Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international fund.

We also understand that Ron Conway’s SV Angel has joined this round, along with a small number of angels, and TransferWise’s existing backers IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. This brings the total raised by the company to $7.35 million since its launch just two years ago.

Originally billing itself as the “Skype of money transfer“, TransferWise enables individuals and businesses to send money between countries for a fraction of the price that banks and others charge, using a peer-to-peer, “crowdsourced” model — where money destined for transfer doesn’t unnecessarily actually leave each country. It passes on these saving by charging a small flat fee per transfer.

(It’s the P2P element that playfully draws the Skype simile, as well as the fact that TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus was the Internet calling giant’s first employee, while other members of his team also worked at the company.)

The company also pitches itself as the preferred method of money transfer for European startups, recently garnering some decent PR with an offer to waive the fees for a total of $100 million worth of international money transfers for qualifying startups using the TransferWise platform. Interestingly, Thiel was one of a host of names publicly endorsing the campaign, so we probably should have known something was going down.

Hinrikus tell me that the new funding will enable TransferWise to continue expanding, both in terms of the number of currencies it plans to support, and in raw head-count. It started out offering British Pound and Euro transfers, and has since added support for the U.S. Dollar, Swiss Franc, Polish Zloty, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Krone. In total, the company claims to have transferred over £125m worth of customers’ money, saving £5 million-plus in banking fees (though it isn’t without competition). Meanwhile, the team has grown to 33 members of staff.

“There’s another dozen currencies to be launched this year and 20 more people needed in the team,” says Hinrikus. “Also we need to launch locally in key European markets – Germany, France and Spain.” Hinrikus says TransferWise continues to grow between 20-30 percent a month, which to date equals roughly 10x year-on-year growth. “Doing what’s in the pipeline puts us on track to do another 5-10x this year,” he says.

Staying on message, London-based TransferWise (with an office also in Tallinn, Estonia) is now calling itself a Tech City startup. Tech City, headed up by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations, is the UK government’s re-branding of the London tech scene and, specifically, East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area.

Cue the now prerequisite statement from Shields: “Transferwise is a shining example of the successful businesses that make Tech City a thriving ecosystem. London has a real strength in financial services and technology, with many companies like Transferwise transforming financial services for consumers, for the better.”

That said, TransferWise’s HQ is on Shoreditch High Street, which doesn’t get any more Silicon Roundabout than that. And certainly, a $6 million series A is no mean feat for a European startup, and nor is attracting a top tier Silicon Valley investor like Peter Thiel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today, this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.

That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release. Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work.

In addition, Google is making its recently introduced phrasebook feature available in that app. The phrasebook, Google said at the time, allows “you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them,” and revisiting them regularly should help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge.”

The phrasebook is now available in Translate’s app menu, where it replaces the app’s ‘favorite’ feature. The service will automatically sync with your Google Account (assuming you are signed in), so any changes you make on your phone will also be reflected on the Google Translate desktop site.

“With your favorite phrases synced across devices,” Google writes, “we hope you’ll never be at a loss for words again.”

It’s worth noting that the iOS version of the app does not currently support translate by camera.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Viber has made quite a name for itself as a global mobile first company, but today that all changes as the company breaks ground in the desktop space. That means that starting today, Viber’s 200 million+ users will have access to their Viber contacts from both mobile and desktop.

The rollout is part of a bigger push from Viber, including an update to its iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps to version 3.0. But the real story is this desktop app.

I played with the software earlier this week, and can say that it’s a truly impressive VoIP, messaging, and video calling platform. That’s right. Viber for Desktop (available on both PC and Mac here) marks the company’s entry into video calling with a beta version of the feature. For now, video calling is only available from desktop to desktop.

Other than that, the desktop version has just about everything the mobile version has, including messaging, stickers, etc.

To start, you must be a mobile user of Viber, so if you don’t have a number that’s already associated with the service, the desktop app will ask you to download the mobile application. From there, you simply input your number into the desktop app, enter a pin which is sent to your mobile device, and you instantly have access to all the contacts you know on Viber.

The reason Viber did it this way is because the company pays close attention to the chatting, and talking habits of its users. We don’t sit still when we talk; we roam and wander. By tying the mobile and desktop applications together by default, this actually lets you seamlessly switch from mobile to desktop in the middle of a call.

Viber also syncs your messages against mobile and desktop, so all messages appear on both platforms but only the device that you’re on actively will beep. Messages deleted on one platform will also show as deleted on others.

As previously mentioned, Viber is also launching a huge update to its mobile applications, most notably Android and iOS. They’ll both now have video messages (much like a video voicemail which you can leave for a friend), new stickers, “last online status”, an upgraded photo experience, a new voice engine, and other minor fixes. Android in particular has undergone a huge redesign to be “less iOS and more Android,” according to Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber.

Viber is also rolling out a new version of its BlackBerry app that ensures voice calling works with the desktop app, since BlackBerry encodes calls differently than other platforms.

Past that, the company is offering eight new languages which brings total languages supported to 27.

Viber for Android now supports: Dutch, Korean, Swedish, and Turkish in addition to previous languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish.

Viber for iPhone now supports: Dutch, Indonesian, Korean, Malay, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese in addition to previous languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish.

Viber has been growing steadily, announcing growth to 200 million users, up from 175 million in February.

This latest push only makes sense for users who have multiple devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Socialising the travel experience – in the way that Airbnb ‘socialised’ apartment rentals – has proved harder than expected. “Hot” Berlin-based startup Gidsy has spent almost two years touting its peer-to-peer booking platform for discovering local experiences and things to do. It attracted $1.2 million in a seed round in January 2012, with Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher participating. But recently rumours surfaced that the company was deadpooling, unable to raise a follow on round based on its current growth figures. It’s now been acquired by competitor GetYourGuide in an undisclosed deal. The latter has offices in Berlin and Las Vegas. Clearly, it’s that Berlin connection that proved vital in this deal.

Gidsy’s investors were Danish VC Sunstone Capital, London-based Index Ventures, SoundCloud CEO Alexander Ljung, Berlin Angel Christophe Maire and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

There’s no guessing where GetYourGuide to the capital to acquire Gidsy. In January it closed a $14 million Series A funding round with investment from Spark Capital and Highland Capital Partners Europe, the newly opened European arm of Highland Capital Partners.

Edial Dekker, CEO and co-founder of Gidsy, said the company and its team of 12 would become part of GetYourGuide, along with his cofounder brother Floris and Phillipp Wassibauer. Dekker will become head of mobile development for GetYourGuide, his brother will become head of design.

Dekker told me: “It’s true we had to change the business model of Gidsy to more sales (and less p2p!), and GYG was already doing that, but in a much better way than we did. It only makes sense, to bring together both teams. All the things we worked on a lot (social, product) we can immediately apply at GYG. We’ve also been working a lot on mobile in the last months, but we did not launch it yet. We’ll have a huge opportunity to work on the same problems we tried solving in the first place: bringing people together around activities.”

Gidsy was founded in 2011 and attracted a lot of interest, building a respectable community with booking activities in more than 140 cities and 40 countries.

However GetYourGuide, founded in Switzerland in 2008, has become a large platform for tours and activities globally, signing a lot of real-world partners, rather than using Gidsy’s crowd-sourced approach. It offers over 19,700 activities provided by professional suppliers in more than 1,930 destinations worldwide and has distribution partnerships with more than 1,500 online travel agencies, travel operators and media companies, such as TripAdvisor.

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Xamarin, the company behind the cross-platform mobile development platform with the same name, today announced that it has recently acquired the Danish mobile testing startup LessPainful. LessPainful is the company behind the popular open source cross-platform functional test platform for Android and iOS, and Xamarin has already put this acquisition to use. The Xamarin Test Cloud, the automated user interface testing platform the company launched at its Evolve 2013 developer conference in Austin today, is based on Calabash.

Test Cloud is a pretty ingenious product that solves a real problem for mobile developers. It allows users to easily write user interface tests and then see how their apps perform on real-world devices. Indeed, LessPainful – and now Xamarin – operate a lab with hundreds of devices, and the service runs these tests directly on the device and provides users with detailed logs and screenshots about how the app performed.

As Xamarin co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman told me last week, fewer than 10 percent of developers currently use automated user interface testing for their apps. The tools that are currently on the market, he noted, tend to be hard to set up and use – and once they run, the tests are often very fragile because they rely on image recognition, so even the slightest change to the wording on a button can throw them off. Developers, however, should really run these tests, given the huge fragmentation in the mobile space (and especially on Android). They only get a short amount of time to convince users that their apps are worth using, and the smoother the experience, the more time the user will spend with the app.

Test Cloud – and Calabash – takes a different approach. It provides users with a very basic language to write tests and a great user interface for running the tests and seeing the logs. Developers can choose which phones to test their apps on or just choose to run their apps on the top 10, 20 or 30 phones on the market.

As Friedman noted, one of the nifty features of Test Cloud is that users don’t even have to write a test to get some early results (he called it a “gateway drug” in our interview). The Xamarin App Explorer will automatically navigate through your app and visit every screen, press every button and try every UI element. All of the user interface elements are identified by object IDs and not image recognition or gesture recording, so as long as the ID remains the same, developers and designers can change the color of the layout of their apps at will and the tests will still work.

Because it can be integrated into popular continuous integration systems like Team Foundation Server, Jenkins and TeamCity (Xamarin offers plugins for those), as well as an API and command-line interface, it’s easy for developers to regularly test their apps.

Xamarin, Friedman told me, is growing rapidly. The company has over 15,000 paying customers and in total, over 300,000 developers are now using the service. Some of the company’s most well-known customers include Rdio, Clear Channel, the Portland Trailblazers and National Instruments. The launch of Xamarin 2.0, which allows developers to use Visual Studio to write iOS apps, has been a major factor in the recent interest in the company’s tools.

Access to the Test Cloud is currently only available by invite. During the beta phase, the service will be available for free to Xamarin users. After the beta ends later this year, the pricing will be based on device hours, but the company is still working out the details.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you can’t beat ‘em, aggregate ‘em. That was my take in late 2010 when a host of daily deal aggregators sprang up at the height of the whole Groupon-clone thing. So you’ll be forgiven if this post reeks of déjà vu for you, too.

Bownty, the Denmark-based daily deal aggregator, which currently targets the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Denmark, has raised $1.1 million in new funding from Danish SEED Capital, and Accelerace Invest, the startup accelerator and investment programme.

The new funds will be used to further expand across Europe, with a focus on raising awareness of the Bownty brand and its consumer proposition. Yes, there’s life in those daily deals yet.

Competing with the likes of Buyometric, Deal Zippy, and City Treats, Bownty aggregates over 2,500 deals from over 100 daily deal sites each day, including Groupon, Living Social, KGB Deals and Wowcher.

It’s a familiar daily deal aggregator play: Subscribers receive one daily email that matches their preferences, thus negating the problem of so-called “daily deal fatigue” caused by too many and spammy emails advertising irrelevant deals. There are also apps for iOS and Android. In addition, users can store all of their deals in their Bownty “Deal Wallet”, which will notify them of any expiring deals.

“There has been a lot of skepticism about the future of this industry,” says Steffen W. Frølund, Founder and CEO of Bownty in a statement. “But this investment proves that the daily deal market is not dead. We have seen significant growth and I believe there is still huge untapped potential in curating the daily deals marketplace.”

Meanwhile, David Ventzel, Senior Management Consultant at Accelerace Invest, chimes in: “The fast expansion of Bownty from Denmark to the UK, France, Spain and Germany supports our belief that this company represents the future of online2offline commerce”.

That future is a daily deal aggregator, apparently.

Gotta go, it’s 2010 calling…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The world of language learning startups is going international. Today, Berlin-based Babbel, which creates online and mobile-based language learning courses, is buying PlaySay, a TC Disrupt finalist that focused on creating mobile apps that turned the process of learning languages into a game — modelled somewhat loosely on the back-and-forth paired-play concept of “Draw Something.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, except to note that the acquisition was being made out of operational cashflow.

Babbel says that it will be using the acquisition as a way to better tackle the U.S. market. The company already says it has some 15 million users worldwide, with 8 million downloads of its language learning apps and 200% annual growth. Languages covered by Babbel include Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch.

PlaySay is not disclosing how many users it had of its English/Spanish app at the time of acquisition, its founder and CEO Ryan Meinzer does point out that it picked up about 100,000 users within a month of launching its iOS-based service last year. At that time, it had secured $820,000 in backing from Novak Biddle Venture Partners and executives from PayPal and HigherOne; along with a distribution deal with Harper Collins.

The deal will see PlaySay close down its service and “invite” current users to join Babbel. Meinzer himself will be coming on as an advisor, as he now has a full time job at Salesforce’s Heroku. He declined to tell TechCrunch what that role is, saying only that “it’s to make the awesome company even awesomer.”

The deal is in part a way for Babbel to expand more into the U.S. market — and, in Meinzer’s words, apply some of PlaySay’s learnings around gameplay to its wider portfolio of services — but it is also a reaffirmation of PlaySay’s emphasis on the mobile platform as a key entry point for language education.

“Education is going mobile,” said Markus Witte, CEO of babbel.com, in a statement. “This acquisition represents a continuation of our strategy to offer a complete range of mobile solutions to language learning and the possibility to leverage market share in the US.”

For a company making a difficult switch from creating software to building hardware, Robocat is making very good early progress. The Danish startup’s Thermodo smartphone thermometer accessory hit its original Kickstarter goal of $35,000 in just seven hours yesterday, and is now at over twice that amount, with pledges still flowing in. Robocat accordingly announced some stretch goals this AM, in a manner that makes me think this is one of the best-engineered Kickstarter projects ever.

The stretch goals for the Thermodo include a $125,000 level, where Robocat will turn their affection more squarely to Android. The thermometer was always going to be compatible with Android devices through third-party developers, but the team will make the official Thermodo companion app Android-compatible if funding hits that level, and will ensure that Thermo, the startup’s existing app, will also work with Thermodo on Android.

At $250,000, a new colorway comes into the mix, with a red option available for all backers who pledged $25 or above. And finally, should the project exceed $500,000 in funding, everyone will get an aluminum Thermodo. Robocat is currently offering an anodized aluminum level, but that will remain special as the other levels will have only black, white and red as color options.

The stretch goals look artfully planned to have been ready to go based on Thermodo’s early success, and that’s why I applaud the project’s design. Robocat went into it knowing exactly how much they needed to get the production line rolling, and asked for only that, but then were ready with upgrades designed to capitalize on the fact that it might be a hit with backers. Individual pledge levels are low, and the overall target looks very achievable, so backers are naturally less skittish about putting down their money since there appears to be little risk.

Expect Thermodo to reach most, if not all of those tiers in its stretch goals. Which will add up to a huge amount of actual devices to ship when it comes time to deliver. That may be the most interesting part of the whole project: watching how a software company handles mass production of a hardware accessory.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Like to use your iPhone on the toilet? Myshkin Ingawale has an app for that.

Ignawale is the co-founder of Biosense, a med tech company based in Mumbai that specializes in cheap and functional medical technologies. Last year’s product was a portable and needleless anemia screener called ToucHb. This year at TED in Los Angeles today he unveiled the charmingly named UChek, a urinalysis app for the masses.

In the old days, urinalysis was a bit tougher. A sample of urine is taken in cup and a chemical strip is dipped into said urine sample. The strip is then compared to a color-coded map, which can be used to determine levels of glucose, bilirubin, protein, and other abnormalities in your urine. High levels of glucose, for example, could indicate diabetes.

Although chemical strips can be deciphered by sight, there are many urine scanning machines that produce more accurate results. The problem is that they can cost up to $10,000, with limited compatibility with different types of chemical strips.

Ignawale’s UChek is an app that seeks to simplify the process in an affordable way. Once the chemical strip is dipped in urine, a picture is taken of the strip with a smartphone. The app then quickly analyzes the strip and produces accurate and easy-to-understand results.

While the app is currently going through testing phases in a Mumbai hospital, it is awaiting approval in Apple’s App Store.

The app itself will cost $99, while an extra $20 will nab you a packet of chemical strips, a color-coded map for testing. An Android app is expected, although Ignawale says it will take a little bit longer before it’s released.

“We all have two things, cell phones and urine,” Ignawale told his TED audience. “We figured we had to be able to do something with this.”

He certainly isn’t the first person to have noticed. An iPhone app called Piddle was developed by Danish programmers last year in May for Health Hack Day in Stockholm, where it took first prize. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a boom in mobile urinalysis apps, as strange as that sounds?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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