New Technology News

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The advent of affordable quadcopters has made aerial photography accessible for almost anybody. Getting really good results still often takes a bit more than just attaching a GoPro to a quadcopter. A few months ago, I looked at the DJI Phantom and that was already a lot of fun to fly, though the images you could get from an unmodified Phantom can be quite shaky.

Now, DJI has launched the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, which comes with a built-in camera you remotely control through your phone. As far as out-of-the-box quadcopters go, the $1,200 Vision sets a new standard for anybody who wants to get into aerial photography and is a heck of a lot of fun to fly.

One thing to remember here is that you are looking at a prosumer device – and not just because of the price. This is not the kind of remote-controlled helicopter you can pick up at any discount store today. Just like its predecessor, the Vision has a built-in GPS unit that allows it to fly back home if the connection to the remote controller is ever interrupted. In the near future, DJI will release an app that will turn the Vision into an autonomous drone by allowing you to input GPS coordinates and have it fly a circuit without your input.

dji_vision_portland

What makes the new Phantom stand out, though, is the fact that you get a direct video downlink from the camera that shows up on your iPhone or Android device. To do this, DJI built a mobile app and added a Wi-Fi extender to the remote (which you have to charge separately). As the remote has a range of up to 1,500 feet, the Wi-Fi connection between the phone and Vision would likely break up after just a few hundred feet. With the USB-charged Wi-Fi extender, you should be able to keep the video going up to almost 1,000 feet (though all of this always depends on your local conditions, too).

The phone app comes in handy for more than just seeing the video link. It also includes a heads-up display with all the pertinent information about your flight, including speed, distance, height and battery life. You can also use it to see a radar-like screen that tells you where exactly your quadcopter is in relation to your own position.

dji_vision_remote

The phone controls all the settings for the built-in camera. The wide-angle camera itself is comparable to a GoPro Here 3 Silver Edition and can, among numerous other settings, take 1080p video at 30 frames per second (fps) and 720p video at 60 fps. Unlike the GoPro, it can also record 1080i at 60 fps. Thanks to the built-in vibration-damping platform underneath the vision, the video you get from this unit is significantly better than from an unmodified Phantom 1.

When it comes to these kinds of videos, higher frame rates are often desirable, as the slowed-down video makes the recording feel quite a bit smoother. All of the images are beamed to your phone, but also stored on a microSD card.

Using your phone, you can start and stop video recordings, but you can also take still images. The 14 megapixel camera doesn’t exactly rival a DSLR, but does a nice job of keeping up with different lighting conditions and in a pinch, you can always set your exposure settings manually from the app. You can also take images in RAW format, but so far, DJI hasn’t made any tools available to actually read these images in Photoshop or other photo-editing suites (chances are it will at CES this week).

I’ve got a feeling these kinds of images will be the next trend in wedding photography (let’s just hope the photographers are better fliers than this guy).

Here is an example of what raw video from the Vision looks like:

The gimbal underneath the Vision only moves vertically, so it doesn’t fully eliminate vibrations and only compensates for the quadcopter’s forward and backward motions. When you’re flying sideways, your image will also be slightly tilted to the side. Overall, though, this system does away with virtually all of the dreaded “jello effect” that often marred videos from the original Phantom when paired with a GoPro.

Unlike the previous Phantom, which had a battery life of about 10 minutes, the Vision comes with a far more powerful battery. I didn’t quite feel like crashing my review unit by running out of juice (though it should automatically land itself if it does indeed run out), but in my tests, the unit easily stayed in the air for a good 25 minutes, which is on par with DJI’s promises. In return, though, the battery, which includes the on/off switch for the quadcopter, is proprietary and an additional unit will set you back about $150.

vision_drone_ground

How hard is it to fly the Vision? I’m not an experienced RC flyer, but just like the earlier Phantom, the Vision is pretty easy to get in the air and land after you’ve watched the introductory videos. Once it’s flying, the live video and radar scope make it straightforward to stay in control, though inexperienced flyers should definitely go slow at first. This isn’t a toy, after all, and it has four fast-spinning rotors that could easily hurt somebody. Because of this, you probably want to stay away from people at first (and trees, power lines and everything else, really).

I never quite crashed the Vision, but I did make a couple of ungraceful landings that didn’t seem to faze the Vision. If it’s anything like the original Phantom, which I did manage to crash into concrete and trees when I tested it, it should stand up to quite a bit of punishment.

It’s also worth remembering that the FAA would prefer it if you didn’t fly any remote-controlled planes within the proximity of an airport (three miles is the standard for regular remote-controlled aircraft) and to keep them under 400 feet.

If you have $1,200 dollars burning a hole in your pocket, the Vision is probably among the coolest toys you can buy right now (and hey, it’s even $200 cheaper than Google Glass). It won’t let you start your own Amazon Prime drone delivery service, but it’ll give your videos and photographs a whole new perspective.

testfinaltechnews

DJI’s Phantom 2 Vision Makes Aerial Photography Easy

1:09 PM

Unknown

The advent of affordable quadcopters has made aerial photography accessible for almost anybody. Getting really good results still often take...

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has responded to the scathing criticism of the company made in a blog post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. A post which ended up making headlines recently. Libin says new versions of all the apps are planned, targeting note editing, navigation, search, sync and collaboration.

He says the company has already started on these, and it now plans to focus on stability, design and simplicity – with many more hires planned to beef up their team.

Libin goes to some length to address the issues surrounding Evernote’s increasingly bloated platform, many of which are around the ecosystem of apps Evernote has built up which has led to a series of issues around bugs.

He says “reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right.” But, he adds, “We’re going to fix this.”

Specifically, he says that despite huge growth the company needs to “pause for a bit and look in rather than up,” and he promises Evernote’s “central theme” for 2014 will be “constant improvement of the core promise of Evernote.”

He says work on this started a couple of months ago, precipitated by the frustrating roll-out of their iOS 7 version, resulting in “stability problems”.

There are 164 engineers and designers working at Evernote, with 150 assigned to the core software products. He pledges the total number will increase “quite a bit” in 2014, but the proportion will stay the same. He claims that since then they’ve made a lot of progress, and Evernote is “measurably less buggy.”

Libin says App store ratings have gone from 2 stars to 4.5, customer support volumes for iOS “have been cut by more than half”.

However, he says it may well take longer for the improvements to be felt by users.

It’s an unusually candid response from what is now a pretty big company.

testfinaltechnews

Evernote CEO’s Mea Culpa — Plans To Address App Stability, Plus A Hiring Blitz

12:09 PM

Unknown

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has responded to the scathing criticism of the company made in a blog post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kinca...

What is to be done with Europe? As The New York Times wrote just two days ago, there are not enough people in Europe qualified to fill all the technology jobs available. At the same time, Europe is not producing really big platforms to take on the global players. Too much of European technology has been caught up producing client-driven businesses in enterprise. As it is often said, where are the platforms like Googles, Facebook and or Twitter in Europe? We can’t recycle stories about Skype forever. There are some amazing companies coming though. But more are needed.

So it is that the European Commission wants European member states to develop ‘a new generation of web services’, and of course, reap the economic benefits from those.

Of course, the Commission is not the magic bullet, or the super hero to save the day. But it wants to try.

There’s no getting around it. For a long time Europeans have looked with envy upon the sheer scale of technology innovation coming out of places like the USA (in software and internet platforms) and Asia (in hardware). The Commission, quite rightly, wants to help do something about this.

So back in May 2013 it introduce a set of ’6 actions’ by the EC VP for Industry & Entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani as part of its grandly titled “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”. The little unit inside the Commission to deliver this is one year old, which, in EU Commission terms, is a teeny tiny baby.

So the question is, can they do it, and what the hell is their action plan?

Well, their Action Plan described as a blueprint for “decisive action to unleash Europe’s entrepreneurial potential, to remove existing obstacles and to revolutionise the culture of entrepreneurship in Europe.” (This was developed after a public consultation process with a number of European entrepreneurs).

The aim is to invest in in changing the public perception of entrepreneurs (typically poor in risk-averse European business culture), in entrepreneurship education and to support groups that are underrepresented among entrepreneurs. The aim is to revitalise an entrepreneurial spirit which has considerably declined in the postwar years. And let’s face it most jobs are created by SMEs and micro-firms that did not exist even 5 years ago.

The Commission wants to under-pin the idea that it is only when a large number of Europeans recognise an entrepreneurial career as a rewarding and attractive option that entrepreneurial activity in Europe will thrive in the long term.

So, what in each is in this “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”. Well, it has three main pillars: Entrepreneurial education and training; the creation of a business environment where entrepreneurs can flourish and grow; and finally, highlighting role models while also reaching out to specific groups whose entrepreneurial potential is not being tapped to its fullest extent.

Since it issued it’s action plan, the Commission has delivered six initiatives aimed at each of the above actions, which I’ll go into in a moment.

• Setting up a Startup Europe Partnership

• The “Leaders Club” of entrepreneurs

• MOOCs for increasing web talent in Europe

• Accelerators Assembly – A Commission-funded network of tech Accelerators who are asked to sharing knowledge and information.

• A network of EU investors active in raising venture capital

• An EU crowd-funding network

These activities are, in theory targeted as ‘web entrepreneurship’ (or W.E. as they like to call it) and is is all about helping to cultivate more ambitious tech start-ups which, crucially, are also able to scale into full-blown going companies, while boosting overall economic growth and jobs in the internet-based economy.

The EU Commission has a motto for this action plan which is ‘start in Europe and stay in Europe’. Of course, it’s not going to suit every business, but it’s a laudable thought.

In order for this to happen they want to overcome what obstacles there are in Europe to starting up and to work out how they can enhance startups to ‘scale up’ inside the EU and compete internationally.

Here we detect a slight problem in the thinking. Many startups will want to scale internationally from the word go, not just in the EU.

But, of course, it’s only the EU area of member states that the Commission can deal with anyway. That said, if the EU can create some sort of ‘best practise’ there’s nothing to stop nearby non-EU states taking a leaf out of their book.

One area the Commission thinks it is ‘doing OK’ in is the area of the Telecom Single Market legislation – an area championed during Neelie Kroes’ second term in office, with it’s aim to reduce the cost and legislative burden on companies, and the geographical asymmetries that prevent ‘single market’ economies of scale. And to be fair, she has been pummelling the networks to reduce roaming costs – and it does indeed look like those will come down year over the next few years.

So what has the Commission been doing in a concrete manner on the ground, and where do they go next?

The answer is six main initiatives, with a couple of ancillary activities tacked onto the end.

• Startup Europe

They set up the Startup Europe which covers a a wide range of activities and calls on private sector to come together to support European startups. A number of these are listed here.

Confusingly, They have registered, and promote this URL StartupEurope.eu

which simply re-directs to this long URL. Meanwhile, they also have Launch.StartupEuropePartnership.eu which isn’t doing anything right now.

Under the banner of Startup Europe, the Commission ran “Tech All Stars”, which was basically a European Commission-backed effort to run a startup pitch competition. Except they did not run it. It was a series of two competitions run by AngelsBootcamp and Founders Forum culminatiting in the overall winner, Trustev, being showcased at the Digital Agenda Assembly in Dublin on the 19th June.

Note that this has a different logo to the StartupEurope Partnership. Confused yet?

Under the list of achievements is the the expression of interest and the quality of the corporate ‘pledges’ received so far from companies such as Telefonica, Microsoft, Adobe, Google.

The pledges they are after include things like mentoring, Open office hours, access to office spaces, funding, training, etc etc. All things corporates are famously bad at, of course, but at least it’s something.

They’ve had Telefonica bring Campus Party to Europe. Microsoft pledged to create CoEntrepreneurs.eu as a “a platform, a community and a collection of 2.0 initiatives enabling massive entrepreneurship support by the entrepreneurs themselves” – however, the site re-directs to CoEntrepreneurs.be, a Belgian domain, and a site with a couple of guys taking in French about startups. Not very Microsoft.

There’s also a vague commitment from Microsoft BizSpark to engage with European Institutions, but since this is simply cover for MS to sell software then you’d expect them to do this anyway.

• The Leaders Club

“The Leader’s Club” is a group of six successful web entrepreneurs assembled by the Commission to basically come up with a list of things they think Europe should do, which they called the Startup Manifesto.

These are: Daniel Ek (Spotify), Kaj Hed (Rovio), Joanna Shields (Tech City UK), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (The Next Web), Zaryn Dentzel (Tuenti), Niklas Zennström (Atomico) and Lars Hinrichs (formely of Hackfwd).

In March last year they met EC VP Neelie Kroes and in September launched their Manifesto of 22 actions needed to boost entrepreneurship for internet-driven economic growth across Europe. They boiled down to five headings: improving tech skills and education in Europe; making it easier to access talent in and outside the EU; increasing access to capital; modernising data laws across the EU; getting European countries to take ‘thought leadership’ in tech.

They tested the interest in the manifesto by subjecting it to public vote, but that garnered a relatively low 3,000 or so votes. That said, the ideas were rock solid. Indeed, the The Leader’s Club has probably come up with amongst the best output of any Commission initiative to date – assuming anyone is listening.

If this were to go any further, one might suggest they look at the UK’s Tech City policy of creating a ‘Fast 50′ layer of much larger startups on their way to an IPO.

• Fostering Web Skills

The Commission has put out to tender a project to study the capability of MOOCs to improve web skills in Europe, for EUR 90,000. The study is due to report later in 2014, and will map the supply and demand for these, with the results to be published at a conference Q3 2015. The MOOCs Tender was launched to explore short term and long term objectives in developing massive online courses, such as the ones launched by Stanford’s Coursera, or MIT’s EdX which have had an explosive growth.

Massive Online Courses have clearly aided the development of skills, though, arguably, basic Computer Science combined with trawling the web for the usual coding resources works equally well.

There’s little to say about this initiative other than it’s probably a good idea to get data on MOOC usage in Europe.

• The Accelerators Assembly

This is a network of tech Accelerators which was launched in the first half of 2013. It was set up as an on-line group but has had some offline meetings. It has some 200 active accelerator members who are supposed to be sharing knowledge and information about access to funding opportunities. The Commission has commissioned a report expected Q1 2014 to summarize the overall situation in Europe with respect to the growth of accelerators.

• Web Investors Forum – A network of EU VCs

This is the work to create a network of Venture Capital firms, ongoing since March 2013. Oddly, although this is to “create awareness” about the growth of web services, you can probably agree that they already know this already. However, there is more specific work going on to survey of over 60 VCs and publish the results later this year.

• Crowdfunding Network – the EU crowd funding network

Once again we have a separate web site for a pretty related project. Launched in June 2013 by various Commission departments, the idea here is to make EU member states aware of the movement of Crowdfunding and ‘Crowd-Equity’ financing for startups. Why? Well, to put it bluntly, this who thing has apparently not been noticed at policy-making levels by quite a lot of EU states. This has led to some very non-EU friendly behaviour, such as the fact that legislation in Germany and Italy has a completely different view of what crowd funding actually is. Thus, ‘harmonisation’ – a favourite EU word – of the on-line crowd funding market is very relevant. If EU platforms played by the same rules, then they would be able to raise much bigger sums of funding. The Commission plans to commission a report analysing the policy priorities in the EU and run an event around this issue in the second half of 2014.

Other Activities

Aside from all this, the Commission has started some work on trying to dynamically map what is going on in Europe across the EU ecosystem, but there has not been results of that published yet.

In addition, the Commission has been dabbling in what amounts of PR works for startups.

It created the Europioneers awards to use its media profile to highlight the work of startups, alongside the Techallstars activity.

So there you have it, a long laundry list of things the Commission is planning or already implementing.

The question is, can they achieve what they have set out to do?

And should the Commission even be dabbling in these initiatives at all?

The questions is, are these the right things? Many would argue that the Commission would be better off emphasising that EU Members States invest vastly more into Computer Science and Engineering skills, than dabbling in startup competitions usually better run by the private sector.

With Europe facing a skills and entrepreneurship gap over the next few years, it would seem they have to do something.

testfinaltechnews

Holy Tech Batman! — Can The European Commission Be A Startup Super Hero?

9:09 AM

Unknown

What is to be done with Europe? As The New York Times wrote just two days ago , there are not enough people in Europe qualified to fill all ...

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2013 - Image by Dan Taylor/Heisenberg Media

Back in 2012 I’d been to enough tech startup conferences in Europe over the previous few years to work out which ones appeared to be most significant. Europe being the disjointed bunch of countries that it is has too many to mention. That ended up being a post about events in 2013.

Now, with 2014 already here, I figured plenty of readers would like an update. So here it is. A huge thanks to Heisenberg Media for helping me put this together. Thanks also to Conferize for their crowd-sourced list of European Tech Events in 2014 which you can find here. That is not our list, it’s theirs, but it’s pretty good. We also recommend the listing over at Lanyrd.

But, simply being listed below does NOT imply that any of these events are endorsed by or ‘partnered’ with TechCrunch, other than TechCrunch branded ones of course. This is a purely editorial list, based on our experience in Europe, the list is designed to help the European tech scene grow and get more organised. Simple.

Why is it important to do this? In the first instance, Europe is a bit of a mess. Every single country seems to have its own major conference on tech startups. And so we need a single overview of what’s going on.

But the main reason is that it’s easier for those of us in the media (hello!) to cover your company if we get to meet you at an event. And it helps if that event does not clash with another. So if we produce a list of the bigger events, the events organisers will – like several planes emerging from above the clouds and realising they are about to crash into each other – HOPEFULLY not clash with each other. It’s also MUCH easier for investors to move between conferences where there are startups to check out and entrepreneurs to meet. It’s also easier for startups to take their show on the road and present to investors or the media if the events DON’T CLASH. See? Everyone wins!

The reason the list below also includes some major events in the US and a few outside Europe is that – especially in the US – TechCrunch Staff will not be around in Europe at those times. For instance, if you want TechCrunch staff to be more likely to turn up at a conference event, don’t schedule it during our Disrupt events in San Francisco or New York or Europe. OK? Simple.

I have not included events in Asia as this is more about U.S./European event traffic. And we HAVE included some in the Middle East and Africa, as they are “near” Europe.

In this listing you will (mostly) not find developer events or hackathons or meet ups. We’d prefer to concentrate on events where startups get pitched and where investors gather. Although all of the events are good some are genuinely ‘Recommended’, or ‘Interesting’. Some are more off the beaten track than others and deserve a mention.

Here’s the list pertaining to the 2014 dates. Some events either haven’t updated their sites yet, or there’s simply no information a 2014 event yet. As they update their information, and I get told, I will update this post.

Please leave your feedback in the comments, and we will take them into consideration. Thanks!

However, this is our (well, my) editorial pick.

JANUARY

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Week 1

Empty

Week 2

CES, Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10

Week 3

Empty

Week 4

Hyberlin, Berlin, Germany, January 18 Demo (public), January 19 founders (invite only)

SIGNIFICANT: DLD, Munich, Germany, January 19-21 – Invited / Ticketed

WEF / Davos, Switzerland, January 22-25 – Invite Only (often featuring big tech giants and startups)

FEBRUARY

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Week 6

SIGNIFICANT: MIDEM, Cannes, France, February 1-4 – Midem Lab is a track for music startups

SIGNIFICANT: Seedcamp Week London (+ Sometimes SeedSummit at the same time), London, UK, February 3, Invite only

LIFT, Geneva, Switzerland, February 5-7

Week 7

SIGNIFICANT: The Crunchies – San Francisco, California, February 10, The Annual TechCrunch Awards – Very recommended!

Finovate – London, UK, February 11-12 – Good for Financial / banking tech startups

TechChill Baltics – February 13. Good event for Baltic startups.

Netexplo.org, Paris, France, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, NY Fashion Week, New York, New York, TBA

Startup Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA

Week 8

London Fashion Week, London, UK, February 14-18 (big for Fashion tech startups)

Social Media Week (Multiple global cities), February 17-21

Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain, February 24-27

4 Years From NowFebruary 24-27, Barcelona, Spain

MARCH

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Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: London Web Summit, London, UK, TBA

Week 10

MENA ICT Forum – Dead Sea, Jordan, TBA

Week 10-11

CeBit, Hannover, Germany, March 10-14 – Trying hard to include startups more, though not a major focus and too B2B.

SIGNIFICANT: SXSW Interactive, Austin, Texas, March 7-16

Week 12

F.ounders NYC, New York, New York, TBA – Invite Only

Go Youth Conference – 16-17 March, “an event aiming to promote entrepreneurship and creativity” among young people, tech oriented

The Guardian Changing Media Summit, London, UK, March 18-19

FutureEverything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 27-April 1 – Digital culture, innovation

SIGNIFICANT: ArabNet, Beirut, Lebanon, TBA

GDC SF, San Francisco, California, March 17-21,

EU Digital Agenda Assembly, Athens, Greece, March 18-20

Scaling Startups – 26 & 27 March 2014 – London, UK

Economist Technology Frontiers 2014 (London, UK) 27 Mar

NACUE Startup Career Launchpad – London, March 28

APRIL

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Week 14

DEMO U.S., San Francisco, California, April 3

Week 15

FailCon Europe, London, UK, April 8

MiPCube, Cannes, France, April 7-10 (part of MipTV, good for tech startups around TV/entertainment/video)

Webexpo.net, Prague, Czech Republic, April 11-12

Week 17

Startup Day, Stockholm, Sweden – April 26 – general startup pitches but majority tech and growing bigger each year

Railsberry, Krakow, Poland, TBA – Recommended for European Rails developers

SIGNIFICANT: The Next Web, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 24-25

World Economic Forum on Europe, MENA and Eurasia (Istanbul, Turkey) – 27-29 Apr

Latitude 59, Tallinn, Estonia, April 28-29 – Baltics startups pitching & speakers

SIGNIFICANT:

Disrupt NYC, New York, TBA – Very Recommended

MAY

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Week 19

DigiTalk, Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2014

NEXT Berlin, Berlin, Germany, May 5-6 – Some startups, mostly corporates and digital marketing

Heureka, Berlin, Germany, May 6 – Startups & focused on Berlin’s ecosystem

London Big Data Week events, (crowd-sourced), London – May 5-11

Berlin Web Week, Berlin, Germany, May 6-7 – Range of events

Week 20

Engage Invest Exploit 2014, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 8

CapitalOnStage, Berlin, Germany, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, London, UK, May 10-14

Bacon, London, UK, May 16-17 – developer conference liked by starters.

Google Zeitgeist UK (London, UK) – 18-20 May (TBC)

Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, France, May 14-25 – Good for media startups

Week 21

Shift Split – Split, Croatia, TBA

Net Prophet, Cape Town, South Africa – TBA

Thinking Digital, Newcastle, UK, May 20-22 – Interesting

Forum SPB, St. Petersburg, Russia, May 22-24

Week 22

The D Conference, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, TBA

Digital Shoreditch – London, UK A SXSW style event, last week of May

JUNE

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Week 23

Startup Village – Created by Skolkovo, 2-3 Jun 2014

Kinnernet Europe, Avallon, France – June 5-8 – Israelis hanging out with Euros & others.

DEMO Europe – June 4-5, Moscow, Russia,

Red Innova, Madrid, Spain, TBA – Spanish / LATAM event

Startup 2.0, Bilbao, Spain, IS THIS STILL GOING?

PivotEast, Nairobi, Kenya, TBA, East Africa’s main mobile apps / startup pitch competition for investors

Spain Startup and Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA – In English

Week 24

SIGNIFICANT: Le Web London, London, UK, June 9-10

>Midnight Pitch Fest, Oulu, Finland, June 12-13

FoundersForum.eu, TBA – Invite Only

Startup Island, Hvar, Croatia, TBA

EU Commission Digital Agenda Assembly – TBA

Week 25

Cannes Lions 15-21 June 2014, Cannes, France – Relevant for tech companies driven by advertising, big players attend

Startup Summit, Prague – TBA (21 June in 2013)

Venturesummit.eu – Kiev, Ukraine, TBA

SIGNIFICANT: Bitspiration, Krakow, Poland, TBA

WPP Stream, Cannes, France, June 17 – Invite only

Cannes Lions, Cannes, June 15-21 – Good for media/advertising startups

ICT Spring Europe, Luxembourg, TBA

Week 26

MLove Berlin, Berlin, Germany (closer to Halle, Germany), June 25-27 – Interesting

Founders Forum Menorca Tech Talk, Menorca, Spain, TBA

D-Conf, Milan, Italy, TBA

NOAH, San Francisco, California, TBA – Interesting for late-stage startups

JULY

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Week 27

Tech Open Air Berlin – Berlin, Germany, July 4-5

Week 28

DLD Women, Munich, Germany, TBA

Tech4Africa Nairobi – Nairobi, Kenya, TBA

AUGUST

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Week 32

Young Rewired State, UK, August 4-10

Week 33

GDC Europe, Cologne, Germany, August 11 – 13 – Useful for social games developers/startups

Week 34

Rock, Paper, Startups – Rijeka, Croatia – TBA (18-19 July in 2013)

MediaEvolution.se, Malmo, Sweden, TBA – Media/Tech overlap conf.

Turing Tech Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, TBA – Interesting

Week 35 – 36

Burning Man, Black Rock, Nevada, August 25 – Sep 1 – Lots of tech entrepreneurs now attend

SEPTEMBER

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Week 36

Hack Cyprus/ – Cyprus, TBA

DConstruct, Brighton, UK, TBA – “technology and culture”

IFA, Berlin, Germany, September 5 – 10 – Europe’s main consumer tech/gadget show

SIGNIFICANT: CTIA, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 9-11

Digital Derry, Northern Ireland, TBA

Week 37

SIGNIFICANT: TechCrunch Disrupt SF, San Francisco, California, TBA – Very Recommended (September 7-11, 2013)

Pirate Summit, Cologne, Germany, TBA (1st or 2nd week of September most likely) – Fun, startup event, junkyard atmosphere, good vibe

Campus Party London, London, UK, TBA – Big huge Hackathon and speakers

Startup Lisboa Demo day, Lisboa, Portugal, TBA

Week 38

Kinnernet, Israel – Invite only, mainly Israeli in focus, with some outside guests

DM Ex Co, Cologne, Germany, September 10-11 – Advertising startups / Germany

TechCrunch Italy, Rome, Italy, TBA

Investors AllStars, London, UK, TBA. Not a conference but an interesting gathering of European VCs and founders.

Overtheair.org, London, UK, TBA – Interesting for mobile startups

Week 39

MindTheProduct, London, UK, TBA

TechBBQ.dk, Copenhagen, Denmark, TBA

OCTOBER

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Week 40

The Next Web New York, New York, New York, TBA

SIGNIFICANT: Webrazzi Summit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA. Usually 1st week of October – Recommended to download Turkey

TED Global, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 5-10

SIGNIFICANT: White Bull Summit, Barcelona, Spain, TBA – Oct. 6th-8th (2014) – Recommended, esp. for growth or mid-stage firms

Decoded Fashion Tech – Milan Oct 22 2014

MindTrek, Tampere, Finland, TBA

Spain Startup And Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA

Tech4Africa – Johannesburg, South Africa, TBA

Week 41

Ennovation, Poznan, Poland, TBA

WHU’s Idea-lab.org, Vallendar, Germany, campus of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany,TBA

Week 42

IDCEE (Investor Day CEE), Kiev, Ukraine, October 16-17

Wired UK 14, London, UK, October 16-17

GigaOM Structure:Europe, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, TBA

Week 43

DLD Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, TBA – Recommended

Venturecamp.mindthebridge.org, Milan, Italy, TBA

Week 44

TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT EUROPE AND HACKATHON TBA DATE OR WEEK NOT YET SET

SIGNIFICANT: Pioneers Festival, Vienna, Austria, TBA – Recommended as a broad conference on science, tech and innovation

Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders, Dublin, Ireland, TBA

Stream Global 2014 (Marathon, Greece) 23-26 Oct

NOVEMBER

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Week 44

HowToWeb, Bucharest, Romania, TBA – Recommended to download Eastern Europe

Week 45

zz9

Explorers Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, TBA

Webit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA – Recommend, Large trade show and exhibition featuring broadly on digital marketing, commerce and startups, in Turkey and Southern and Central Europe

Silicon Valley Comes to the UK – Nov 6-8 featuring veterans from the Valley touring London and Cambridge

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford – Featuring veterans from the Valley at the Said Business School – (24-25 November in 2013)

Codebits – Portugal, TBA, Large hackathon style conference, not startup oriented but a pool for talent

Week 46

Noah Conference, London, UK, November 12-13 – Recommended for later stage startups, broadly European but heavily German and Israeli

Apps World, London, UK November 12-13

Global Entrepreneurship Week in Belarus – (Nov 18-21 in 2013) – Minsk, Belarus – Features startups

Slovakia Startup Awards – (22 Nov 2013)

Rise Up Summit – Cairo, Egypt – Recommended a as a major event for tech in the Middle East (Was 24-25 Nov 2013)

Global Entrepreneurship Week (various global events like Internet Week Europe)

SIME, Stockholm, Sweden, TBA

Monaco Media Forum, Monaco, TBA

SVC2UK, London, UK, TBA – Recommended

Slush, Helsinki, Finland, TBA – Recommended as the main Nordics/Scandinavia event

Startup Conference Next – Sofia, Bulgaria (November 30th 2013)

DECEMBER

___________________________________________

Week 49

SIME Miami – 3-4 December

Stretch, Budapest – December 5-6 – leadership and management conference for tech comps

SIGNIFICANT: Europe Venture Summit – Kiev, (December 4-5 in 2013) – Recommended

TechCrunch Moscow 2014, Moscow, Russia, TBA

LeWeb, Paris, France, TBA – Recommended, big tech event in Europe for some time

API Days, Paris, France, TBA

Week 50

Empty

testfinaltechnews

For Your Diary — The Best European Events For Startups In 2014

8:39 AM

Unknown

Back in 2012 I’d been to enough tech startup conferences in Europe over the previous few years to work out which ones appeared to be most si...

CES looms, as it frequently does, and soon we will all be awash in the deluge; the annual international carnival of gadgetry shows no sign of slowing. But beyond this yearly cycle, a longer pattern is about to reach an inflection point.

Mainstream technology is not exactly a paragon of ingenuity. The advances that trickle down to us as consumers are quite prosaic, really, compared to the high-risk world of startups (a few of them, anyway) or the churning erudition of academia and serious R&D. This lack of ingenuity manifests itself in a dozen ways, from acquisition culture to a general failure to grasp the zeitgeist, but the one I think matters the most at the moment is the tendency to advance by accretion.

Basically, it’s bullet-list syndrome. When the underlying technology doesn’t change much, one adds features so that people think the new thing is better than the old thing. Cars have always been a good example of this: a phase occurs between major changes (the seatbelt, for instance, or electronic fuel injection, or dash computers) when manufacturers compete on widgets, add-ons, luxuries, customizations — things inconsequential in themselves, but a moonroof or short-throw shifter is a useful psychological tool to make the pot look sweeter without adding any honey.

That’s what we’ve been seeing the last few years in consumer tech. Certainly there have been quantitative improvements in a few individual components, notably displays, wireless bandwidth, and processors, but beyond that our computers, phones, tablets, hi-fis, headsets, routers, coffee makers, refrigerators, webcams, and so on have remained largely the same.

Of course, one may reasonably say, that could be because of the greater amount of “innovation” being achieved in the area of software. But innovation isn’t a limited quantity that must be expended in one direction or another. Besides, Internet-connected apps and services have blown up mostly because of ubiquity, a consequence of ease of adoption, itself a result of microprocessors and flash storage reaching a certain efficiency and price.

At any rate, stagnation is occurring, which historically can be recognized by how different you are told things are. The iPhone and the Galaxy S 4 — what could be less alike, judging by the Super Bowl ads to which we will no doubt soon be subjected? Except they perform the exact same tasks, using almost identical interactions, access the same 10 or 20 major Internet services, and, in many important ways, are as physically indistinguishable as two peas in a pod.

The aspects in which we are told they differ, from pixel density to virtual assistant quality to wireless speed, are red herrings designed to draw the consumer’s attention; like a laugh track or “applause” sign, they’re signals that these, and not the innumerable similarities, are what you must consider. That they are not self-evident and you must therefore be told about them is testament to their negligibility.

These parlor tricks Apple and Nokia and Samsung are attempting to foist upon a neophilic customer base that desperately wants real magic, but which will accept sleight of hand if it’s convincing enough.

Tablets, too, are this way, and TVs, and fitness bracelets, and laptops, and gaming consoles, and so on and so forth.

This isn’t exactly a problem for consumers, since generally it means things have reached a high degree of effectiveness. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything is great! TVs are huge and have excellent pictures. You have coverage just about everywhere and can watch HBO shows in HD on your phone on the train. Laptops can do serious work, even cheap ones, and not just Excel and email — video editing, high quality gaming.

But when everything is great, people stop buying versions of things. And if you can’t do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the Treo, you need to start putting bullets on lists.

Yet at some point, the list gets so long that people stop reading it, or else stop believing it. This is the inflection point I think we’re approaching. No one bought fridges that tweet whenever they’re opened, and no one buys a Galaxy S 4 because of some obscure networked dual-camera selfie stamp book, or whatever other garbage they’ve crammed into that awful thing.

At some point, things have to change in more ways than more. Sometimes less is the answer (as I’ve written perhaps too often), even within high tech: the Kindle, for instance, was (and remains) a very limited device; originally it wasn’t even better than the paperbacks it was meant to replace. And the original iPhone, let us not forget, was notoriously feature-poor, lacking rudimentary functionality found in flip phones worldwide. But both were very new in that they leveraged a powerful and promising technology to change the way people thought about what devices could be used for.

The next logical step along the path of proliferation (due to small, cheap microprocessors and memory) after devices that do a lot is devices that do too much — and after that, it’s devices that do very little. This last is the category that is making its real debut this year, in the guise of “wearables” and, more broadly, the “Internet of things.” The fundamental idea here is imbuing simple things with simple intelligence, though trifles like digital pedometers and proximity-aware dongles look for all the world like parlor tricks. There is reason to think that this trend will in fact create something truly new and interesting, even if the early results are a little precious.

Punctuated equilibrium is the rule in tech, and we haven’t seen any decisive punctuation in quite some time. Meanwhile the bland run-on sentence encompassing today’s most common consumer electronics is growing ungrammatical as the additions make less and less sense. And my guess is it will drone on for another couple years (not unlike some columns).

What will jump-start the next phase? Is it, as some suggest, the ascension of coffee mugs, toasters, and keychains to a digital sentience? Will it accommodate and embrace the past or make a clean break? Have we heard of it, or is it taking shape in the obscure skunkworks of Apple or IBM? I don’t know — and I suspect the prestidigitators at CES don’t know either.

testfinaltechnews

Parlor Tricks

8:10 AM

Unknown

CES looms, as it frequently does, and soon we will all be awash in the deluge; the annual international carnival of gadgetry shows no sign o...

Saturday, January 4, 2014

While details about the deal are quite sparse, it seems that Google has quietly acquired (acquihired?) Bitspin, the Zurch-based team behind the Android alarm clock Timely.

Best known for its design, Timely found a rather nice balance between beauty and simplicity. It’s flagship feature was its quick set alarm, which allowed users to schedule an alarm with just a single swipe or two. According to their Google Play stats this morning, Timely had received somewhere between 1 and 5 million downloads.

In what may be the shortest announcement ever, Bitspin announced the news by way of a three sentence post on their home page:

“We’re thrilled to announce that Bitspin is joining Google, where we’ll continue to do what we love: building great products that are delightful to use.

For new and existing users, Timely will continue to work as it always has. Thanks to everyone who has downloaded our app and provided feedback along the way; we truly appreciate all your support.”

Alas, there’s no word yet on the specific details of the deal, though we’ve got emails in asking for more.

The good news, in the mean time: Timely, as an app, will continued to be offered for free — and as far as we can tell, all of the content that was once premium (like new themes and alarm sounds) has gone free as well.

testfinaltechnews

BitSpin, Developers Of The Timely Alarm Clock For Android, Join Google

11:09 AM

Unknown

While details about the deal are quite sparse, it seems that Google has quietly acquired (acquihired?) Bitspin, the Zurch-based team behind ...

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — ring in the New Year in celebration of surviving yet another crisis in the venture capital community. The concern is that acquihires represent the capitulation of innovation in service of the big getting bigger. As cloud computing lowers the barriers to entry for first stage ideas, the struggle is moving to staying alive long enough to pivot to the second-stage models that form the corpus of the VC success equation.

@scobleizer sees an analogy in Bob Lefsetz’ chronicling of the record industry’s collapse into a singles market, but the rise of streaming and binge viewing suggests the death of the album is vastly overstated. We’re seeing a cyclical rebirth of the innovation cycle, as the long term winners of tomorrow are built on the profits of the last big bets.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor