TechCrunch
Free's Xavier Niel To Launch 1000startups In Paris, The World's Biggest Incubator
While the name is very reminiscent of 500 Startups, 1000startups is a brand new crazy project from Free CEO Xavier Niel. With the help of the Caisse des Dépôts, Niel wants to create the world’s biggest incubator in the heart of Paris. As the name suggests, its 320,000 square feet should be enough to help 1,000 startups.
Located in the 13th arrondissement at the halle Freyssinet, 1000startups will open in 2016. The team had to buy the building from the City of Paris for $94 million (€70 million) and will invest $108 million (€80 million) over the next few years. Niel is clearly the major investor as the Caisse des Dépôts will only contribute for 5 to 10 percent of the budget.
Many investing institutions, such as the public VC firm Bpifrance, will relocate to 1000startups. During the project’s unveiling, the team presented its vision of the perfect incubator, with multiple locations to share ideas and meet new people.
Yet, 1000startups looks flawed. While Niel calls it an incubator, it seems to be closer to a coworking space. For example, Free’s CEO didn’t say whether he plans to invest in the companies that will work in this new location. No word on how it plans to select startup teams either.
Moreover, it is once again a partly public initiative that doesn’t want to generate any profit. That’s not how you find the best startups, cherish them and make them succeed. Other initiatives such as Paris-based TheFamily looks more appealing.
1000startups should therefore be treated as a good project to rent cheap startup offices in Paris. It could create a new startup network for French startups. But startups shouldn’t expect advice and introductions from the team behind 1000startups.
Cargo's Brewbot Makes You A Smartphone-Powered Craft Beer Microbrewery Starting At £1,500
All you really need to brew your own beer is a spare bathtub and some ingenuity, or so I believe based on long-held unsupported and unconfirmed opinion, but if you want to get fancy, a new Kickstarter project called Brewbot has you covered. The Brewbot is the product of Belfast-based Cargo, a team of devs and designers that wants to build amazing things, starting with a way to brew beer at home relatively cheaply, using smart connected devices.
The Brewbot is a smart appliance that’s far more interesting than Samsung’s connected refrigerators and washers, since it produces delicious beer. It’s also designed to look good, take up a minimum of space and eliminate as much possibility of error as it can to make home brewing easy.
Cargo’s motivation for building Brewbot stems from the team’s own passion for home brewing, which has become something of an international phenomenon. They noticed in pursuing their own hobby that setup was extremely complicated, and that there was a low degree of repeatability involved – in other words, it was very hard to brew the same beer twice, which, while adventurous, is hardly helpful if you want to turn your hobby into a business. Plus, typical brewing apparatus (good ones anyway) are huge.
Brewbot gets around these limitations for home beer enthusiasts by building a relatively svelte design that tucks away all the necessary machinery, vats and tanks into a package that’s about the size of a standard Ikea freestanding wardrobe. They then used Arduino-based controls and a load of sensors to make sure that Brewbot can easily follow recipes downloaded from the Internet to the letter, ensuring perfect repeatability every time with little or no manual intervention required.
Recipes are housed in a Brewbot iPhone app (an Android version is planned for later), which transmits directions to the Brewbot itself via Bluetooth. Users can tweak recipes on the fly, and share their creations with the community. Each batch can be up to 20 litres (around 5 gallons), and the cost of brewing is around £0.26 or $0.42 per 330ml/12oz standard beer bottle (so much cheaper than buying pre-made beer yourself).
The Belfast-based team aims to ship initially to the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., and backers can pre-order a unit for £1,500, plus up to £150 in shipping fees. The team at Cargo has built mobile apps for a lot of people, but are focusing on this much more ambitious project as an in-house effort. They’re partnering with creative consultancy Mette, which has experience building products for Jamie Oliver and Tesco, and hope to have the first completed units shipping in May. I don’t know about you, but I’m already thirsty.
Price War? mPOS Startup SumUp Cuts Its 2.75% Per Transaction Fee Across Europe
The European mobile POS space is a very crowded one, with a raft of startups duking it out to differentiate their offerings and grab market share from each other. One way to poach customers is of course to undercut the competition — which is what iZettle did, back in July, by launching a sliding per transaction fee that could drop as low as 1.5% for U.K. business processing more than £15,000 per month via its mobile card readers. iZettle’s move looks to have sparked an mPOS price war, as today rival startup SumUp has announced a swathe of fee cuts across European markets.
Rather than offering a sliding rate, SumUp has opted to cut its per transaction fee from a flat fee of 2.75% to a range of different flat fees. In the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, it’s cutting its fee to 1.95% for all debit and credit card transactions. In France the fee drops to 1.75%, in Spain it’s down to 1.5% and in Germany the local debit card fee drops to 0.95% but the credit card fee remains at 2.75%. SumUp’s three remaining European markets – Portugal, Belgium and Russia — remain unchanged at 2.75%.
SumUp’s U.K. transaction fee cut means local SMEs wanting to use the services of a mobile card reader startup will have to figure out what’s more attractive: a guaranteed 0.8 percentage point fee-cut regardless of how small monthly takings are, or the lure of a potential 1.25 percentage point reduction (using rival iZettle’s sliding rate). On the surface SumUp’s flat-rate cut looks likely to appeal to smaller businesses with variable monthly takings, while iZettle’s slider could attract those that have more stable monthly revenues (and which take in more than £4,798 per month: the point at which iZettle’s sliding rate matches SumUp’s fixed 1.95%).
The 2.75% per transaction fee that’s still leveraged by many European mPOS startups (including iZettle and SumUp in some markets) has been something of a standard, although mPOS category pioneer Square (which still hasn’t launched in Europe) also offers an alternative of paying a $275 flat fee per month, rather than the per transaction percentage.
Speaking to TechCrunch in July, iZettle’s Jens Münch described the 2.75% rate as “a hangover from the U.S.”, adopted by Square because of national cost structures. Different cost structures in Europe made rate cuts inevitable, argued Münch. “We knew that at some point that [2.75% rate] was going to be challenged,” he said at the time, when asked for iZettle’s workings on its rate cut.
For its part, SumUp said today that cost savings from moving to its own technology stack have enabled it to pass on savings to its customers via reduced per transaction fees. “Following our authorisation as Payment Institution by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) earlier this year, we are now underwriting, processing and settling transactions end-to-end through our own technology stack. This gives us a significantly lower cost base. We are excited to be able to pass the savings on to our merchants,” said co-founder Stefan Jeschonnek in a statement.
Asked whether the new lower fee is sustainable, from a business margin point of view, Jeschonnek said it is, arguing that it would help SumUp expand its business by reaching new market segments. ”The lower fee enables any business to accept card payments, even the more price sensitive ones. As a result, we expect to able to tap into new market segments. Our long-term business model is built around transaction-based revenue and this remains the case even with the reduction of transaction fees,” he told TechCrunch.
The startup, which has raised some $20 million to date, according to CrunchBase, and counts Groupon among its investors, said the new lower fees will automatically apply to all transactions of its merchants, starting from today.
It remains to be seen whether further mPOS rate cuts will bleed out across Europe. iZettle previously told TechCrunch it is using the U.K. as a testbed for its sliding reduced rate, with a view to potentially rolling it out into the other markets where it operates. SumUp’s move adds more imperative to that decision.
No comments:
Post a Comment