, and so on. Just like Nimble. The cool thing about Bottlenose is that it gives you the opportunity to set sophisticated alerts and uses action-based rules to help you get on top of the noise, regardless of whether or not you’re actively engaged in the app or not. It can even take actions for you, like a helpful browser-based social media butler. So there’s a lot going on under the hood, but the experience is light and fast — it doesn’t feel like your browser is carrying sandbags, thanks to Bottlenose containing a breezy concoction of HTML5 and Javascript. The social butler I mentioned before (or “Assistants”) now live in the left column of the app, learning about your interests as you go, offering personalized suggestions for filters that you may actually care about. This is all part of Bottlenose’s core technology, called Sonar (hence the dolphin references), which has been significantly improved in version 2.0, now representing a really interesting, visual browsing experience. When you’re in the app, Sonar takes up the right portion of the screen, presenting personalized, relevant tags in a graphic layout. They’re layered in concentric circles, with those closest to the nucleus being the most important, but you can see the visual tree layout of your conversations, clicking into each one to learn more. Beyond the new column view with “Assistants,” Bottlenose 2.0 also now allows you to consume pictures, video, and read articles in-line within your streams (all embedded in the UI), and there’s more author and message context so you can view author data inline, threaded conversations, bios, and so on. Users can also now write lengthier messages, and Bottlenose will carry messages that exceed the character limit into a “metadata payload” that others can expand. Oh, and there’s plenty of Twitter info to keep you occupied, influence, interests (all semantically inferred) — instant dossiers on the people you care about. Hooray! Bottlenose already has 10K+ users in beta, with 100K more on the wait list, and the team says that users have been spending an average of 11 minutes in the app per visit. The startup will be opening up third-party developer access (APIs) very soon to enable plugins, new functionality, integrations, and all that good stuff. Once that happens, Bottlenose could really take off. The app is still in somewhat limited beta, but for those looking to get access (I recommend checking it out), head over to the homepage , sign up, create an account, and if you’re prompted, use “Getsonar” for the access code. Oh, and if you have a Klout score over 30, you’ll get in automatically. Let us know what you think.