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Danish start-up ZYB has launched a free service, which it claimed not only backs up your phone over the air, but also makes it dynamic by tying it in with on-line social networking services such as LinkedIn, Plaxo and FaceBook.

In a very simple manner, seamlessly supported by more than 400 phones, ZYB uploads your mobile phone’s address book and calendar to your online account within minutes after you sign up to the service. As a result, you get online access to your phone’s content from anywhere, and transferring the phone’s content to a new phone in the future is easily done over-the-air from zyb.com. In a pioneering way, the new ZYB also links your phone’s address book to an online community that is constantly connected to your mobile phone, so any updates made by your friends, are automatically updated in your mobile phone. As such, ZYB is the “missing link” between the mobile phone and online social networking, opening up a whole new dimension of social networking, where your online personal network is created from your existing contacts in your phone. According to the leading social networking news site, Mashable, this is “the most appealing part” of the new version of ZYB.

“We believe that your personal network is not something you create; it’s something you already have. Next generation social networks need to evolve around people’s real-life contacts and be “life-capturing” to reflect people’s real-life behavior and relations. The mobile phone has been used for a decade now as a life-capturing device, keeping a record of who you meet and talk to in the real world. Connecting the online social network with the phone’s address book, is the most effective way of moving social networks closer to real life,” said Tommy Ahlers, CEO and co-founder of ZYB.

“There are still a lot of people out there who don’t see the point in building their social network online when they already have a social network in real life. With ZYB they can now leverage the power of social networking without building an online presence from scratch,” adds Tommy Ahlers.

With the new version of ZYB, users can now:

• Connect to people in their mobile phone’s address book
• Let friends keep their own contact information updated on the user’s phone
• Micro-blog online or from the phone and broadcast the blog to friends
• Upload pictures from the mobile phone and tag them using the phone’s address book
• Expand their social network by searching for people with mutual friends ZYB can currently sync a Social Phonebook account with entries on a range of business and consumer networking services. It said that it will soon add the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar as well.

ZYB investors include Morten Lund and Nordic Venture Partners Management.

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Nordic Venture Partners Management, Yahoo, ZYB

With the air of a retired multi-billionaire without a care in the world, Bill Gates descended on London for his eagerly anticipated audience organised by the Institute of Directors. Over a thousand delegates turned up to share in the wisdom of the man who is perhaps the greatest entrepreneur on the planet. Interestingly there was almost a complete absence of media companies, and mainstream software companies. A smattering of government funded small business organisations; a scaffolding company, a few engineering companies, and several ‘craps‘ of marketeers made for a diverse but enthusiastic audience.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed you by the throat and ordered you to write down a list of the worlds most influential people, there are so many ‘tech celebs’ you would forget, but chances are [Read more]

Tags: Apple, Microsoft

The business social networking site LinkedIn has appointed a European managing director, heralding a new wave of European expansion.

LinkedIn said Kevin Eyres, the former general manager of search engine Alta Vista, will head its European service from a new office in London. The company is already recruiting six more staff in sales, marketing and business development. However, technical development will remain based at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

LinkedIn has been benefiting from the growth of interest in social networking sites, along with rival services Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, but offers a more niche service for professionals that it hopes will tap into a more lucrative business demographic. Eyres said LinkedIn’s strategy would be to target each country in Europe individually, with localised versions of the service under development.

LinkedIn now has 5 million users in Europe. It has big plans for growth in 2008 and will concentrate on the 25% of the population that fits its target demographic. Industry commentators have been predicting that LinkedIn will be bought by a major media firm, with some tipping Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation as a potential buyer.

About

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 13 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Investors: Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, European Founders Fund.

Story 

Tags: Alta Vista, Bessemer Venture Partners, European Founders Fund, Greylock Partners, LinkedIn, News corp, Sequoia Capital

SoonR, the mobile desktop people, have closed a $9.5 million Series B funding round led by Cisco. Previous investors Intel Capital and Clearstone Venture Partners also participated. This brings the total investment in the two year old company to $15.5 million.

Through the SoonR platform, users can access, back up and share files on their desktop computer while on the go, from their mobile phone or internet-enabled device - and even when the computer is turned off. Documents created in a number of applications, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, appear just as they would on the computer screen and Outlook email and calendars easily accessed. Data on the user’s computer is continuously backed up, allowing it to be restored should the computer be lost or stolen.

www.soonr.com

Press Release

Tags: Cisco, Clearstone Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Microsoft, SoonR

Nirvanix today announced that FreeDrive has selected, implemented and now officially launched its service using Nirvanix’ s Storage Delivery Network, a global online storage platform optimized for media applications. FreeDrive is a personal online storage and file sharing application that works across social networks. With today’ s announcement, FreeDrive is now available first as a Facebook application enabling its registered users to host and share photos, videos, music and documents among their existing Facebook friends and groups. FreeDrive has exited its beta period with over 100,000 users and is expected to register another one million users conservatively over the next six months.

FreeDrive offers customers 1 GB of free storage that serves as an Internet hard drive while providing online access to files that can then be linked and posted to Facebook. Prior to partnering with Nirvanix, FreeDrive hosted, stored and delivered these files in a Tier-1 co-location site on hardware they had to purchase, maintain and service. The costs associated with purchasing storage commensurate to their growth forecasts and managing the storage became prohibitive and stifled the company’ s aggressive expansion plans so FreeDrive looked into other options.

“When we began passing several terabytes of storage, we were faced with the decision whether to continue providing it ourselves or go through an outside vendor,”said Michael Witz, Chairman and Founder of FreeDrive. “Going with an outside provider was more economical and saves us time and energy. We heard about Nirvanix and Amazon S3. Going with Nirvanix was a real easy choice. Nirvanix provided a high level of customer service while Amazon was more of a ‘do-it-yourself’ proposition. Nirvanix’ s technology is further along than Amazon’ s with value-added media management tools already built in and an API that worked with our backend. And, providing online storage to outside companies isn’ t exactly Amazon’ s core business focus. We didn’ t want to risk our business on them.”

www.freedrive.com, www.nirvanix.com

[Read more]

Tags: Amazon, Facebook, FreeDrive, Nirvanix