Tag Archives: europe

Collaborative Gastronomy? Cookening Lets Tourists Dine In A Local’s Own Home

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Cookening

In years to come, when we look back, it’s only then that we’ll know if Collaborative Consumption really is a movement or if history deems it to be the hollow marketing term that it sometimes appears to be. But in the midst of things, it’s hard not to think that something pretty interesting is happening, specifically relating to the issue of trust. Airbnb and its European rival 9flats, for example, got users used to the idea of inviting strangers into their home. Meanwhile, Housebites enables people to sell home-cooked meals as an alternative to a take-out.

Launching today is Cookening, a new French startup co-founded by Cédric Giorgi (previously co-editor of TechCrunch France) that combines elements of both Airbnb and Housebites. Starting with France first, a country known for its gastronomy, it enables locals to be matched with foreigners — tourists in particular — so they can invite them into their homes to experience an authentic, in this case French, home dining experience.

The pain-point that Cookening is targeting is that when traveling it’s not always easy to meet local people and experience authentic food. “As a passionate cook, it is impossible to easily invite new and relevant people to share a home cooked meal,” Giorgi tells TechCrunch. “This is what Cookening wants to solve.”

Hosts create a profile on Cookening, which includes a table page showing photos of their favourite home-cooked dishes, a preset menu/meal structure, and a price for the guests. The profile is manually vetted by Cookening. Non-locals then simply choose the host/table booking, and make contact. Like similar peer-to-peer marketplaces, payment is handled by Cookening in order to help establish and maintain trust between hosts and guests, and the host only receives payment the day after a successful meal. It’s also how the startup will make money, charging a 20% commission.

If it all sounds quite similar to an existing concept in France, known as “Table d’hôte”, where people host home cooked meals, that’s because it is. However, Giorgi says the practice was highly regulated. “We want to globalize and ease this concept so that everyone can experience the wonderful moment of sharing a meal with people you don’t know and that have different origins,” he says.

Another important element of the Cookening concept is that hosts dine with their guests. This adds further trust — both parties are in theory eating the same food — plus it’s as much a social as gastronomic experience, a cultural exchange, if you will.

To date, Cookening is bootstrapped but is looking to raise external funding. Alongside Giorgi, the startup’s other co-founder is Sébastien Guignot, previous head of development at French fintech startup Quanthouse that exited to Standard & Poor’s.

Meanwhile, Cookening’s potential competitors include Feastly in the U.S., which focuses on meals organised between locals, not locals and tourists specifically. Israel’s (and Disrupt NY nominee) EatWith is probably a closer competitor, but isn’t targeting France at the moment. There are also some local rivals in the “Table d’hôte” tradition, though Giorgi says they lack Cookening’s peer-to-peer model.

Urturn Raises $13.4M Series A, Led By Balderton, For Its Social Expressions Platform That Lets Teens Create Memes & Movements

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urturn

Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with a $10.7 million investment. The private equity arm of Debiopharm Group invested the remaining $2.7 million. As part of the investment, Balderton founding partner Barry Maloney will join the Urturn board.

The London-based startup, which also has an office in the Valley, is also launching an iOS app today, funded by its Series A, to extend its web-based platform to mobile. An Android app is also in the works, due later this year. Prior to the Series A, Urturn had raised around $500,000 in friends/family funding.

So what exactly is a social expression platform? Urturn — pronounced ‘your turn’ — is best described as a viral meme-generator. It offers both a social toolbox for creating and sharing ‘expressions’ with other users, with support for sharing these out to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and also a space to hang your creations and browse others (and/or follow celebrity users or your friends). It also has its own bookmarklet browser button to make grabbing source material for meme-making purposes even easier, as Pinterest does.

Expressions is Urturn’s term for the visual composites that are its social currency. These often start with a photo but can also include multimedia elements like video and audio, which are then augmented with text or doodles or other graphical elements, by a user selecting the relevant template. So, instead of having to go to Google to copy and paste the meme du jour to post to Facebook or Twitter, Urturn gives its users the tools to make their own version of that meme. Or something else entirely.

The image at the top of this post is a basic example of an expression created with Urturn — by first uploading a photo and then adding a series of pointers to the image. Other templates currently available on the site include doodles, collages, quotes, speech bubbles, hashtag tags, cartoon elements (such as the Bunnify expression, below right) and more. 

There are also templates that support interactions, such as love it/leave or this/that which ask other users to vote on whether they like whatever else they’re seeing in that template. And templates to incorporate multimedia elements, as noted above. In short, everything an angst-ridden teenager needs to express themselves online. Or a fashion blogger to ask their followers which slacks they dig.

Another core piece of site apparatus is Urturn’s ‘Your Turn’ button which encourages the viral component by letting users click a button to easily create their own version of an expression that someone else has made — leading to waves of similarly themed expressions to be generated by, for instance, fans of the musicians who have a presence on the site.

The main topics Urturn is focusing on for now are music, fashion, beauty and art & design. It notes that it has received “significant interest” from the music industry as a new way for artists to connect with their fans.  Artists already signed up to the platform include Alicia Keys, David Bowie, One Direction, Green Day, UNIONJ, Ellie Goulding, The Gossip, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kendrick Lamar. Urturn has also attracted interest as a blogging platform to engage with readers from fashion magazines such as Cosmo.

Urturn is not currently breaking out its total user numbers but says its biggest markets globally are the U.S., followed by the U.K. and then South America.

The original idea for Urturn stemmed from a sense of frustration with the limitions of existing social tools as a medium of expression explains Stelio Tzonis, CEO and also the co-founder pictured top, left, with Urturn’s fashion & lifestyle hire, Sophie O’Kelly.

“We were sharing some stuff on social media like Facebook, Twitter. And the frustration we got is most of the time we wanted just to play around with content, like taking an image and doodling on the top, or writing something. And you end up having to take the picture, go to Photoshop or whatever, so all the work flow were really complex,” he tells TechCrunch.

“We just want to be more expressive. Sometimes you just want to have a picture and ask something to your friends, or put a quote on it, or point to something. This is really what we mean by be more expressive.”

Urturn plans to open up its templates feature in future via an API, to further expand the scope of the expressions it offers.

“Social networks really enabled the way to connect people with friends and followers, and a way to share with like, reblog, repost, retweet. Other things like this. But when you come to express yourself it’s really limited,” Tzonis continues.

“What we saw was unlimited ways to express yourself. And what we were dreaming is to have a palette [of templates like Urturn's expressions] — if you want to record you just find something to record, if you want to create a quote, if you want to share some music, you want to point something you want to  doodle, and we believe that there is unlimited different numbers to express yourself. That was really the beginning where everything started with Urturn.”

Balderton’s Maloney says the fund saw a lot more in Urturn than just A N Other photo-sharing social network/comms network. “We see it as a medium for self-expression which we don’t think has been done very well yet,” he tells TechCrunch. “Photos are an important part but it’s not just photos. What we liked about it was it brings together the idea of music, goes into segments like fashion so for us what grabbed our attention about it was the engagement that’s possible, when you can really use self-expression to engage with our audience.”

“The social networks that are out there do a great job at what they’re designed to do which is communicating. What this one really does is it gets to the heart of self-expression and we think that’s where the value is,” Maloney adds. “The way the audience has taken to the tools, the way they’ve made them pretty simple to use, they way they’ve presented them in a multi-fashion, multi-dimensional way where you can almost drop and drag any of the connotations that you want to get that engagement going, and then to watch the users that are on, how long they stay on, and what they’re doing are all really great early signs for us of something that’s got great potential.”

Urturn’s Tzonis says the startup is still exploring monetisation strategies, with possibilities under consideration being promoted posts, much like Twitter’s promoted tweets model. But the first order of business is to scale up the number of Urturn users and grow the community.

“There are a lot of different opportunities to monetise this because it’s so expressive, that we have a lot of brands asking us [about Urturn]. It’s a lot better than an ad because an ad it’s just broadcasting something. Here you have the audience that just take your message and do it their own way, so when you see your feed you don’t see again that ad — you see ‘hey, my friend has done that with that product’ or whatever,” he says. “If you have an audience you will get revenue from it… We have a lot of opportunity and people are coming to us with ideas directly.”

SumUp, One Of Europe’s Many Mobile Payments Startups, Launches In Russia – Now Operating In 11 Markets

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sumup russia

SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an eleventh European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and now Russia, giving it a larger international geographical footprint than other European mobile point-of-sales rivals including iZettle and Rocket Internet-backed Payleven.

To support its Russia launch SumUp has opened a local office in Moscow, and partnered with Svyaznoy Group, a Russian retail and financial conglomerate, which will distribute SumUp’s card readers through its nationwide consumer electronics retail network of close to 3,000 stores.

Svyaznoy stores will also be using SumUp’s solution to accept card payments from its customers — giving SumUp another leg up in the market. The retailer, which specialises in the sale of phones, digital equipment and portable electronics, sells close to a third (30%) of all the smartphones in Russia, according to SumUp.

SumUp said Russian businesses can now sign up to its service in Svyaznoy stores as well as on its own website, and are able to receive native language assistance from its Moscow-based support team. Daniel Klein, SumUp CEO, said it’s targeting the more than 6 million small businesses in Russia, and also aiming to grow off rising smartphone usage.

“We see a real need for an easy and secure solution for card payment acceptance in the Russian market. We are excited to work with the strongest possible partner in Russia right from the start,” he said in a statement.

SumUp has been using a partnering strategy to build out its European payments business, including partnering with a women’s plumbers organisation, Stopcocks Women Plumbers, in the U.K.; a maker of iPad POS software in Europe; and with a taxi hailing app and an odd job software platform provider in Germany.

As with the myriad mobile payments players targeting small businesses, SumUp does not charge a monthly fee to businesses using its system but rather takes a 2.75% per card reader transaction charge. It accepts Visa, Mastercard and recently added support for Amex in the majority of its markets.

Aiming To Be The Mobile Banking App To Rule Them All, Numbrs Stashes $7.7M Of Fresh Funding

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numbrs-logo

Chalk this up as one to watch closely in the world of consumer fintech. Numbrs, a mobile-first banking app founded out of Swiss company builder Centralway, has raised 7.5 million Swiss francs (~$7.7 million) from its parent, capital it will use to build on its pending German launch, with the UK and Swiss markets up next, followed by Singapore and Hong Kong.

The startup, which also hails from Switzerland (a country known for its “innovative” banking) bills itself as a mobile banking app to rule them all, offering a financial dashboard similar to something like Intuit-owned Mint.com, which enables a user to intelligently track and predict their spending, but with the added functionality of being able to actually make transactions and pay bills from within the app, too. That’s something that most, if not all, of its competitors lack.

Longer term, however, Numbrs’ ambition is to get this working across all countries and all banks, which would be some feat. Tackling Germany first makes sense, where I understand there exists a single and independent protocol over which Numbrs connects to banks locally.

In contrast, the UK — where Numbrs is gunning for a Summer/Fall launch — lacks a common B2C standard. Instead, the startup is working with a “leading” but unnamed API vendor (though I understand it’s not Yodlee, the U.S. company that powers a number of competing dashboards) which has already done the heavy lifting of creating connectors to all the major UK banks. This will enable Numbrs to authenticate the user with their bank accounts, import and conduct transactions, and present all data in the same aggregated view already present within the German version of the app. It also makes it harder for the banks to pull the plug on Numbrs, since its the same system they use for their own consumer apps.

Another key feature of the Numbrs app, and something that is central to its planned advertising-based revenue model, is what the startup calls the Future Timeline, a technology that predicts what a user’s finances will be like in the future by analysing historical patterns of incoming and outgoing payments, thus enabling financial targets to be met. It’s also the sort of data that I’m guessing advertisers would, indirectly, kill for.

Finally, as part of Numbrs’ UK launch, TechCrunch has learned that Centralway is opening a London office, scheduled to open in September, where the Numbrs UK country manager and other marketing personnel will also be based.

Rando’s 5M Anti-Social Photo Shares Could Be The Canary In The Social Networking Coalmine

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rando_youhavenofriends

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free.

Rando has been downloaded almost 230,000 times since its March 10 launch, with nearly 35,000 downloads in the past seven days, according to data shared with TechCrunch by ustwo‘s Matt Miller (aka Mills). The platform breakdown is pretty even right now — with only slightly more iOS app downloads than Android (roughly 120,000 vs 107,000), showing how Android users are adopting Rando even faster than their iPhone owning counterparts, having had a month less to send strangers strange shots. There are, of course, many more Android owners than iPhone owners out there so there’s a lot more scope for growth on Google’s platform.

Rando’s top five countries by downloads are as follows:

South Korea  82,224 downloads 37% of total downloads
United States  41,120 downloads 19% of total downloads
Russia  25,553 downloads 12% of total downloads
UK  12,173 downloads 6% of total downloads
Brazil  7,795 downloads 4%

Even though Rando does not enable social sharing within its app, users can take screengrabs and share shots manually — and that’s happening a little. ustwo notes there have been more than 25,000 #rando Instagram shares, for instance, despite the app not giving users any simple path to do that. Searching for #rando on Twitter also typically brings up a handful of organic daily shares.

The single piece of contextual information that Rando does allow its users to retain — the general location where a photo was taken — is also removed by close to a fifth of users (17%). While less than 1% of shared images have been marked as inappropriate so you can’t accuse Rando’s growth of being fuelled by sexting. You could perhaps argue it’s a bit of a curiosity that’s appealing to a small minority of people, even while most folk find it baffling. ustwo’s data shows that the app’s most active users (top 10% in terms of uploaded randos) have uploaded more than half (57%) of all the shared randos. But the app retention rate (50% in the past week) does sound strong. Specifically that means half of Rando’s users logged in within that week, which isn’t bad as an active user type stat.

A little bird tells me that ustwo, the London-based studio which decided to find out what would happen when it made an anti-social photo-sharing app, is preparing to push Rando onto a third mobile platform in the not too distant future too — so expect Rando’s growth trajectory to continue stepping upwards, as it has been since launch. ustwo says one million randos are being shared every four to five days now, at current usage rates. ”You are literally looking at the next $1billion Yahoo! Acquisition,” jokes Mills.

Joking aside, there is something seriously interesting about Rando’s takeoff. Not to read too much into a single app, of course, but as an experiment in social-less networking it’s fascinating to watch. Not to mention ironic, since on Rando no one is watching you — which is entirely the point. But factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors.

The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

Mobile usage is certainly fuelling this messaging-centric shift. There’s no doubt younger social network users have shifted focus away from relying on the workhorse PC in the corner, and on to apps on mobile devices — aka, the device that’s always with its owner. But the mobile is not only highly portable it’s inherently personal, containing an address book of your friends’ phone numbers. Which may be another reason why mobile social networking feels a little different, demands a little more privacy than the old web portal gateway to the social city.

There are certainly various trends at play here. Photo/image-sharing dominating text-based status updates being another, which explains Facebook’s recent focus on photos. But, if Rando’s rise proves anything it proves that humans communicate in more subtle ways than you might imagine, and need less social reinforcement than you might think. And when you think in those terms, it’s not such a huge leap to imagine the shifting sands of communication eroding the foundations of huge walled social strongholds after all. Lots of little apps, all taking away a portion of people’s attention, could eventually add up to a collective social exodus from the old networks. At least of key youth demographics.

Let’s face it, when the ex-owner of former teen-favourite social network MySpace feels capable of some very public Schadenfreude at Facebook’s expense — taking the trouble to dine out on the perception of members’ growing disinterest in Zuckerberg’s empire — something is definitely looking a little wonky in that gigantic electronic country.

MySpace hasn’t expired entirely but exists today, Ozymandias-esque, as a much diminished version of its past all-powerful self. And Murdoch’s Newscorp famously lost a bucket load of cash on the acquisition and sell off. You’d think he’d be too embarrassed to mention it — but instead he’s finding time to chuckle at Facebook’s imagined expense…

Look out Facebook!Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously.First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) May 17, 2013

Read that again, and it’s the same timeless warning as is contained in Shelley’s poem. Murdoch might as well have tweeted: ‘Look on my past works, Mark Zuckerberg, and despair!’

So while Rando’s relatively modest growth trajectory (vs Facebook or mobile messaging giants) is unlikely to make it onto Zuckerberg’s radar, it’s something any developer working in the social space would do well to take note of. Because even Facebook can’t overlook the wider forces at play in mobile – forces that appear to be reconfiguring the rules of the social game. And Rando is a small but telling member of that movement.

Zalora, Rocket Internet’s SE Asian Zappos Clone, Raises $100M More From Summit, Kinnevik And More

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Zalora logo

Zalora, a Zappos-style fashion e-commerce site in South East Asia backed by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator in Germany, is today announcing its latest investment — $100 million, led by Rocket Internet itself, along with regular Samwer investing partners Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The is the largest investment in Zalora to date, and one of the biggest in an e-commerce startup in the region.

Zalora has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and this round comes amid a new flush of money for fashion e-commerce companies: just yesterday it was reported that Fab is raising $250 million at a $1 billion valuation (a deal that only one month ago appeared to be for a $100 million raise).

This is not the first flush of money to come to Zalora. The startup had raised at least two other rounds since launching in March 2012, a “significant double-digit million” investment from JP Morgan in September 2012, and $26 million from Tengelmann in March 2013. It’s been using the funds to build out its footprint into more countries, invest in its logistics and also in R&D, out of its HQ in Singapore, and new platforms — among those, the launch of a iOS app.

As seems to be par for the course with Rocket Internet portfolio companies, Zalora has been no stranger to being subject to the negative rumor mill. In March 2013, Zalora was reported to be shutting down its regional operations in Taiwan, although the company said that it was streamlining and moving some functions to Singapore. That comes after other reports that Oliver Samwer had to go hands-on soon after Zalora’s launch for a little staff motivation. The company appears to already have changed MDs at the company. Today it is being run by Michele Farrario; in September 2012 the MD was Mato Peric.

But any signs of turmoil seem to be behind the company, for now at least. The company is claiming “months of steady growth,” recently delivering its one millionth order, although it doesn’t spell out what those revenues are specifically, noting just “double-digit million USD revenues.” It says that mobile sales make up 25% of all of its sales, which cover 500 brands and some 20,000 products per country site.

“Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in South-East Asia and has bright prospects,” said Ferrario in a statement. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as ZALORA. Our goal is to continue serving up world-class products and services, so everyone in South-East Asia can benefit.”

Rocket Internet got its beginnings building out e-commerce startups across Europe. Mimicking the functions of well-funded e-commerce startups in the U.S., some of those Rocket Internet startups even got acquired as part of the Americans’ inorganic growth strategies.

Rocket Internet still has a strong presence in Europe, but the Samwer brothers have been putting a lot more of their efforts lately into emerging markets like those in South East Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and further afield (case in point: Azmalo, a new Amazon-style online marketplace site in Pakistan launched just this week). The idea is to try to reach a swathe of consumers that represent a new middle class who are only starting to go online to shop, and therefore represent a faster growing user base than consumers in more mature, and more penetrated, markets.

Often the Samwers’ movements are in countries that Rocket’s U.S. counterparts have yet to tackle, making companies like Zalora into potential acquisition targets. In the meantime, adding more Rocket Internet e-commerce startups in each country to bolster existing ones means that they can share backend systems, logistics and get faster economies of scale, essential in getting e-commerce businesses to profit. You can see the full extent of the Rocket Internet empire here.

Jolla’s Software Chief Says Co-Creation Is What Makes The MeeGo Startup’s Phone Hardware So Special

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Jolla

Jolla, a Finnish startup formed in response to Nokia’s decision to ditch MeeGo in favour of Windows Phone, has finally taken the wraps off the smartphone hardware that will be paired with its “unlike” Sailfish UI. Being a startup is challenging enough in any business sector but Jolla is seeking to compete in the fiercely competitive smartphone space, going up against giants Samsung and Apple who hold the majority of the market in a pincer grip. So it’s hard not to dismiss their efforts as too late. But it’s a lot harder to accuse them of doing too little.

Jolla’s strategy for fighting the mobile industry’s Goliaths is all about standing out by doing things different. Today’s hardware underlines how this startup is hoping to disrupt the concept of a single flagship device — such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 — that’s hankered after and owned by millions yet with only a little variation in case colourings to tell the difference between each one.

In seeking to break down software homogeneity with its Sailfish UI and a business model that encourages working with third parties to develop new types of smartphone experience that loop in others’ data, Jolla is also taking aim at hardware commoditisation via a cross-over feature in its debut device that it’s calling the Other Half. The Other Half refers to removable hardware shells that snap on to the back of the handset and can be changed and customised by the user. But the feature goes further than interchangeable shells — which is not at all new, dating back in spirit to early Nokia mobile phones of the 1990s with their removable facias, and more recently to a device like Nokia’s Lumia 820, which has a coloured and swappable backplate.

Jolla’s Other Half isn’t just decoration but links to the software on the handset — using an unconfirmed bridging technology that sounds to my ear like NFC — allowing content on the phone to be tied to the addition of a new shell, or even for new physical features to be incorporated and supported.

Jolla’s Marc Dillon, now head of software but until recently CEO, gave some examples of how the Other Half feature could be used — noting that this is about opening up the back of the device for others to come in and augment.

“You have the processor side of the device, the power side, the engine, and then the Other Half is about adding to that. This is a new kind of media where it could be anything from your favourite artist could release their latest album on the other half of the Jolla device, and then when the user buys this they have a physical thing from their favourite artist then when they snap it on to the other half of their Jolla device, then everyone can see it, that they support and love their artist and then on the inside they could get the content. They could get maybe special content, that could only be released in this format like videos or links to websites or tickets or special offers, things like that but because of this interface between the two halves,” he told TechCrunch.

“It can not only be media, it can be very simple things — so maybe you have a colour palette, so when you go out of an evening you might have a different colour depending on your outfit and that colour then carries through to the software updating the Ambience of the device. So you might have — if you have a green dress, you might have a green device and then you have green icons and green Ambience [Sailfish UI theme] on your phone. But it can also be more interesting — you can add features. Like the camera is a good example, the native camera of course has a flash but maybe you’re going to a party and you want to have a big flash so you can take pictures in the dark at a nightclub. So really the imagination is the only limit here.”

“Instead of having a device with some bulky things attached to it or some things sticking out the side of it to extend the capabilities of the device, or to add content, we’re giving a new way for users to actually design and co-create with us new ways of using the device,” Dillon added.

“Of course we will be offering a choice of Other Halves for the user to buy but this is a place where we want to see others get involved. Designers can design Other Halves for the device, engineers or hackers or techies can design new interfaces and maybe add physical hardware features that they wish they had on their device but might have a smaller market than to deserve having a whole entire device,” he said. “We talked about 3D printing them today. So it could be those kinds of things, but really we’re offering a new kind of interface for a device so that people can really take their imagination, and I believe there will be a lot of third parties and a lot of people who have a lot of great ideas in order to help you use the Other Half of the Jolla device.”

The Other Half may be a bit of a clumsy name but it’s a savvy move that taps into the custom hardware trend that’s growing off the back of the rising profile of 3D printing. That said, it does of course remain to be seen how much interest Jolla can spark for others to get involved in co-creation with only one device to its name and that device not launching for another six months. It will need enough traction to get the co-creation party started.

The idea to link the hardware and software has been part of Jolla company discussions and plans since the beginning, according to Dillon. “It’s been something that we’ve been planning and working towards the whole time. The Ambience was a hint of how this can come together,” he noted, adding: ”Hardware like many things, it’s become a commodity, so the problem with commodities is it generally forces things down — things become kind of lowest common denominator… We set out to make the greatest device that we could, and we understood that the software and the user experience is key because that’s where the value comes from in the device and the hardware is the realisation of that, it’s a productisation of the software.

“So we kind of took this tack, then of course the hardware has to be fantastic it has to support the software and support the user and be something the user can be proud of and my belief is that when people see the Jolla device they want to see what’s inside.”

“This iteration, the direct stuff here, has been about a year in development. It started getting really good for me about six months ago and I’ve been using the device for a while now, and it’s really started to feel fantastic, when the hardware and the software have come together. They were done by the same designers and the same people so it has been kept in mind that the two go together, that the two have a synergy the entire time. We’ve had a roadmap the entire time as well so we’ve had a set of hardware specifications to work with,” he added.

It’s worth flagging that Jolla is not the only mobile maker to take an interest in 3D printing and custom hardware, even if it’s taken that further by creating a link between custom hardware and phone content. 3D printing is something Nokia has done with the Lumia 820 shell, for instance. Dillon said Jolla may also look to open source the 3D design of the Other Half, telling TechCrunch “I could see that happening”.

Asked specifically about the bridging technology between the hardware shell and the software, Dillon declined to give specific details, saying: “There’s a number of options here but there is a connection between the Other Half and the software. And of course all of that needs to be open as well.”

Asked whether the device will launch in the U.S. he said Jolla is looking at other markets but opting for Europe and China first. ”We’re starting with Europe and China and we will be extending to other markets as we go. We’re in the delivery phase at the moment so we’re building the infrastructure, and the logistics in order to be able to deliver and care for the users of the device, and we’re of course going to look at other markets as we go.”

“It’s the target to get the Christmas market in Europe, Chinese New Year. That’s the big milestones,” he added. “The most important thing is we come out with a fantastic product… When we’re shipping at the end of the year if it’s a fantastic product then it’s really going to resonate and I think we’re really going to have a lot of demand.”

Instabeat Is Revolutionary HUD For Swimming Goggles You Can Back On Indiegogo

Tech, Technology,

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While the world goes gaga for Google Glass, a small startup has come up with an intriguing new take on a device which can display information before your eyes. Instabeat is head-up display unit which attaches to swimming goggles and monitors your heart rate, calories, laps and turns during your swim. It’s been live on crowd funding platform Indiegogo for a few days and is already poised to reach its modest funding target, meaning the product will actually ship.

While runners have Runkeeper and many other similar apps to track their goals, swimmers have until now been left out of the tracking game. Instabeat scratches that itch with a streamlined device which reads your heart rate via a (patent-pending) optical sensor that can accurately read the heart rate from the temporal artery on the side of your head, without the need for the annoying chest belt. The device has gone through several prototypes and the finished product can be backed for $139, and slated for shipping (to people who backed) it in October.

The sensor automatically turns on when the device is placed on your head and projects a color onto your lenses in real-time to know how close you are from your target zone. Each color has three levels to indicate whether you are in the beginning, middle or upper limit of the zone. It also measures your calories, number of laps and flip turns and syncs with a personal online dashboard to track progress over time. Right now that’s via USB port, but later models are planned which will sync wirelessly.

Competing products include Aqua Pulse from FINIS, which reads your heart rate out loud to you – but this does not store data and has no other features. Then there is PoolmateHR from Swimovate, a watch that reads the heart rate with a chest belt and counts laps – but again you have to wear the chest belt which many swimmers don’t enjoy doing.

Ironically Instabeat has been been developed out of the Middle East – a region not normally known for its watersports. The sports technology startup is based in Lebanon, and was founded in 2011 by Hind Hobeika out of her personal need for a heart rate monitoring device for her swimming practice.

And as far as we can tell, this is the first crowd-funding campaign out of the Arab world for a physical product.