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Web Mission 08 had an overwhelming response with over 100 companies applying. The applications were reviewed by Doug Richard, Mike Butcher and UKTI and they were really impressed with the quality of the applications.
In the words of Doug Richard, "some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley".
The applications were assessed on their ability to do meaningful business in the US; from setting up office, to finding funding, to extending their network, and developing sustainable cross-pond relationships. The companies were also assessed based on their business viability and the strength of the management team. The final selection needed also had to be balanced to form a mix of companies that showed the breadth of what the UK has to offer in this space.
Here’s a checklist of the companies coming on the Web Mission, with a few lines they’ve written to tell us what they do. Please click on a name to open the description.
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www.coull.com
Coull was founded with the mission of making online video experience interactive, rather than passive. Coull’s video platform enables video owners to easily identify and tag objects within online videos, and customize user experiences around interacting with those objects. Coull’s-enhanced videos are driving deeper consumer engagement with brands as well as innovation in product placement and Coull’s robust reporting tools allow real-time campaign tracking, measurement and monitoring. Backed by Rupert Hambro & Ptnrs, Finance South West Growth Fund and Creative Ventures and led by an experienced Management team, Coull is headquartered in Bristol, UK.
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www.dothomes.com
DotHomes is a 'Google of real estate'. It allows home seekers to search over thousands of real estate Websites from one place. It was founded in mid-2006 by Artemi Krymski and Douglas de Jager, two young alumni of Imperial, Europe's leading technology university; and is equity backed by three of Europe's leading early-stage venture capital groups, The Accelerator Group (TAG), Arts Alliance and Samos Investments. In June 2007 Artemi was selected by Business Week as one of Europe's Young Entrepreneurs 2007. In July 2007 DotHomes was picked out by The Guardian newspaper as one of its Top 10 Dotcoms to Watch. In November 2007 Esquire magazine shortlisted DotHomes as Best New Idea at its annual Man at the Top Awards - together with Waitrose, Fashion Academy and Yotel.
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www.edocr.com
edocr's mission is to bring attention to business documents through interactivity. At edocr, you can open a free account and upload your documents for sharing by the professional and business community. At the same time, you can interact with the documents uploaded by like minded professionals and businesses. Once uploaded, edocr generates a visually stunning thumbnail and flash document that you could embed on to your corporate website, blog, e-zine, etc. The social network wrapper around each flash document allows edocr community to interact with your documents through commenting, ranking, tagging, book marking, e-mailing friends and colleagues, e-mailing author/publisher without having to know their e-mail address, etc. The document can also be assigned to Special Interest Groups for extending the interactivity.
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www.thefilter.com
The Filter is...
+ The ultimate in personalised content filtering technology
+ It aggregates entertainment content information (metadata, purchases, usage, ratings, etc...)
+ Creates a model of connections between the information and each item of content
+ And filters it all by using individual tastes and moods (aggregating user’s existing online profiles as well as the user’s activity on The Filter)
+ Designed for entertainment content and eCommerce
+ Backed by Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures
+ An $8.5m investment in R&D to date
+ Proven - with significant depth and breadth of data
+ Currently used by:
+ Nokia music store, MSN music store, DjDownload
+ Mobile application on Nokia & Sony Ericsson mobile phones
+ Downloadable iTunes/WMP plugin that monitors consumption & creates playlists
+ Digital entertainment discovery website (launching April ‘08)
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www.groupspaces.com
GroupSpaces is an Oxford-based Internet company that provides online tools for management and promotion of ‘real world’ groups, societies and clubs.
Following a successful pilot over 2006-7 with 300 Oxford University societies and advertising contracts secured with over 40 blue-chips including IBM, BP and UBS, the GroupSpaces team is now developing a scalable online toolset to meet the needs of millions of groups worldwide.
GroupSpaces was founded in October 2006 by a team of Oxford University students and graduates, and received seed funding in 2008 from a consortium of Angel Investors including Avonmore Developments.
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www.hubdub.com
Hubdub is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is founded by a team of four, Nigel Eccles (CEO), Tom Griffiths (Product Director), Rob Jones (Creative Director) and Chris Stafford (Technical Director). Nigel Eccles was previously the product manager for the Flutter betting exchange (acquired by Betfair). Recently the team closed a round of seed financing from a group of prominent Scottish technology investors including Kevin Dorren (previously CEO of Orbital Software) and Ian Ritchie with Kevin has joined Hubdub as chairman. Hubdub launched in January 2008 at DEMO 08 in Palm Springs.
Hubdub allows users to make predictions on the outcomes of news events and to challenge their friends in fantasy league style competitions. Unlike other news sites, Hubdub only tracks news that users think is worth creating a question on, such as “Will Obama be the next president of the US?” or “Facebook vs. MySpace, who will grow faster?”. “Hubdubbers”, as Hubdub users have started to call themselves, can not only create such news-related questions and predict Hubdub dollars on them, but they can also set up their own personalized leaderboard to compete against their friends. The site brings the thrill of fantasy sports to news junkies.
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www.huddle.net
Huddle.net combines online collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles. It offers an easy, secure and inexpensive online service for everyone from individuals through SMEs and enterprise to government. Huddle is also free for charities. With Huddle you can instantly create a network of collaborative team workspaces, each time bringing together the right team for the right project.
Huddle’s customers include Reuters, Boots, Unicef, John Lewis and Edelman. Management team boasts former employees of Library House, lastminute.com, Fibernet and Dunnhumby.
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www.kwiqq.com
Kwiqq is a social networking system designed for rapid deployment, simple setup and easy extensibility. Each installation is fully customisable.Kwiqq is usable on PDAs, mobiles and is W3C compliant. As part of our service, we will customise your social network to precisely match your users' requirements. We are a one stop shop for any online social networking project. As well as the software we can also offer hosting, moderation and consultancy.
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www.mydeo.com
The site provides easy-to-use online tools that help users upload and stream high quality video to friends, family, customers and prospects, as well as live statistics to track how popular videos have been. Mydeo is Microsoft’s first and only European Movie Maker Hosting Partner. Mydeo has been nominated for ‘Best Streaming Service’ at the 2008 UK Internet Service Provider awards and was named a Red Herring Europe 2007 finalist.
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www.rummble.com
Rummble helps users find recommended content for a location more easily, whether at home or on the move. Rummble is a location based content discovery tool and social software platform, which uses patent pending algorithms to discover content relevant to your physical location. Instead of finding everything that is nearby (e.g. 40 restaurants) Rummble gives you the 3 or 4 you’ll actually like. Rummble saves the user having to wade through pages of search results on their cell phone, instead delivering personalised content for a location, in a few seconds. Rummble can also tell your friends where you, who's nearby and where they'll be going in the future so you can hookup. The Rummble platform has been built from the ground up to include functionality that capitalizes specifically on the advantages of mobile technology; it works on the web and on mobile by SMS, WAP and a Java mobile application.
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www.shortfuze.com
Based in Cambridge, UK, Short Fuze has a team of 20 people drawn from high end graphics, computer games, mobile, and entertainment media. Funded by a combination of Angel investment and seed funds, Short Fuze makes Moviestorm. Moviestorm is a suite of software tools, add-on content, and online services which allows anyone to create 3D animated movies ranging from simple video clips to full-length movies in a cool, attractive, fun and easy way. Moviestorm movies can be broadcast, sent to mobiles, shared on any social media, or just posted to any video site. Currently in "enthusiast release", Moviestorm is the easiest way for anyone to create and share video blogs, music video, dramatic stories, and self-advertising. Moviestorm is actively looking for major partners and content ahead of a commercial release in Q3 2008. While UK founded, Moviestorm has a strong US focus to its plans in 2008.
Short Fuze has won Running the Gauntlet 2004, English Tech Tour 2007, Great Eastern Investment Forum "Most Improved Company 2007", American Film Institute applause, a British Venture Capital Association Award for "Best Structured Deal 2007". Short Fuze is a finalist in the Cambridge "Rising Stars 2008" award. Moviestorm has been seen at CTIA 2007, CE02CEo 2007, C21 Future Media 2007, and SIME Innovation Day 2008. You can catch up with Moviestorm at Webmission 2008 and California Tech Showcase 2008 (la Baule).
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www.silobreaker.com
Silobreaker is an online search service for news and current events that delivers meaning and relevance beyond traditional search and aggregation engines. Its relational analysis and explanatory graphics provide users with unparalleled contextual insight into the news stories of the day.
More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enable users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.
Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. With the engine’s focus on finding and connecting related data in the information flow, Silobreaker’s user tools and visualisations are ideal for bringing meaning to content from either today’s Web or the evolving Semantic Web, or both.
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www.skimbit.com
Skimbit is a social decision-making tool that works like an online shareable scrapbook populated by automatically ‘skimming’ the best bits of sites you like. It aims to help with group decision making, like choosing a holiday villa with friends, choosing a home with flatmates, or picking bridesmaid shoes with your bridesmaids. It can also be used for more independent decisions like researching the purchase of a TV, car, or baby stroller. Skimbit also offers a white-labelled hosted version of the service called Skim-in-a-box, aimed at portals, marketing agencies, concierge services and wedding planners.
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www.slicethepie.com
Slicethepie is a revolutionary new website that acts as an A&R and financing engine for the discovery and funding of new and established artists.
Slicethepie turns every music fan into a record label and harnesses the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ to identify the highest rated artists on the site who move forward to a showcase and then onto financing.
Site users invest in the top artists and get involved in the production of the album. Financial returns are linked to the number of albums and singles sold over a 2 year period. Investors can trade in and out of their artist investments at any time. The site was launched in June 2007.
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www.trampolinesystems.com
Trampoline Systems is a London-based enterprise social computing company. Trampoline’s SONAR Suite provides strategic organisational insight for large enterprises. It supports the informal organisation and emergent processes working alongside the formal structure of the corporation. SONAR Server is the analytic core of Trampoline’s technology. It analyses an organisation’s email and data to identify who is talking to whom and about what. SONAR Dashboard enables employees to connect with useful people at work based on the organisation’s social network and employees’ work focus and interests. Metascope is Trampoline’s dedicated technology for ONA professionals working with large networks.
Trampoline’s clients include the Raytheon Company, a top 5 global management consultancy and the UK Foreign Office. Accolades include Oracle’s EMEA Innovation Award 2007, Finalist in the UK Technology Growth & Innovation Awards 2008 and Finalist in CNET’s Enterprise Product of the Year 2007. Trampoline raised $6m in Series A investment from the Tudor Group in March 2007.
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www.trustedplaces.com
With reviews from over 450 cities in 40 countries, TrustedPlaces allows users to discover and share online all the latest information on where to go out, via reviews and recommendations from the TrustedPlaces community of passionate, individual reviewers. TrustedPlaces also allows business owners to gain valuable insights into what their customers think about their venue and attract new customers by interacting with an engaged, targeted audience amplifying word of mouth for their business.
Started by Sokratis Papafloratos and Walid Al Saqqaf in May 2006, the company went on to secure £500k investment from HOWZAT Media the investment fund started by Cheapflights' David Soskin and Hugo Burge. By autumn 2007, TrustedPlaces had featured in the Guardian’s ‘Top 10 dotcoms to watch’ and was at the top of the Times’ ‘Top 50 travel websites of 2007’.
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www.wayn.com
WAYN allows you to keep a log of your trips so that you can share your experiences with others; keep track of
your friends’ whereabouts and make new friends from different locations based on where you are, where you’ve
been and where you’re going.
By uniquely combining the ability to track people’s locations, WAYN is able to provide an unparalleled ability for
our members to meet people in a certain place at a certain time, whilst also providing companies with unique
targeted advertising opportunities.
WAYN encourages interaction amongst its users by focusing on travel, places and people’s whereabouts. The
site enables members to:
• Keep a log of past, present and future trips and keep track of friends’ whereabouts and activities
• See who is currently in, has been to or is going to the same location and find out the best things to do in
different locations
• Find old friends from their travels or the past
• Share travelling experiences, comments, reviews and ratings with others
• Customize personal profile and trip information pages
• Upload contacts, photos, videos, journals plus more
• Send Instant Messages, SMS, Emails and Ecards
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www.webjam.com
The place for you, your groups, your sites.
Webjam is the solution of choice for local communities, interest groups, charities, fan clubs or families who want to easily connect online and share content in a controlled and safe environment.
Webjam allows users to give a sense of purpose to their online connections and create a relevant and personalised presence for their groups and communities.
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www.zebtab.com
Zebtab is about connecting consumers and content, effortlessly. Zebtab is the smart desktop widget that allows content owners to deliver their rich content & media direct to their users desktops. Zebtab discreetly delivers users the content they want and delivers content owners the awareness, traffic and revenue they want. Zebtab is an aggregated platform and exploits the network effect to the benefit of users and clients alike. Zebtab maximises the commercial opportunities presented by the burgeoning online advertising sector and presents a plug & play solution to content owners who wish to monetise their content at low cost and with minimal effort. 30+ major content deals signed with Man Utd (Launching March 08), ChelseaFC, Dennis Publishing, Sky At The Races, Firebox, StuffTV, 4TheGame, The London Paper, EMI, IWOOT, Evening Standard, Holy Moly, CityAM, Virtual Festivals, TuneTribe, Setanta Sports etc..
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www.zogix.com
Zogix provides a SaaS (software as a service) platform for companies and consumers to measure and track Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, monitor and store emissions reduced from energy efficiency initiatives, and monetize co2 saved from change in energy consumption.
Employee Services
Zogix has launched the first application – “Employee Services” that enables organisations & employee to track emissions related to
business travel through a self service application. The service supports an employee incentive program where employees are rewarded with “Z points” on using low carbon service providers or/and travel alternatives. These points are calculated based on actual savings made on corporate policy and t co2 saved from the choice. Employees can redeem the “Z points” across a range of online retailers. Organisations can implement a “Green Workforce” or/& “Sustainable Travel” policy through the “Employee Services” application which results in reducing Travel & Entertainment spend, overall reduction in cost of carbon and improves employee retention.
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