We’d have to give up our freelance journalist jobs to keep interviewing and profiling newco’s coming out of Europe these days, so we hope you’ll settle for briefs on what we think is hot. The criteria to be in the list is purely subjective. Either we’ve tried the product and liked it, or we think the founders are smart guys, or it’s their backers who have been prescient in the past.
Incrowd, a Belgian bootstrapped developer of online communities, wrote in to tell us of its launch of Facebox, a new Europe-oriented online community platform targeted at young people. It is not in Beta mode so doesn’t exactly fit with our title but we’re pressed for time here. Like some of the other social networking sites out there, users make personal webpage, share video, music-likes, and photos with each other. It looks like it handles the Pan European traffic by reading browser setting for users that land on its homepage, offering up the appropriate country-specific languages. That will be important for advertisers. Incrowd claims it already has more than 15 million members throughout Europe on its other sites, namely Gentebox (Spanish market, 5 million members), Bingbox (English market, 3.5 million members), Redbox (Flemish market, 1 million members), Coolbox (French market, 2 million members). The company was founded in 2003 by Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert and is self-funded.
Crowdstorm – Newfangled shopping engine whose registered users recommend consumer goods. It is in Beta mode. Both of the founders were previously with venture-backed startups that were acquired by big Internet names. CEO Philip Wilkinson, founded Shopgenie, a comparison shopping engine, and then merged it with Kelkoo and built up the UK biz, and his co-founder is a former Ciao.com man. British.
Nooked – Selling software to marketing types at businesses to complement email marketing tactics. Irish. We know that email marketing technology developers are closely looking at RSS as a complementary feature to add to their software product lines. That means pioneering companies like Nooked will either expand and add email marketing to satisfy all the online marketing requirements of businesses, or firms they will be acquired if they are able to rapidly validate the RSS-for-biz market by winning some big name customers. Email marketing engine developers will likely be keen to do bolt-on acquisitions.
