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Great interview with Amen’s Felix Petersen the day before they officially launched Amen at TechCrunch Disrupt. Also read Mike Butcher’s TC post...
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Business Angel, Super Angel, micro-VC, VC - how does one keep these investment players apart?
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8 posts tagged amen
Skype A Founder #12: Loopc.am Founder Tor Rauden Källstigen on his Seed Financing Round and Launch of new web platform
Ok, I don’t want to get carried away, but i can’t help but rejoice in the fact that Loopc.am announced a seed financing round with a group of investors that are without equal.
Loopc.am’s round closed earlier this year and was led by London-based Passion Capital. Joining Passion in supporting Tor and his team is a syndicate of premier angel investors including Zoe Adamovicz (Xyologic, Concise Software), Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud), Heilemann Ventures (Dailydeal), Christophe Maire (Txtr), Felix Petersen (Amen), Peter Read and Eric Wahlforss (Soundcloud).
The Loopc.am app allows you to capture a series of frames through an iPhone or iPad camera stop-motion style, which is seamlessly and quickly merged into an animation to share. This has appeal to anyone who loves visual interaction – and can be described as a blend between still photographs and video. As an example, this was my latest loop from my day at Wannsee yesterday:
The fact that an A-Team of investors yet again backs a product-centric company truly manifests the paradigm change that has taken place in the Berlin scene over the last years. Before investors were focused on backing proven business models and operations driven companies. Today, recently funded startups like Amen, EyeEm, Wahwah.fm or Loopc.am show that one can convince investors in Berlin with a strong vision and an innovative product.
I must admit that when I met Tor the first time more than one year ago at the F@6 radio show we were both guests at, i thought he was kind of nuts to create an App for animated Gifs, a technology that had been around since the late 80s. At that point GIFs were not even out of fashion, they were practically living dead. However, the product he ultimately came up with proved to be uber-slick and bloody addictive. It is wonderful to witness someone like Tor, who pulled through and never stopped chasing his dream to make Loopc.am a full-time endeavor. Kudos!
Have a look at the interview to find out more about the financing round, it’s API release and Tor’s vision to create the Lol-Graph of the future.
Ashton Kutcher invests in Gidsy
Gidsy has a new, prominent investor: Ashton Kutcher! After Amen and Soundcloud, social marketplace Gidsy is already the third investment in a Berlin based startup by the Hollywood actor. In the US, Kutcher has been investing in tech startups for a while and with portfolio jewels such as Flipboard, Airbnb or Path, he seems to be doing a great job picking the right deals.
The round is led by Sunstone Capital and is joined by Index Ventures, Werner Vogels, and Peter Read. The total investment sum adds up to $1.2M.
For more background on Gidsy, have a look at the interview TechBerlin did with Gidsy CEO Edial Dekker some time ago. You can find the video as well as an exclusive preview of their office here. (Also check out the TechBerlin interviews with the founders of other Kutcher investments such as Soundcloud, Amen or Airbnb).
And the beef goes on…
Amen vs. Gründerszene: Round 2!
Today Gründerszene, one of the biggest German tech blogs, publicly addressed the accusations Amen founder Felix Petersen (one of the most well known German internet entrepreneurs) made against their editor in chief, Joel Kaczmarek. Recap: TechBerlin had first reported about the tension between the two one week ago. The essence of the argument is Felix’s accusation of Joel allegedly blackmailing him in order to get a scoop.
While one week passed without any public wrangling, Felix Petersen yesterday wrote a blog post to expand on his side of the story. In the post he advises fellow entrepreneurs “… against working with this publication and with this individual.”
It took less than 24 hours for Joel to answer to the allegations. In a long blog post titled “Amen: Does the Hype startup really deliver?” in which he extensively analyzes the performance stats of Amen’s first two months on the market, Joel says that Felix and him had a “bumpy ride” when negotiating the way to handle their launch announcement, but that he did not blackmail Felix. Unfortunately he did not want to go into further details. We all know that the devil very often lies in the details. The Gründerszene article itself was long planned and not a reaction to Felix’s blog post. According to Joel, he had invited Felix to comment on the post and performance figures some days ago, which Felix did initially. Later however, he asked Gründerszene to not post his his comment.
Anyway, in conclusion Joel said that he wanted to meet Felix in person and resolve the argument. Felix also wants to “toss the negativity out the window, concentrate on kicking ass, help each other out and make Berlin the BEST startup city in the world.”
But this morning Felix wrote on Amen “Today’s Gründerszene Article on Amen is the Best Bullshit to read on the Web this Year.” It is unclear whether he will meet with Joel.
From today on Joel is on a three months sabbattical wich was announced earlier. He states that this has nothing to do with the Amen “conflict”.
Asaf Moses (Upcload) straight from TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing
UPcload, the startup that seeks to revolutionize online shopping by giving shoppers a simple way to measure their exact dimensions and thus lower return rates for e-tailers, was the only startup from Berlin that participated at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing.
Founder Asaf was kind enough to give TechBerlin a skype video call the same day he pitched UPcload on stage and share the experience with all of us.
Unfortunately UPcload did not make it into the finals, but that should not sadden Asaf and his team. Having been chosen to compete at Disrupt is a major achievement for such a young startup, something that most early stage companies can only dream of. He shares that experience with Berlin based Henrik Berggren from Readmill and Felix Petersen from Amen who took centre stage this year at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and SF.
The question that remains: When will TechCrunch will bring Disrupt to Berlin. I am sure not only Asaf thinks that the time is ripe!
IdeaLab!2011 - Panel discussion “Berlin - the next Silicon Valley?!”
With Felix Petersen (Amen), Jens Begemann (Wooga), Alexander Ljung (Soundcloud),Stefan Glänzer and Florian Heinemann (Rocket Internet).
(Sound gets better after minute 5).
For an interview with Felix Petersen, click here. For an interview with Alex Ljung click here.
Gründerszene/Amen: Beef in the hood!
German speaking tech blog Gründerszene seeks to create an English speaking blog called VentureVillage about the European web scene. Their landing page looks like a direct copy of the great Amen design:
No, this does not seem to be a joke as Simon Schäfer suggested on Facebook when he wrote “Copyism Galore! Hope it’s a hoax!”.
In the recent past there has been some beef between the editor of Gründerszene, Joel Kaczmarek and Amen CEO Felix Petersen. As to TechBerlin’s knowledge it all started with an Email thread regarding an exclusive story. Joel did not want to bow to the news embargo by the stealth startup, arguing that he could publish a story with screenshots that he had researched himself. However, since Amen would later launch the app at TechCrunch Disrupt it was bound to the TechCrunch rules of not releasing any screenshots to the public prior to launch. Non observance would lead to disqualification. After a fierce argument, Gründerszene ended up publishing the article at a pre-agreed date and time.
When asking Felix about the whole incident today, he responded by saying: “There was probably a good reason, why I had not heard of Gründerszene before they contacted us. I have a company to run, I don’t have time for this.”
A couple of minutes later he posted the following to Amen:
For an interview with Felix about Amen, please click here.
UPDATE 1: When speaking to Joel on the phone, he said that copying the Amen design was not intended.
UPDATE 2: VentureVillage picked up on Felix’s Amen and changed its landing page to the following:
Nuff said!
up.front meet-up with presentation by Caitlin Winner, Co-Founder & CPO at Amen
Yesterday TechBerlin checked out the up.front web design meet-up that was held at co.up in Kreuzberg. There were at least 80 people present. Maybe more people could have attended if the gates had not closed by 8pm :-).
The closing speech was held by Caitlin Winner, co-founder of Amen which has launched on iTunes last Monday. As design plays an important role for Amen, it was very exciting to hear Caitlin talk about her sources of inspiration in design. You can watch her slides and comments above. Let us know what you think?
To listen to the whole interview, click here.
To watch an interview with Amen CEO Felix Petersen click here.
SKYPE A FOUNDER #7: Felix Petersen, Co-Founder & CEO, Amen
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This is the Best Interview With The CEO Of One Of The Greatest Fucking Apps In The World. Amen.
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