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.

Find more stories about: startups, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: Amazee, startups, Switzerland

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?

Find more stories about: Google Maps, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: AppSumo, Doodle, Memonic, Switzerland, Wuala

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.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Google Calendar, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: Corsin Camichel, Evernote, Memonic, startups, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: Amazee, social media, startups, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Switzerland, Web 2.0

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.

Find more stories about: realtime, Seesmic, Sobees, startups, Switzerland, Twitter

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.

Find more stories about: Dogster, PetSite, Reviews, startup, Switzerland

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.

Find more stories about: acquisitions, Europe, Quick News, Switzerland, Wuala

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.

Find more stories about: Europe, Quick News, Switzerland, Wuala

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.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Quick News, Reviews, startups, 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.

Find more stories about: Quick News, Switzerland, TV, Zattoo

Moreganize is a Swiss-based startup that looks to help you organize groups using surveys. Example uses would be to find the perfect time for a group meeting or which movie everyone in the group is interested in viewing. There are also some basic project management services including a to-do list.

The site is easy-to-use and if the survey is used for an event, schedule invites can be automatically sent to the attendees. The service is available in German and English although I would suggest they make sure all of the content is available in English. I see a good bit of words and phrases in German even on the English version.

They also need to look at making it easier to create a survey. There’s no link to create on the homepage and while the text says "no registration required" the only link to get started is for "free registration".

Update: Our Switzerland connection Corsin Camichel tells me that the biggest competition for Moreganize comes from switzerland itself: doodle.

Here’s a Moreganize sample where John Sample attempts to get feedback on which type of movie his guests would like to watch:

Check out Mark Gibbs’ review of Moreganize at NetworkWorld. And check out our coverage of other event-planning services including MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Center’d, Coordinatr and GoLark.

Find more stories about: Moreganize, Quick News, Reviews, startups, Switzerland