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The grounding of flights in and out of European as a result of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has been a powerful reminder of how much of our global economy relies on air transportation. As we wrote yesterday , the volcanic ash not only impacted the airline industry, but the tech world as well, disrupting business and conference travel alongside product deliveries. European startups, particularly reliant on quick transportation from country-to-country, may be feeling the consequences of restrictions on air travel even more so. Mike Butcher argues in a Techcrunch Europe article , "It seems that Europe's startup economy has been running partly on the spread low-cost airlines for the past 5 years, and without airlines the startups, along with the whole of the general business sector, are going to be badly affected." Sponsor It's unclear how much the volcanic eruption will further challenge business development, or if it will spur innovation and opportunities, particularly around virtual conferencing and alternative transportation planners. Jame Andrews, co-founder of Loco2 , a site promoting sustainable travel, remarks, "Thanks Iceland volcano for helping us to prove the market for alternatives to flying!" Jacek Kelski, founder and director of f3fundit , a blog and business portal aimed at helping support European entrepreneurs, argues that the major hindrance in Europe remains "investor readiness." According to Kelski "there are definitely a lot of good ambitious companies out there. There is a lot of activity all over the continent." But while there seems to be a lot of startup activity, Kelski is less optimistic about investor activity. "We're seeing very little if any VC activity in Europe at the moment, and the majority of funding is coming from angels and larger corporates." To help, f3fundit are holding a "Next Top Startup" competition. Ten finalists will take part in a boot camp June 16 and 17 in Barcelona, Spain, where they will work closely with a team of 25 mentors. One of the companies will be crowned the "Next Top Startup" and win a €25,000 prize. Kelsi hopes f3fundit.com's competition can help provide both the cash and the support for some of the startup community. Hopefully, European volcanic activity will cooperate. Discuss
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Volcanoes, Boot Camps, and Other Opportunities for European Startups
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As a parent (now there's a phrase you don't see here that often), I'm dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids' apps on my iPhone to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze. But there's this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and - loath though our children's parents are to admit it - sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue... and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play. Sponsor Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for - like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we're groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us. At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We're reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story. With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again. More Noise to Signal. Discuss
Originally posted here:
Cartoon: What's a Time-out in 2010?
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iphone,
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World
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Looking for that next booming trend in the tech industry to sink your entrepreneurial teeth into so that you might come up with a great product to receive funding for? Well perhaps you need to look no further than music, as reports show that first quarter investments in 2010 for music tech startups nearly doubled from 2009 and 2008 figures - an upward trend entrepreneurs could take advantage of in the near future. Sponsor Duncan Freeman, author of the site Indie Music Tech and founder of Band Metrics , estimates that around 25 investment deals in the music tech space were inked in the opening months of this year. Compared to 13 and 14 approximate investments in the first quarter of 2008 and 2009 respectively, Q1 2010 is off to a great start with huge early investment growth. Among the largest and most notable deals of the year so far include Spotify 's undisclosed amount of funding from Founder's Fund, $20 million which when to startup Guvera , and speaker manufacturer Sonos which received $25 million from Index Ventures. Other well known startups, such as SeatGeek, Songbird, TuneWiki and BlogTalkRadio all received various amounts of VC investment in the first quarter of this year. While there was nearly twice as many investments this year than in 2008, the amounts of those investments were much smaller. Freeman's estimates put 2008's 13 first quarter investments at a value of around $90 million, an average of nearly $7 million per investment. This year's 25 investments managed just around $110 million, or just over $4 million per investment, which is no better an average than from Q1 2009 which saw around $62 million. So while more deals are going down in the music tech industry, only slightly more cash is being doled out. It seems like the market for music startups is slowly warming and gaining traction with investors as companies like Spotify are thriving while others like Lala, which was acquired by Apple, are being snatched up by large corporations. Music could be an interesting industry to watch over the course of 2010 as these Q1 estimates suggest it could be a busy year of investments, so entrepreneurs may want to take a look at how they might provide a valuable service in this sector. Let us know what you think about the music tech space and where you think trends may lead this year by posting a comment below! Chart from Indie Music Tech . Discuss
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First Quarter Music Tech Investments Nearly Double in 2010
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Apparently Steve Jobs has gone and answered another customer email, this time sending shockwaves through the tech world with two words - "Sorry, no." According to a Mac rumors blog , a German user emailed Jobs asking if Apple was planning on "supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future" and that was Jobs' answer. We know it's only been a couple of years since the iPhone was originally released, but is this all that surprising? Sponsor It has been nearly two years since the iPhone 2G was available for sale, though you can still find plenty of them on Ebay , but the same can be said for other old beasts . Should we really expect Apple to continue releasing updates for outdated hardware? As it is, the iPhone OS 4.0 isn't going to support the iPhone 3G for half of its functionality - what are we looking for with iPhone 2G support then? After all, with Apple's infamously closed platform, are we looking for much in the way of bug fixes and security holes? Now, if only Microsoft would do the same for Internet Explorer 6, we could all move on with our lives. Discuss
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Apple To End iPhone 2G Support? Jobs Says So
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apple,
asking-if-apple,
iphone,
Microsoft,
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Steve Jobs,
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Link blogs, light blogs, blogs on the side; found treasures and half-formed thoughts - it turns out that many members of the ReadWriteWeb team are also publishing on Posterous , Tumblr and other casual blogging platforms. These are the places you can learn about the people behind the news and analysis here at ReadWriteWeb. Where you can find cool little videos and images that we want to share but that don't cross the thresh-hold for full-scale RWW blogging. Publishing and reading on these platforms is a lot of fun. We've listed some of the fun blogs published by members of our team below. We'd love for our readers to share links to your sites like this if you have them. Sponsor Richard MacManus , our Founder and Editor, writes about his travels outside his home in New Zealand, music, books and art using the Soup.io platform at VelvetsFan.com . I, Marshall Kirkpatrick , maintain a Posterous blog at Marshallk.posterous.com . I post a lot from my phone there, I post images and random thoughts about life in Portland, Oregon, my chickens and the tech news industry. Morning writer in Florida Sarah Perez uses Tumblr at sarahintampa.tumblr.com to post "random pictures, videos and infographics I come across on the web," she says. Portland based morning news writer Frederic Lardinois scored the cool domain DishWasherOnMars and uses it to post "stuff I don't get to blog about and that I want to share with my Twitter followers." Morning news writer Mike Melanson records his experiences as a hyper-mobile blogger in Austin, Texas on his Posterous blog . RWW's webmaster Jared Smith shares "(hopefully) useful tidbits about Web development, UX, and other geeky pursuits" on his Posterous from Charleston, South Carolina. Portland based Enterprise and ReadWriteCloud writer Alex Williams uses Tumblr at AlexHWilliams.com . "Hazard is my middle name," he says and he's not kidding, it really is. He calls it "my place to feed my personal interests." Production Editor Abraham Hyatt is in Portland, too and publishes "just your run-of-the-mill photo blog" on his Posterous . Eugene, Oregon based research team member and ReadWriteStart contributor Audrey Watters uses Posterous too. She says it's "where I post my ideas too long for twitter and too malformed for my blog." Portland-based Justin Houk , a member of the research team here as well, calls GeoPDX.net his "say anything, speak my mind, and voices in my head blog." How about you, dear readers? Where is the ReadWriteWeb community posting their found items, fleeting thoughts and other curated digital ephemera? We'd love to know, so share your link in comments below. We'd love to know what these services mean to you, too. Discuss
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Fun Blogs: Where We Post For the Love of It
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