As a start-up enthusiast, I asked Ian, co-founder of Launch48, to share his thoughts on the start-ups to watch in 2011 – here’s a selection of his choices:
The company: Founded in 2008 the company now has over 35 million subscribers worldwide and last year was listed in the Tech Media Invest Top 100 list of the most innovative companies in tech and media.
Mission: Letting people decide how to manage their own communications
The product: Voicemail system which takes your phone messages and sends them as an email where they can be kept as long for as long as required. Also means that voicemails can be sent via email whilst you are abroad so you avoid the roaming charges associated with accessing voicemail from abroad. The apps for Android, iPhone and Blackberry also allow you to record a “Hullo” and send it via email.
The company: Based out of the UK and India Wingify now claims over 4000 clients for their Visual Website Optimizer including Microsoft, foursquare and Groupon.
Mission: To make website optimization tools which produce results without requiring a degree in rocket science
The product: Wingify’s Visual Website Optimizer uses a visual designer to create multiple versions of sections of the website with the required experimental changes without creating extra pages. Users can use a WYSWYG editor to change and preview their edits. Alternatively traffic can be split to different site pages. Reports available include a heatmap and clickmap to visualise where visitors are spending their time on the site.
The company: Founded in April 2009 and one of the winners of Seedcamp the same year, Boxed Ice’s Server Density tool now includes the New York Times and the University of Oxford as customers.
Mission: Making server monitoring easy
The product: With a variety of features including customisable alerts via SMS or Android/iPhone apps, “loads” of core reporting metrics and snapshots of what was running on whole system when there was a problem Server Density aims to take the middle ground between providing comprehensive real-time monitoring and metrics and not scaring off the non-techies with a well-designed simple UI.
The company: BaseKit was one of the winners at Seedcamp 2008 and then launched its first Beta in late 2009. Based in London they now have over 20,000 registered users and look likely to get even bigger in 2011.
Mission: Simplify the way the world makes websites
The product: A complete website building solution including domain name publication, hosting and a content management system from within a web browser. For the inexperienced no coding or technical expertise is required; those who want to have direct access to the content HTML and HTML5/CSS3 features can. Options include an E-commerce platform for business, social integration and over 100 design templates for those without super skills in Photoshop.
The company: London-based UberVu was another winner at Seedcamp 2008 (obviously a good year!) and now looking to relocate to the US.
Mission: To make social media make sense
The product: A good-looking social media monitoring tool to measure community metrics and analytics including sentiment analysis. The tool has a clear dashboard interface, easy translation of company mentions in foreign languages as well as collaboration functionality. Also has iPhone app so monitoring can be done on the move and an API which can be used to integrate monitoring data into existing dashboards.
Viadeo is hosting a tech gathering at Social Media Week London for tech start-ups, tech companies, VCs and angel investors with a guest speaker, networking and drinks. If you would like to register your interest please drop us a line.
About Launch48
The aim of Launch48 is to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend. That’s right, in 48 hours! It’s a frantic, energy fuelled, entrepreneurial event designed to engage all participants while offering the opportunity to learn and meet new people.
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