Switzerland Archive

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Doodle Premium today. I would have preferred if they called it Super Doodle but I guess Doodle Premium will have to do. The last time we covered Doodle they were launching an online scheduling tool inside of Facebook.

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

Social client software provider Sobees is announcing the launch of their web browser-based client today. The new Sobees web client (which is in Alpha) combines Twitter and (soon) Facebook access. There is also real-time search via OneRiot, Twitter and Friendfeed.

As you can see in the graphic below, you can setup the Sobees web application with as many panels as you would like. The panels can be setup as Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (soon) and real-time searches. For example, I could have one panel for my @centernetworks Twitter account, one for my @cloudcontacts Twitter account, a search for “web blogs that don’t link”, a search for “great web startups”, etc.

Sobees is based in Switzerland and competes with London-based Tweetdeck (which moments ago announced a new round of funding in the amount of 2 million pounds) and valley darling Seesmic. Seesmic has been talking about a browser-based version for a while now but it hasn’t launched as of yet.

The big issue with Sobees in the past was that you needed a windows machine and some runtimes to get the service to work. With this new web-based version, you need only Silverlight which works on both Windows and Mac in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The tool also offers an anti-spam function which allows you to enter a variety of terms that will be blocked in your timeline and/or search results.

My only real suggestion for the Sobees team is to consolidate their product names – get rid of bDule and just offer Sobees Web, Sobees Lite and Sobees Full. I think it’s a bit confusing that bDule = sobees Web.

Update: Seesmic Web client is now live as well – read a very in-depth review by Frederic Lardinois at Readwriteweb.

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PetSite is a new Zurich-based startup that aims to create a pet community. I don’t have any pets (except for the rats in the subway) but I know that those with pets believe they actually talk and so forth. PetSite is a social networking site for pets similar to Dogster/Catster. PetSite is available in a number of languages including English.

Each pet gets a profile page (like MySpace) where the pet can “talk”. The pet categories include dogs, cats, birds, horses, fish, rabbits, rodents (??), reptiles and ferrets.

This week’s featured pet is “Pepe” the cat – displayed to the right. Here’s how Pepe describes himself, “Hey there. I just wanted to introduce me quickly :). my name is Pepe and i live in Zurich, Switzerland in a nice apartment together with my brother Pepper. We are both 2 years old and love to sleep – play – eat – sleep every day (in this order). I will post some news from time to time here.” Pepe has a bunch of friends which include a dog, and a horse.

The pet profiles page also includes what the pets first day was like, what the pet enjoys doing, and things the pet likes/doesn’t like. Pepe notes he likes, “I  love to play with small balls, fake mice, my brother and everything else that i can catch.”.

Petsite also has polls and voting for the pet of the week. The site appears to be currently supported via advertising.

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.

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.

Last month we reviewed a Swiss-based service named Moreganize. Our Swiss reporter, Corsin, noted that the biggest competition to Moreganize would come from another Swiss-based company, Doodle. Today Doodle has announced the launch of an event planning tool as a Facebook application.

It’s interesting to watch the event planning category move to a crowdsourced model where polls are used to find a time and date that meets the needs of the group. The Doodle Facebook application allows you to poll your friends around an event topic. Facebook friends will receive a message inside of Facebook and Doodle will send emails to your friends who don’t have Facebook accounts.

Here’s an example of the poll page:

Check out our coverage of other event-planning services including MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Center’d, Coordinatr and GoLark. Also check out our coverage of technology in Switzerland.

We initially covered online P2P IPTV service Zattoo last year when they launched in the UK. Our reporter in Switzerland, Corsin Camichel, has the scoop on today’s launch of high quality, full television resolution (HiQ) channels on Zattoo. The new HiQ service isn’t full HD (yet?) and is only available in Switzerland.

The monthly fee for the Zattoo HiQ service is 5CHF ($4.60) per month. Zattoo has a partnership with Swisscom and Swisscom VDSL subscribers get the HiQ channels for free. The channels included in the HiQ plan are: ARD, Canale 5, Eurosport, France 2, France 3, M6, Pro7, Rai Uno, RTL, Sat1, SF 1, SF 2, SF info, TF1, TSI1, TSI2, TSR1, TRS2, VOX and ZDF.