Europe Archive

Swiss-based Wuala has announced that they have merged with European storage manufacturer LaCie for an undisclosed sum. Congrats to Wuala co-founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund and the entire Wuala team. I’ve had a chance to chat with Dominik several times over the past year and I found him to be very intelligent and I always walk away from the conversations with new knowledge.

The companies note in the release that they will build a "unique and sustainable" cloud storage system. Wuala’s nine employees will join LaCie. The Wuala FAQ notes that they will be expanding the team in the near future.

Interestingly I just purchased a LaCie external drive a month ago and it came with a free year of Carbonite online backup. I wonder if today’s announcement will put the Wuala application in the LaCie package going forward. 

Check out my interview with Dominik from last year.

Slovenia-based Zemanta has announced a variety of important product updates today. Zemanta provides a set of content tools which help bloggers "enhance" their posts. They have updated their widget to offer support for video, audio and Web apps including Google Maps. Zemanta has also created "content verticals" in categories including: music, tech, health and travel. The idea of the verticals is to have a set of content sources on hand for each content category.

The other update is a major update for Zemanta. The widget they offer to bloggers will now be available to Yahoo Mail and Google Gmail users. The widget is installed as a toolbar for Firefox. Once the toolbar is activated, Zemanta users can enhance their emails by adding images and links, similar to the blogging product. The company also notes that you can create "postcards" which can be personalized and sent via your email provider. It’s a very interesting extension to writing emails although I wonder how often a person will want to enhance their emails.

One interesting thing I’ve noted with Zemanta is just how many juicy SEO links they push out to sites like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. When a person picks an image for a company, Zemanta drops the image into the post, links to Crunchbase below the image and links the image (with a follow tag) to the page that the image references. In fact, I’ve wondered if Crunchbase would rank so high for company searches if it wasn’t for Zemanta.

Maybe there’s a business model in the links. For example, Crunchbase could pay Zemanta a fee each time their links are displayed on a user’s post. Maybe the user who initiated the link gets a cut of the fee. Of course that would just mean that Crunchbase (and the others) are paying for in-text linking which could easily be gamed and is against Google’s TOS, but perhaps it’s an idea that could spark other revenue ideas for the company.

Perhaps the better idea is to allow the content sources to bid on placement in the widget for each keyword. The more you bid, the higher you are listed on the source list.

I came across a blog this morning that covers startups in Turkey. I know it’s hard to imagine that anything goes on outside of Silicon Valley, but it’s true! That’s right, there are startups launching daily in other parts of the U.S. and the world! Now take a deep cleansing breath and check out Startups in Turkey.

The overview notes, "Startups in Turkey is a blog covering mostly web & technology news that are in any way connected with Turkey. These will be about startups or bigger companies, that involve Turkish people, living in or out of Turkey. Companies that enter the Turkish market are also subject of StartupsInTurkey.com. Other than the news we write ourselves, we will also fetch news from other Turkish blogs, translate and publish them as soon as possible."

The site is edited by Şekip Can Gökalp, Burak Büyükdemir, Vadi Efe and Mert Erkal. It looks like they have about a month’s worth of content so far. Drop me a line if you know of other startup blogs from outside the valley.

We initially covered Vienna-based Tunesbag last April when they launched their private beta. Today they have announced some additions and upgrades to the service they describe as an “online media hub”.

You can now listen to any public playlist using the search feature and then save it to your library if you like the songs. They have also updated the search to allow for a site-wide search which will index artists, tracks, users and playlists.

Tracks and playlists can now be shared with other tunesBag users along with the ability to share outside of tunesBag via mail, Facebook and MySpace. They have also released a new music player. 

Lastly, they plan to publicly open the service in the first half of 2009.

The Guardian in the UK is out with their top picks for 2009. Actually they state, "here are our 100 revised best sites to see you through the next couple of years". So I assume that means we have to put up with some of these services for more than the next 12 months? (lol?) So let’s check out their list – click to view the full list.

• Blogging – they like WordPress and Bloglines
• Browsers – they like EVERY browser except IE
• Cartoons – Dilbert is one of their picks
• Create/Collaborate – Zoho and Remember the Milk are two of their selections
• Games – they go with a variety of blogs from the UK – thought this was about web apps?
• Geek Squad – nice to see NY-based Joel on Software get a nod even though he’s a blogger
• Public Services – good roundup – sites I haven’t heard of but will try to review on CN
• Location – dopplr gets a nod – does anyone besides Scoble use this anymore?
• Mapping – there’s a noise pollution map listed – pretty interesting – I can only imagine what my area would get for a score!
• Money sites – all UK based which makes sense – Zopa gets the nod in the social lending space
• Music – last and blip .fm listed but no Pandora
• News – well lookie there, Digg on top – how’d we see that coming? Techmeme listed along with Slashdot
• Offbeat – the lolcats won’t die in the next couple of years apparently – damn.
• Photography – flickr is the best apparently
• Physical from virtual – they love their UK-based Moo – I dislike the moo cards – especially now processing them on CloudContacts
• Social Networking – same ole same ole

They have even dedicated a special section to Twitter tools! It’s an interesting list worth checking out as there are a few new sites on the list.

If you are new to Swiss-based Wuala, here’s how founder and CEO explained the service: "Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."

This morning Wuala is announcing the launch of a new interface for their Web client along with an API which will allow developers to tap into the Wuala platform. The API can be used to create or extend existing applications and mobile services. Wuala can be used either via web browser or via a desktop client for mac, pc or linux. I like how clean the new Web interface is (an example screenshot is below). Looks like it could be a good fit for sharing a batch of photos similar to Flickr.

Wuala self-reports 30 million files have been stored and shared on the service since their beta launch in August. Since it seems Wuala offers private storage and sharing, it could be considered a competitor to NY-based Drop.io.

Check out our full interview with Dominik Grolimund to learn more about Wuala, their technology and business model.

We’ve written about London-based Skimbit several times and CEO Alicia Navarro provided her reasons why the UK is a great place to build a startup.

Today the Skimbit team is announcing the launch of Skimlinks. The easiest way to describe Skimlinks is that they provide a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Revenue is split between you and Skimlinks. Skimlinks doesn’t share what percentage they take of each sale. What I like about Skimlinks is that once you add the Javascript code to your site, all of your old pages of content will also work with the Skimlinks program.

Skimlinks works with merchants including AmazonUK, Ticketmaster, Boots, eBay, BT and play.com. It looks like the list is mostly UK-based companies. Depending on what percentage Skimlinks takes, it may make sense to use Skimlinks in addition to affiliate programs you are already running.

Here’s a video overview of how the Skimlinks system works and you can checkout another viewpoint on the launch from Jemima Kiss.