TechCrunch
Samsung's Galaxy Gear Smartwatch Takes Shape Ahead Of Sept. 4 Event, Likely Won't Resemble Mini Phone
The good ship Galaxy Gear smartwatch is springing multiple leaks ahead of its official reveal this Wednesday, Sept. 4, and there are even leaks about previous leaks vying for attention. That said, there’s a lot about the device we can reliably say we know at this point, although what the device looks like probably isn’t one of those things. Here’s a quick breakdown of the latest rumors about Samsung’s foray into wearable computing, for those of you keeping score at home.
Not Just A Shrunk-Down Galaxy S4
The Internet cried out in horror at leaks this past weekend that claimed to show the Galaxy Gear in the flesh on a person’s wrist, effectively taking the shape of a shrunk down Galaxy phone that’s still looking might unwieldy when worn. But that’s apparently not what the shipping hardware does in fact look like, according to Om Malik, who appears to have solid sources providing lots of information about the upcoming device.
Malik wrote on GigaOM that Samsung will present a “different, more finished product” at an event taking place in Berlin ahead of the annual IFA consumer tech show, claiming the version leaked to VentureBeat was actually an early developer prototype. It isn’t uncommon for major smartphone OEMs to seed early hardware to developer partners to help them build software; BlackBerry’s BB10 development devices are perhaps the most public example in recent memory.
More Powerful Than Many Budget Smartphones
Rumored specs for the Galaxy Gear, according to both GigaOM’s sources and SamMobile’s, paint a picture of a device that has the guts of a decent mid-range phone, with a smaller display best-suited to a wristtop computer form factor. In short, the Gear is said to offer:
- A Samsung Exynos 4212 dual-core 1.5GHz processor
- An AMR Mali-400 MP4 GPU (the same found in the Galaxy SII)
- 1GB of RAM
- 2.5-inch, 320×320 OLED display
- Bluetooth 4.0 Low-Energy
- Android 4.3 (likely because of included Bluetooth LE support)
- Accelerometer and other sensors
- Built-in cmaera and mic
- 24-hour batter with light user, 10 under more strenuous conditions
The device actually pretty closely resembles the Galaxy SII in terms of its internal specs, but has a slightly more powerful processor, which could give an idea of its range of software capabilities.
Modified Android OS (And Non-Samsung Hardware Support)
New details from GigaOM shed some additional light on what the OS experience of the Galaxy Gear will be like, contrary to appearances from the leaked VentureBeat screenshots. The Gear will run the latest version of Android, minus a software keyboard (logical enough) and with no native browser. Using apps on-device should require a Samsung device and a special Samsung-specific app store, but connection to the iPhone 5 and other Android devices is listed as a strong possibility for basic smartwatch functions. It sounds like it’s possible the device could offer a basic set of notifications for all devices, requiring Samsung smartphones for more advanced features and third-party software.
A Gear To Grind Your Gears?
In a piece commenting on Samsung’s vision for the smartwatch based on the VentureBeat image leaks, Chris Velazco said that Samsung appears to have added too much complexity into the smartwatch mix for the Gear to be genuinely useful. The new details seems to suggest a device that focuses on supplementing the experience of using a smartphone (with full-screen notifications, for instance) rather than trying to replicate or replace that experience. It still might seem an unnecessary layer for most consumers, but at least the most recent reports about its features and hardware make it seem a bit more likely to achieve relevance than would a shrunk down phone strapped to someone’s wrist.
European Accelerator Numbers - Seedcamp Releases Its Data For The Last 6 Years
TechCrunch Europe was launched in September 2007, the same week Seedcamp – the European tech startup accelerator – also launched. So we’ve been on something of a journey together. That year and for at least the next 2/3 years after it was largely the only game in town in terms of the new wave of accelerators in Europe. It’s since been joined by TechStars London (formerely Springboard), StartupBootCamp and corporate networks like Wayra to name JUST a few. It seems like Europe is awash with accelerators right now.
But while many of those initiatives are still finding their feet, Seedcamp still draws in many of the top players. Niklas Zennstrom spoke as its first event for instance and is among those superstars who return regularly to Seedcamp events.
Today – at the opening of Seedcamp Week, when investors flood in to London to take pitches from new Seedcamp companies – it is publishing some data about its 6 year journey exclusively in TechCrunch. The information shows that while Seedcamp may not be the biggest (other are pushing many more companies through their system), the bar to get into Seedcamp remains very high.
There have been 93 Seedcamp companies since it started in 2007. Of those, 76 are still operational, 6 were acquired and 11 closed. Seedcamp Startups have raised $120 million in total since 2007, and $1.3 million is the average follow-on funding raised per startup after it’s been through the Seedcamp process. That’s important to know because the worst kind of accelerator is one where companies whither and die just after the programme. Accelerators need to accelerate.
Here are some more numbers which Seedcamp is releasing:
• In 2007, Seedcamp backed 6 startups. To date, they’ve invested in a total of 93 companies with 10 so far in the first half of 2013.
• They’ve had a total of 7,876 applications over the years, more than 2,000 already in 2013.
• The applications came from 70 different countries, and Seedcamp has backed founders from a total of 36 different countries across the EMEA region in the past six years.
• The nearly 100 startups accepted have gone on to secure $120 million in capital to date, having raised $5.5 million from Seedcamp. That translates into a “22x” in investment terms, and represents an average of $1.3 million in follow-on funding per company.
• Seedcamp companies typically raise in between $330,000 and $2 million in the round immediately following the Seedcamp program. This generally happens within 3-6 months of entry.
• Seedcamp startups have gone on to raise money from 354 investors across Europe, the US, and Asia.
• Some 80% of the 2012 companies (who entered the program at various stages last year) have gone on to raise follow-on funding.
• Out of the companies in the 2013 batch, approximately 60% have already secured follow-on funding.
The companies that closed were: Kublax, Tablefinder, Lookk, tldr, Trebax, Ineze, Efficient Cloud, Publisha and three others that are “in the midst of closing down.”
Of the companies that were acquired, these are: RentMineOnline (acquired by RealPage for $9.5M), Mobclix (acquired by London-based mobile marketing agency Velti for north of $50M), Jeeran (acquired by Talasim), Crashpadder (acquired by Airbnb), Toksta (acquired by Mainseek)and Kukunu (acquired by Rundavoo).
Now, what we can draw from this is that follow-on funding and – ultimately exits – is still no-where near matching the kinds of numbers in the US. The $1.3 million average follow-on makes building significant new company quite hard, especially when your international competitor may have raised 3-5 times that at Series A.
Europe only has 20 percent of the venture capital that’s available in the United States, from about 25 percent as many VCs. Thus, accelerators have a more significant profile in Europe – and they solve one of Europe’s biggest problems, which is clustering startups together so they learn stuff faster.
However, Europe is it’s own game, and frankly you shouldn’t compare everything in the Europe to the US.
Seedcamp’s approach is to trek around the world – mainly Western and Eastern Europe – hoovering up startups at local events and then encouraging them to cluster in a big hub, predominantly London. This is where the biggest investors reside, and the among the most experienced in Europe.
Other accelerators in Europe seem to want to start lots of local divisions based on cities, rather than centralising in one, as Seedcamp does. That means the quality can vary from programme to programme depending on the people involved locally. You will hear that X accelerator is “great in X city but terribly in Y city” for instance.
StartupBootcamp by contrast is going for numbers quite quickly. Launched in 2010, it now has 95 alumni companies, 77 are active (81%), 2 exits so far, and the average is €350,000 raised by each startup, equating to €65million. It has a programme in 7 cities.
Wayra – which started in 2011 in LatAm but is now in various European locations – has about 264 companies (across 14 academies, in 12 countries). Of those, 48% have “graduated”. No Wayra company has been acquired yet and 19 have closed.
All of that aside, Seedcamp is taking not so much a “pile-em high” approach as one which goes after the most high-end investors and investment strategies, and concentrating its fire on one big week a year in London.
It’s an approach which mans their startups raise “sufficient capital within 3 to 6 months” which is comparable to the US, they say.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Reshma Sohoni, said it’s approach is definitely not about lots and lots of companies.
“Our approach has been to bring the best quality and help to our startups, and especially to get them to the next reound of funding/. Our volume reflects that – we do 20-25 investments a year only.
“We go into each location, into 20 cities a year and then bring the startups back to “hubs” that help accelerate them. For us, that is London, Berlin and the US, the East Coast and West Coast.
“We don’t need office space to do that. It’s more about the bridges and the connectionism and where he mentors come from, how many people we can connect a startup with. It’s quite different to the approach of other [city-based] accelerators.”
Speaking about the average raised, she said, this is likely to increase. “We’ve seen the average of $1.4m in from TechStars in the US, for instance. In that sense, we are hitting that that level. I have always said US companies seem to raise twice as much in half the time, and it’s fair point that out. But that’s why we focus so much on 20-25 companies a year and go for follow-on funding. And getting really good investor’s. We’ve sen that with Transferwise, Grabcad, Editd and Erply for instance. If you don’t raise enough as a startup, you can’t hire enough people, so you tend to stay small.”
A third of Seedcamp’s startups have raised money from 103 investors from the United States, including Redpoint, USV, SV Angel, Betaworks, Atlas Ventures, Index Ventures, 500 Startups, Lerer Ventures, Matrix, NextView, Peter Thiel (Valar), Felicis Ventures, IA Ventures, and Horizons Ventures. To be frank, this is a who’s-who of US investors and is part of Seedcamp’s appeal for startup that want early introductions to US investors.
In other words, Seedcamp’s pitch is that you don’t have to start a company in the US to raise from US investors if your accelerator has quite deep US connections.
It’s also partly why the Springboard programme converted into TechStars London last year – that useful connection to the US…
So it’s been a busy 6 years and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Sooqini Raises $500,000 Seed Round For Its ‘UK TaskRabbit'
With the heavily-funded and U.S.-based TaskRabbit having a few teething problems, the jury is still out on how much growth there is in a reverse-marketplace for ‘tasks’. But that isn’t stopping a few UK TaskRabbit-inspired clones services from pressing on, though noticeably, one of those, Sorted, recently pivoted away from TaskRabbit’s model.
Today, UK task marketplace Sooqini is announcing that it’s raised $500,000 in seed funding, and with it a new website and greater emphasis on the trust element of its service, including verified sellers via a tie-in with identity and reputation verification startup Veridu. The new backing — the company’s first external funding, having been bootstrapped — is being led by Lars Toft Larsen, and Paolo Rubatto, founder of Start Capital. Both Larsen and Rubatto join Sooqini’s board.
Launched in 2011, London-based Sooqini lets users buy or sell a wide range of services — anything from accounting, translation, and things like digitising business cards, to cleaning, gardening and other general errands. Using a reverse-marketplace model, buyers post tasks to Sooqini’s website or through the iOS app, and receive offers from interested sellers. They then choose the best offer and pay when the job is completed, with Sooqini taking a 15% cut.
The startup says that there are currently around 15,000 sellers offering services on Sooqini and that £300,000 worth of jobs have been posted to date. In addition to the newly-designed website, the iOS app is to be updated this month and an Android version is pegged for October.
As well as its standard offering, the company sells what it calls the ‘Sooqini Silver Service’, which makes the process for buyers a little more frictionless, with Sooqini acting as a sort of Personal Assistant to the buyer. The company says that this elevated service is aimed at users who need a number of tasks done each month. They pay a monthly subscription that also covers the costs of small tasks, such as table reservations and a UK travel itinerary, and Sooqini’s team does the heavy lifting of filtering the best offers from sellers.
The introduction of a premium version of Sooqini is no doubt an attempt at solving the major downside of a reverse-markplace for general tasks in that it requires quite a lot of work from the buyer, which is counter-intuitive from a supply and demand point of view, depending on how bespoke the task is of course. That’s also the reason why competitor Sorted pivoted.
Kantar: Android Takes 65% Of Sales Across Major Markets; Windows Phone Grows By Tapping Dumbphone Users
The latest smartphone sales figures are out today from Kantar WorldPanel Comtech, and in case you needed one more metric to underscore the topline trend that’s been the case for years, the WPP market-research analysts are giving it to you: led by Samsung, Kantar tells me Android accounted for 65% of all smartphone sales in the nine influential smartphone markets in the world (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, USA, Australia, China, Mexico) for the 12-week period to the end of July.
Apple, meanwhile, is an increasingly mixed picture, with shares as low as 6% in one country, Spain, and as high as 43% in the U.S., for a nine-market share of 26.3%. Kantar’s figures also highlight another important trend. Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS devices — and by association its biggest partner, Nokia — continue to gain ground, if slowly. The platform is now at 4.4% of sales across these markets, says Kantar, nudging up to 3.5% of sales in the U.S., and in Europe, doubling its share in the last year to 8.2% of sales.
It’s not all rosy for Windows Phone, though: in China, its already-tiny share halved over a year ago, and it’s now at just 2.2% of sales.
Kantar’s figures are an interesting counterbalance to figures from analysts like IDC, Gartner and Strategy Analytics, which chart shipments from handset makers (and therefore may be overshooting or undershooting how many consumers users are actually buying). In comparison to Kantar’s 65% figure for its nine markets, Gartner and Strategy Analytics both noted recently that Android took nearly 80% of smartphone sales in Q3 globally.
Regardless of specific percentages, all of these analysts’ figures point to a very big and now pretty established smartphone leader in the form of Google’s OS, and specifically how it is used by Samsung.
We’re reaching out to Kantar to try to get an exact proportion of sales for Samsung specificallyas well as Android globally. What this trend also does is set the stage to see how the market responds to the all-but-confirmed introduction of some new, and possibly price-busting iPhone models from Apple.
Dumbphones but not a dumb strategy
Kantar points out an interesting trend in how Windows Phone is growing. While Android and Apple’s iOS platform picked up a lot of speed by tapping smartphone users from Symbian and BlackBerry looking for something more dynamic, Windows Phone appears to be finding new people from somewhere else: the still-large amount of feature phone users in the world, with 42% of sales coming from those making their first moves off feature phones.
That’s a smart move: according to Gartner’s figures, feature phones (AKA dumbphones) still account for 48.2% of all mobile handset sales in Q3. These consumers are less likely to be entrenched in an existing smartphone platform. “27% of Apple and Android users change their OS when they replace their handset,” writes Dominic Sunnebo, an analyst with Kantar.
It will be interesting to see whether Windows Phone manages to pick up mindshare along with marketshare; or whether we finally start to see that success in one does not necessarily lead to success in the other. As Sunnebo points out, “Android and Apple take the lion’s share of the headlines and continue to dominate smartphone sales, so it’s easy to forget that there is a third operating system emerging as a real adversary.”
He points out that low-price models like the Lumia 520 now represents around one in 10 smartphone sales in Britain, France, Germany and Mexico. ”For the first time the platform has claimed the number two spot in a major world market, taking 11.6% of sales in Mexico,” he notes.
Among the other players, BlackBerry continues to languish and one wonders how a player that has all but disappeared will manage to claw back, strategic resolve to embrace “niche” or not. In the “big five” markets in Europe of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, BlackBerry now accounts for 2.4% of sales; in the U.S. its share is now 1.2% of sales.
The full table below:
(Note: first paragraph and title updated with smartphone platform shares from across all markets surveyed, provided to me after I published a version of the story.)
Image: Flickr
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