Switzerland Archive

Startup.ch has just released their Top 100 Swiss startups list. The list is only available in German on the website, but you can still easily navigate to the individual startups websites which are all available in English. They have also broken the list down by category, here’s a link to the Internet/Technology startups. Startup.ch notes that over 200,000 companies have been started in Switzerland since 2006.

The top 10 are:

1. Optotune
2. Dacuda
3. Doodle (our Doodle coverage)
4. Lemoptix
5. Poken (our Poken coverage)
6. Insphero
7. Smallrivers (known better as paper.li)
8. HouseTrip
9. Malcisbo
10. Aimago

You can also download a magazine about Swiss startup life and an overview of each startup in the Top 100 in English.

Swiss-based, social collaboration service Amazee has announced that they will be closing their platform effective December 23, 2011. We covered Amazee back in early 2010 and the social service was described as, ” the platform for collective action, where people initiate movements, find followers, collaborate and boost the attention for their cause.”

Their blog explains why the service is shutting down, “In the meantime, however, Facebook, Google and other large innovators have become all you can imagine, including enablers for social change. On our side, we have converted the business model. Amazee Labs has grown into a successful web development agency and requires our full attention. The work on amazee.com has therefore suffered big time and has become mostly restricted to maintenance work. If Web products don’t move ahead, they go backwards.”

The good news is that the team pivoted over time and their web consultancy Amazee Labs is going strong and will remain open.

Amazee will delete all data on December 23, 2011 so I assume that if you want your data, you should save it before that date.

In Switzerland, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is required to remove people’s faces and license plates from their Street View service. This is similar to the “blurry” Street View that rolled out in Germany late last year. In speaking with a colleague located in Switzerland, Google removes 98% of the faces and plates using an algorithym.

Today privacy advocates in Switzerland are jumping for joy as the Federal Administrative Court has required Google to remove all of the people’s faces and license plates, even if it means using humans to do so. 20 Minuten Online has all of the details (translated link). From 20 Minuten Online, “The focus is the duty of Google, on people’s faces and license plates to make manual completely unrecognizable. Currently, according to Federal data protection, only about 98 percent of all the faces are blurred automatically.”

The other big news is that Google is required to take out local ads letting residents know when the Google Street View car will be coming through their town or village. 20 Minutes Online notes, “It is not permitted by court also insight into the courtyards and gardens, the sight of a “normal passer” would remain closed.”

I am currently looking for a new residence and since I am new to town, I’ve found Google Street View to be a huge asset. I can “browse” the neighborhood and see what the homes and business look like. It’s helped me eliminate many a house whereas looking at the owner’s photos provided a very different experience.

My friends and colleagues in Germany and France are constantly talking about how the government views online privacy. Could these two countries be next to follow Switzerland in the blocking of faces and license plates?

Last week I had lunch with AppSumo founder Noah Kagan. His service provides combo deals for SAAS web services. The deal space is certainly currently hot – of course those of us deal hunters know it has been hot for a long time.

Today I learned about a similar offering from a variety of popular Swiss startups. Their package deal website is called eKnife and offers premium accounts from Doodle, Memonic and Wuala. They describe the service as the “Swiss Army Knife” of web startups.

From the announcement, “The eKnife stands for Swiss efficiency and shows the leading role of Switzerland as a rising tech hub in Europe. ‘The bundle increases productivity and saves time and stress’, says Dorian Selz, co-founder of Memonic. ‘eKnife was born within four weeks from just an idea to a commercial offer of three successful Swiss online services. Could Swiss efficiency be more evident?’.”

The eKnife bundle includes:

• Wuala 10GB premium account
• Doodle premium account
• Memonic premium account

The total price for the services is CHF94 and the bundle is offered for CHF 59 ($61).

If you are new to any of these services, check out our previous coverage of Wuala, Memonic and Doodle.

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Calendar Connect. Doodle explains what Calendar Connect is, “the new calendar interface brings everything that users need for scheduling into one constantly updated place and enables them to select dates and times for meeting requests in a visual way…Also, free and busy data can be shared on Doodle with selected contacts regardless of the calendar system in use. This makes the gap between otherwise disparate calendars even closer.”

You can easily connect your Doodle calendar with Google Calendar using what looks like oAuth. Both calendars will be connected — see the video below for an example of how the new calendar connect service works.

You can also connect with Yahoo Calendar and any other calendar service that supports an ICS calendar feed.

The Doodle team is also working on a private beta of the Outlook Calendar connector. Doodle self-reports over six month users per month are using their calendar service.
Continue reading “Doodle Launches Calendar Connect” »

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.

Swiss-based Amazee describes their service as, “the platform for collective action, where people initiate movements, find followers, collaborate and boost the attention for their cause.”  You can explore the projects posted on Amazee, sponsor projects, invite friends to projects you are a part of and create your own projects.

Earlier this week Amazee announced the launch of their white label solution named “Customized Solutions”. They note, “Amazee therewith is no longer merely a key player in the world of open Social Collaboration, but also strives to become one of the leading solutions providers on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and Community Technology”.

There are two customized solutions options: Customized Base and Customized Pro. The Pro option allows for a customized domain and the base is based on a subdomain. Amazee is working with KPMG Switzerland on a customized solution for Growth Generator which has raised nearly 38,000 Swiss Francs.