Posts Tagged ‘twidox’

In today’s „Top 5“ edition, Tiburon-TV is looking at new and innovative approaches to education. Myngle, Busuu, Lingueo and sofatutor are all about learning the Web 2.0 way, whereas Twidox offers lots of precious resources for educational institutions.



Multi-awards winner Myngle.com operates a platform for online language education combining quality teaching and community. The Netherlands-based startup was founded by ex-eBay and Berlitz language company employees. Myngle asks people to pay about 300-400 Euro up front for lessons and thus is booking 20,000 Euro per month.



Language learning community Busuu.com is a project of the UNESCO’s year of learning languages. Madrid-based Busuu uses an integrated video-chat application where students can connect with native speakers for free. The startup has been nominated twice for the European TechCrunch Awards.



Another marketplace for learning languages is Lingueo.com. Courses in more than 40 languages can be taken in a personalized class any time, any place. You do not have to download anything and the only things you need are a microphone and a webcam.



Sofatutor.com is a virtual tutoring system with user generated videos for pupils and students. The Berlin-based interactive video platform has been launched in March 2009 and offers more than 1700 tutoring videos. Click here to watch a two-minute pitch from Plugg conference.



Twidox is another startup targeting the education market - although not a traditional learning website. The free online library offers an open education resource feature where universities can create a university system to share all their learn material, lecture handouts and research similar to MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

Next Monday is all about Social Networks. Have a great week!

Starting today, Tiburon-TV will be publishing a new Monday series „The Top 5“. We picked the five most promising German Startups to kick off this new weekly series: Plista, barcoo, Twidox, Yoose and hiogi. Berlin-based startup plista.com, co-founded by Dominik Matyka, offers a personalized Internet user-experience and helps you discover new relevant content. It works on every channel as well as cross-domain as an item independent browser extension. Plista’s CIO Andreas Richter presented the startup at the Plugg Conference’s Startups Rally. Another startup from Germany’s dynamic capital city is barcoo.com, co-founded by Benjamin Thym. Barcoo’s mission is to offer transparency to consumers during shopping: The product’s 1D-barcode can be scanned with the barcoo application on one’s mobile and the consumer gets test ratings, local price comparisons and recommendations as well as ecological information on the scanned product. Wiesbaden-based startup twidox.com – founded by twin brothers Nicholas and Daniel MacGowan von Holstein as well as Jan Deppe is a free online library of documents that allows users and organizations to upload, share and manage their documents with direct access to any documents that can be found. The company focuses on large organizations within the European market and cooperates with Amazon, the United Nations and Creative Commons. Twidox has won third place of the best start-ups at this year’s Nonick conference in Bilbao and has been selected for the elevator pitch at next09. Yoose.com will be launching very soon its mobile coupon platform in Berlin with a very localized offering for Berlin-based retailers. „As soon as we have the first returns out of that launch, then we’ll take it quickly to other German cities and later on we’ll go international“, says founder and CEO Christian Geissendoerfer and adds „we’ll look into Asian countries since they are very open to new technology.“ The German startup teamed up with Aloqa and presented its service at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. Question & answer portal hiogi.com offers high-quality mobile answers for all mobile questions. All questions via the mobile portals or wireless email are free. To learn more about the startup, please watch hiogi's pitch from Le Mobile 2.0 as well as a mini video with hiogi’s co-founder and CEO Björn Behrendt. Please note that in next Monday's "The Top 5" we will be presenting "The 5 Most Promising Swiss Startups"

He’s both the co-founder of twidox.com and the organiser of „Challenges and Opportunities in 2009“: The young German / British entrepreneur Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein. „In the recession it’s important to see if there are synergies and collaboration possibilities with other companies“, finds Nicholas. „Everyone has to pull through this crisis together in order to come with a blue eye out on the other side. In Germany, we’re lucky that it hasn’t hit us quite as hard as in other places. You can talk it bad and bad and bad, but in the end you need to think about what you can do to come through it. History has shown that in times of crisis the best companies have been started.“ Nicholas, his twin brother Daniel and Jan Deppe came up with the idea for twidox, an online library of documents with direct access to any documents that can be found. Nicholas points out: „Twidox is also an extremely powerful tool for publishers. We analyze documents, extract metadata and make basically any quality document available to the crawlers.“ The company focusses on large organizations within the European market and cooperates with Amazon, the United Nations and Creative Commons. Being in the middle of its second financing round, twidox will be building up content as well as a white-label solution in 2009: „At the moment we have 70 hour work weeks“, says Nicholas „so there’s plenty to do... like assessing how users are working with twidox and going back to the drawing board to see how we can improve it. We will definitely roll out some new features. But our main task will be to speak to high-profile partners.“ More information on Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein, twidox and „Challenges and Opportunities in 2009“ can be found on our website www.tiburon-tv.com.

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