Fellody And Tastebuds A...

This post is written by our regular contributor Natasha Starkell , the CEO of GoalEurope , the outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe. Twitter @NatashaStarkell . Gplus.to/natashastarkell .† There are some of us who believe that having matching tastes in music is an essential for a relationship. Now two Spotify apps are setting out to prove it. The German founders of Fellody , Robin Simon and Thomas Vatter created an online flirting website where top matches are identified based on users’ music preferences. And they weren’t the only ones. Today Fellody and Spotify are launching Fellody music flirting app, available in English and German languages. At the same time Tastebuds.fm is launching it’s own Spotify app. Tastebuds.fm helps you ‘meet people who share your love for music’. The startup has been making waves with users, especially in the UK (lots of dates and at least one wedding so far). The site was founded by two musicians from London: Alex Parish and Julian Keenaghan. Both founders are members of the band Years Of Rice And Salt. The app integrates with Spotify, scanning a user’s most played music and instantly showing people near to them who have similar tastes. Users can browse prospective dates, listen to their matches’ favourite music and send them a quick message if they catch their eye. The app also allows users to share mixtapes with each other using Spotify’s in-built playlists. Some 48% of Tastebuds.fm’s users have never used a dating site before so it’s reaching a new audience. With the Fellody app users drag and drop their Spotify playlists into the Fellody app. Then Fellody compares the songs on the playlists and offers top matches, which users can engage with by sending flirts and messages directly via the app. Users can also sign up via the Fellody website and add your music history from Last.fm or iTunes. Windows Media Player can also be used to establish music preferences. Fellody is essentially a social network based on musical tastes, where flirtatious behavior is acceptable and encouraged. Its community shares music in a public feed and cheers with a “this rocks!” button for good finds. Fellody “friends” are called “Groupies” and the whole look and feel of the website is rather fun and cool. Unlike its competitor, Tastebuds , Fellody might be considered quite purist. You can only upload those music titles you have actually played on your computer, listened to on Last.fm or added to the Spotify playlist. It goes as far as taking into account music genres and play count. This, according to founder Robin Simon, is to prevent someone pretending they like a band only to get attention. Both founders spend most of their free time with music, and the idea of Fellody was born at one of the music concerts they attended. Simon is a serial entrepreneur, whose previous businesses include Sodatech and Sodapix . He is a lead singer in his band Grant Lassie . His co-founder Thomas Vatter worked for several years as a product manager at German ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG .

MobileBackstage Secures...

Lady Gaga has captured the imagination of the entertainment world with her team’s successful social media engagement with the fans she calls her “Little Monsters”, and many other artists and agents are scrambling to capitalise in similar ways. At the same time startups are appearing to meet this need. To that end MobileBackstage , an interactive fan club service that develops these online relationships between artists and fans, has just today announced it closed a bridge funding round of $1.3 million (€1 million) back in April. The investment was led by Finnvera, the financing vehicle of the Finnish state, which was joined by Miston, a privately owned investment company, management team members, as well as a group of angel investors. The cash will be used for growth, developing the platform and new offices in San Francisco, going existing offices in New York, London and Helsinki. This follows a round of funding in the region of €2 million in 2010. More than just another a mobile app, the service creates a fan club environment across multiple platforms connecting fans globally. The app can be fully branded for each artist/band and runs on iPhone and Java-enabled handsets. The company has so far created fan clubs for artists such as Jessie J., Tinie Tempah, The Kooks, Devlin, Lykke Li, and works with Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony among others. Mobile Backstage claims that in the past year, end users have generated over 4 million interactions and 100 million page views as a result of its platform. The startup is a sort of spin out from an agency called Steam Republic, however they are not pushing the Steam Republic name in order to differentiate the platform. A competitor to MobileBackstage is Moontoast . Both similarly small sized, early stage start-ups offering promising solutions to rebuild try and build deep connections between fans and artists. Paavo Bäckman, founder and CEO of Mobile Backstage says he has also appointed Johannes Milén as the startup’s new Chief Operating Officer (COO) based in its Helsinki office. Milén is a former CIO of Rautakesko of Kesko, one of the largest corporations in Finland.

Aiming For Global Expan...

Elemental Technologies, which builds encoding software used by some of the largest video providers in the world, raised $13 million in a Series C round of funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, which also includes existing investors General Catalyst, Voyager Capital, and Steamboat Ventures. The Portland, Ore.-based startup has now raised a total of roughly $30 million. Along with the funding, Elemental has also named Kevin O’Hara as its Chairman of the Board, replacing founder Sam Blackman, who will remain CEO. The funding will be used primarily to promote global expansion, as the encoding vendor extends beyond its home market in the U.S. and attempts to tap into worldwide adoption of online video. Elemental opened a London office last summer to support its growing business in Western Europe, which now accounts for about 20 percent of all sales. It also opened an office in Hong Kong to tackle the Asia-Pacific market. Altogether, Elemental now has 70 employees worldwide. More investment overseas will mean growing those markets, but also opening new offices in places where Elemental doesn’t yet have a presence. That includes regions like Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. That international support will also be necessary as Elemental prepares to support multiple international distributors for their coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, which are about two-and-a-half months away. The London Games will be Elemental’s largest live deployment to date, as its encoding hardware and software will be used by six major broadcasters distributing to 40 countries worldwide. The opportunity is bigger than just supporting Olympics streams — in a phone conversation, Blackman pointed to the multibillion dollar market for traditional video delivery equipment, which will soon be replaced as distribution moves to the Internet and mobile networks. Elemental gear is already used by some of the biggest names in video, including Comcast, HBO and ESPN in the states, as well as Terra, the largest video provider in Latin America. With that in mind, Kevin O’Hara, who has sat on the Elemental board for the last 18 months or so, will be taking over the Chairman role. O’Hara was one of the earliest employees at Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) which sold to Worldcom in 1996, as well as a co-founder and president at Level 3 Communications. At Elemental he’ll help support the startup’s massive expansion overseas.

With A Talent War In Th...

This is a guest post by Maria Constantinescu , founder of Slickflick the photo story app. Today, in 2012, there is a talent war like no other. The Valley is abuzz with a hiring frenzy. Startups can’t compete with Yammer, Zynga, Twitter, Facebook and the rest for developers. Perhaps the answer is to look elsewhere? To countries where the old Soviet education system produced maths and science graduates by the truckload? To Kiev, Belgrade, Slovenia and others? And perhaps to Romania. For Romanians, perhaps for the first time in history, the world is now flat. Forty-five years of Stalin-esque communism meant sports and education were the only acceptable ways to compete in Romania. Soviet-era industrialisation ended up producing a country where almost half of the educated population were trained to become engineers. Today, in 2012, they are more likely to be coders. And now they can take their place with the rest of the world on the level playing field of technology. The best Romanian coding talent was noticed by Microsoft in its hay day. It’s now gradually becoming democratised, spread out across more platforms, initially through outsourcing and now through the influx of Western start-ups in search of affordable skills. So what exactly should you expect to find in Romania? What are the pros and cons? Here’s the lowdown, with some generalizations. Culture People are smart, educated, fluent English speakers and resourceful lateral thinkers. On the downside, entrepreneurial culture has not yet developed. This translates into a reluctance to take risks and a lower ability to collaborate across teams. It might sound odd to Valley readers, but Romanian engineers would much rather work for a salary than for a stake in a business. There are some examples of local entrepreneurial communities, like the one formed around the Timisoara Tech Incubator or Startupper supported by the team of Adulmec in Bucharest. But the most impactful movement is the one involving start ups that left Romania, with the likes of Ubervu, Summify and Brainient. Skills There is a discrepancy between skills. There is a lot of Java, .NET and PHP skills. More ‘exotic’ coding languages like Ruby, Python are harder to find. On the mobile side, there are considerably more Android coders than iOS developers. One appeal for many western startups that either set up shop in Romania or develop a team there is the ability to offer student internships straight out of university, pick the best and groom them with the kinds of skills that they need. Rates Salaries are low in Romania compared with Berlin, London, Silicon Valley. This reflects the reduced access to opportunities and lack of exposure to cutting edge developments. You would expect to pay €2,000 (net) for a great developer in Bucharest. The rest of Romania is even cheaper, by about 30%. But beware of confusing the tax systems and bureaucracy. Talent You will find the largest tech communities in the historical university centers of Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara & Iasi. In Bucharest you have the largest and most diverse talent pool, but also a more competitive environment with higher volatility. In smaller communities there’s a stronger sense of reputation. Western cities like Timisoara and Cluj tend to have better work ethic. Finding really valuable engineers takes time. The general guidelines are to hire a ‘magnet coder’ that can attract other trusted people from the community. When recruiting, look for Polytechinc graduates from one of the above university centers. The most popular job sites are Bestjobs.ro , ejobs.ro and Jobber.ro . The best screening for engineers is high school. There is a bit of an ‘Ivy League’ of high schools in Romania. These schools are focused on math and computer science. Every large city has one or two. Generally, people coming out of these top schools are no schmucks. Also, pay attention to see if they won any competitions and whether they had jobs or pet projects while still in school. University education in Romania, though thorough, tends not to encourage independent thought. Good Romanian engineers don’t like to be the 15th person down the chain working on a little piece of code or feel disconnected from the business. They are more likely to defect to another business if they don’t feel inspired by you or your company or the team you assemble. The real geniuses will do their own thing, just as anywhere else. Finally, the most appealing trait of Romanians is that they live on both sides of the brain. They have ingenuity and skill, a precious combination no matter where you find it. Soon know-how and self-belief will catch up and they will be on a truly level playing field, possibly for the first time ever.

Some Guys Have All The ...

Sure, AT&T’s One X will officially hit store shelves this Sunday, but you may be in for an early weekend treat if you’ve taken it upon yourself to pre-order the thing. According to a handful of reports from AndroidCentral’s and Phandroid’s forums, some lucky HTC fans have already received their new Android handsets well in advance of the device’s official launch. It’s a common story, really — just about every time a hotly-awaited phone nears launch, it seems like some lucky son-of-a-gun manages to score one thanks to an overeager delivery person. Take another glance at your device’s order status (most likely though UPS if you ordered from AT&T) if you haven’t yet to see if your One X is set to land on your doorstep today. Those first few moments with the One X could be a little rough, if these early reports are any indication — some unlucky AT&T customers are reporting longer-than-usual activation times. C’est la vie. Of course, I get the feeling some of you may be rueing your decision to pre-order — if you’re always on the lookout for new and shiny hardware (and since you’re reading TechCrunch, there’s a good chance you fall into that category), Samsung’s newly-revealed Galaxy S III may be more up your alley. It may not have been the monumental leap forward some were hoping for — the expectations game is a real pain to manage — but it’s certainly going to be a real contender going forward. Samsung Mobile head JK Shin remarked at the device’s launch event in London yesterday that the LTE version of the device would land in U.S. over the summer, and The Verge managed to lock that launch date down to sometime this June. Like HTC’s flagship, Samsung’s new smartphone is expected to land on multiple carriers’ sales channels in one form or another, so it’s a great time for customers to prowl for potential upgrades.