Corsin Camichel Archive

Swiss blogger and sometimes CN contributor Corsin Camichel noted this morning that Google Maps Navigation is now available in a variety of countries in Europe. The country list includes: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland. Corsin has more plus photos from the Google Maps Navigation on his HTC Desire Android phone.

Last week Bing announced that their Bing Maps with turn-by-turn directions was available on a variety of handsets. I downloaded the application but it took so long to load on my Samsung Ace that I could have easily walked to my desired destination in a shorter amount of time. I can’t really blame Bing…my device has GPS built-in but in 3 years I’ve only been able to get it to work twice.

Let’s hope the navigation is better than what’s shown in Corsin’s test photos from his handset. As you can see below, Google suggests you drive right into the heavy bush and their navigation might involve taking a ferry.

Memonic is online information capturing and organizational service. It allows you to capture pieces of information like maps, routes, photos or text. The capturing process can be completed in a variety of ways including: a smart bookmarklet, an iPhone application, email your documents and/or using copy and paste. Once the content is in the Memonic system you can organize the data in collections and share the content with your friends. An example of a nice collection is Johnny’s iPad collection with shows offsome new technology. Memonic could be considered a competitor to the popular information capturing service Evernote.

The Swiss-based Memonic team is made up of five business and development team members. Memonic has quickly sky rocketed to become a new darling in the Swiss startup scene.

This week, Memonic has launched their business model. For a yearly price of 29 Euros (USD 39) you receive storage of unlimited items & collections and up to 10 GB of storage. For comparison, Evernote charges $45 a year. Neither Memonic nor Evernote charge for file uploads although Evernote has a monthly limit of 500 mb.

Have a look at the Memonic Tour to see if the application could help capture the information you are interested in across the Internet. And you can easily start using the service by creating an account or just anonymously organizing your bits of information.

By now you probably have heard that reMail, an email search client for the iPhone, has been acquired by Google and was removed from the AppStore. What is a little bit more interesting in my eyes is a look back at how reMail has evolved. Let’s take a look at what reMail looked like in version 1, and what has changed.

In the very first business plan Gabor showed me, the idea for his startup was completely different. I can’t talk about this publicly, because I think this could be something Google might be interested in as well. But if you know Gabor and know how “obsessed” he is with email, you can imagine how cool his initial idea was.
Continue reading “The History of Newly Acquired reMail” »

Are there actually startups outside of Sillicon Valley and the USA? For us Europeans this is quite an akward question. Of course there are startups here. And thanks to Mike Butcher and TechCrunch and his European tour we can show the world how great our startup scene actually is. As one of twelve cities on the tour, Mike came to Zurich on July 17th. As a techblogger and engineer myself and as a CenterNetworks writer, I had the great pleasure to attend, take photos and videotape the event.

One of the highlights of the evening was the 20-second pitches each startup had the opportunity to give. We have compiled together a video with all the pitches. If you have 14 minutes and want to see a variety of Swiss startups, check it out below. I’ve also included some photos as well – over 150 people attended. Please share your thoughts on any of the startups represented in the video.

Editor’s note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness. Also, we’ve provided reviews of two of the startups from the event, Poken and Mixin.