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Mentaline – Just-Eat founder launches platform for virtual therapists and life coaches 08 Sep 2010, 12:41
Jesper Buch who co-founded Just-Eat, the European company that took fast food online, has launched his latest venture: Mentaline, a platform for therapists, life coaches and psychologists to deliver services to clients.
Ambitiously, it’s not a marketplace in which sessions eventually take place offline but instead the whole thing operates on the Web. Users browse the site by specialism to identify the right therapist and then book and pay for an online consultation which is delivered via webcam. In addition, the system scales so that sessions can be delivered to groups of people or couples, and a separate section of the site is tailored to ‘Masterclasses’ or life coaching-style lectures.
In terms of model, Mentaline charges a 10% commission fee for each completed session, as well as a sign-up fee for those offering services. Buch hopes to take what he learned through his experience with Just-Eat, which he says was “not only about bringing fast food to the consumer, but also about the processes between consumers and suppliers” when moving online, and apply this to the personal counseling, coaching and psychologist consultation industry.
To-date, Mentaline is self-funded by Bach, a self-professed “millionaire”, to the tune of £300k, although he says the startup is in talks with a couple of London-based VCs. In terms of direct competitors, the most comparable is probably U.S.-based Breakthrough.com.
Information provided by CrunchBaseInformation provided by CrunchBaseInformation provided by CrunchBase
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Comments are disabled for now, thanks for your patience 07 Sep 2010, 20:32
Just a note to readers. Our comments have been disabled for now, while we track down the malware issue which arose yesterday. The issue is now fixed, but if a browser like Chrome stills tell you there’s malware here, it’s because we’re also waiting for Google to re-crawl our pages and give us the all clear. If you are at all concerned, feel free to check your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus solution of which there are many on the market. Thanks for your patience.
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iTunes Ping censors the name ‘Osama’ in some countries. Also, ‘Bill Gates’. 07 Sep 2010, 16:43
According to Middle East tech blog ArabCrunch (no relation) Apple’s new Ping music social network (or perhaps we should call it a customer network since it’s not very social) is censoring the name Osama. Update: please see updates below.
Notes the blog:
We received a tip from one of our readers saying that Apple has censored the word Osama adding *** after the “O” and before the “a” in its new music social network Ping with iTunes.
As ArabCrunch points out, Osama means “lion” in Arabic so its actually quite a common name. Here are a few Silicon valley executives with Arabic origins like Osama Bedir, Vice President Product Development, PayPal and Osama Fiyad, Former Vice President at Yahoo.
Update from Robin Wauters (TechCrunch): Mike was unaware of this, but we received the same tip last week, and looked into it. Turns out it’s Apple’s profanity checker being overactive, as far as we know only in New Zealand, where the tipster is based.
It doesn’t censor Osama for me (I’m in Belgium) or anyone else I’ve asked in the United States and other countries, but just to illustrate how weird that profanity checker is: it censors the name ‘Bill Gates’ on my iTunes Ping account, turning the name into ‘Bill ***es’ because it considers ‘gat’ to be a dirty word (it means ‘ass’ in Dutch). Funny how that works.
Anyway, not much to see here (in general with regards to Ping, I might add), carry on.
Information provided by CrunchBase
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GetJar hires former Microsoft exec James Mooney to head UK sales 07 Sep 2010, 14:00
Mobile apps store operator GetJar this morning announced that it has appointed James Mooney as head of UK sales, to help build and lead its first UK-based team.
Mooney joins GetJar after managing the Agency Sales Business at Microsoft Advertising for the past 6 years, where he was responsible for large accounts such as Publicis, WPP and Omnicom.
Mooney will be tasked with developing new and existing relationships with UK app developers and publishers and driving partnerships. In addition, Mooney will take an active role in helping build the GetJar team in the UK, which the company says is a key market for them because of the available app developer talent.
GetJar, recently named a Technology Pioneer for 2011 by The World Economic Forum, raised $11 million in Series B funding last June.
The company claims its app store is now seeing three million downloads per day, and that they’ve counted over 1 billion total downloads in total to date.
Information provided by CrunchBase
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German eyewear retailer Mister Spex raises €7m in second round 07 Sep 2010, 13:22
Mister Spex, the German online eyewear retailer, has raised over seven million Euros in a second round led by DN Capital. Existing investors Grazia Equity, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Team Europe Ventures and Astutia Ventures have also taken part, while Xange joins DN Capital as a new investor.
The new capital will be use to increase brand awareness in Germany and fuel international expansion, with the company recently opening up shop in France.
Mister Spex claims to be the largest online retailer of branded glasses in Germany, and offers a selection of high quality prescription glasses (including varifocals), sunglasses, sports glasses and contact lenses at competitive prices via the Internet.
In 2009 Mister Spex had a turnover of 4.5 million Euro, while in 2010 the company expects to exceed the 10 million Euro mark. Since launching in April 2008, Mister Spex has attracted more than 150,000 customers. The Berlin-based company has a total of 90 members of staff, including 50 permanent employees.
Information provided by CrunchBase
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Pic-Nic Village launches with lofty crowdfunding ambitions 06 Sep 2010, 22:50
Does the world really need another social network? Pete Lawrence, a social entrepreneur and the guy behind The Big Chill Festival, apparently thinks so with the pending launch of Pic-Nic Village. Although, perhaps tellingly, he expects to finance it through crowdfunding, hoping to raise as much as £750,000.
Described as a “modern day co-operative”, the social network aims to connect “like-minded creative thinkers who want to share, enjoy and benefit from each other’s talents, ideas and thoughts of a personal, business or social nature”. Pic-Nic Village will also be “owned and shaped by members”, with the site shunning advertising in favour of a subscription-based model planned to be in the region of £10 per-month.
Good luck with that.
In return, members will get access to the social networking site, obviously, as well as have the opportunity to be featured in the site’s “media centre”, which will showcase members’ projects, hobbies and passions. They’ll also be an offline component to the Pic-Nic Village concept through networking events, conferences and gatherings for the community.
Lawrence is said to be an early pioneer of social media in reference to the fact that The Big Chill Festival, started in the mid 90s, had a lively and active web forum. Although there doesn’t appear to be much new, if anything, about Pic-Nic Village.
Feature-wise, the site, which won’t launch until sometime in 2011, will offer the usual social networking functionality, such as messaging, blogs, images and video, events etc. Additionally, Pic-Nic Village will be organised around “specific guilds” – art, architecture, design, film making, fashion, gardening, music and walking, for example.
And as for shunning ads in favour of a pay-wall, that’s a leaf out of Friends Reunited’s book (and many others) and we all know how that turned out.
That said, if you want in on the burgeoning project as a Founding Member, here’s how the crowdfunding will work:
- Two-year membership package: £100 buys one share in the company and two years of full membership of the Pic-Nic Village web community [following its launch in 2011].
- Lifetime membership package: £300 buys lifetime membership of Pic-Nic Village plus three shares in the company.
In conclusion, I’ll leave you with the following quote from Lawrence himself:
“Pic-Nic Village will be a catalyst for unearthing and nurturing each member’s unique qualities. It will help them fulfill their potential personally, spiritually and financially.”
As I said, good luck with that.
Information provided by CrunchBase