Archimedes Labs leads Weendy funding

Comments

Palo Alto, CA, 1pm, 14 February 2013

Happy Valentines Day everybody. If you are thinking of going Wind Surfing with a loved one, or perhaps Skiing, Kiting, Surfing, Snow Boarding. In fact any sport where the weather is key. Then you need Weendy. It is in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store.

The founders – Katerina Stroponiati and Yiannis Varelas – are Greek. Try saying “Windy” with a Greek accent and you get Weendy. A nice touch :-) .

Screen Shot 2013-02-14 at 10.19.30 AM

As they say on their web site:

“Find and share the best wind, wave and snow conditions with friends and people nearby with the same interests.”

It speaks for itself. And tens of thousands of beta users agree.

Today TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal announced that Archimedes Labs had led the seed funding of Weendy. We are excited to be in business with the Company. Lets go Weendy!

just.me beta goes live

Comments

just.me went into beta on 21st January. Archimedes Labs partner Keith Teare, the CEO at just.me did 2 interviews whilst at DLD in Europe:

The Guardian Podcast

and

An Interview with xube.tv

The beta launch coverage has been wonderful….

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/741025just-me-ios-beta/

http://allthingsd.com/20130123/just-me-app-wants-tobe-a-switchboard-operator-for-all-your-messaging-needs/

http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/23/just-me-launches-in-beta-is-this-what-facebook-would-have-looked-like-if-it-were-built-for-mobile/

http://blog.evernote.com/opportunitynotes/2013/01/23/just-me-holds-these-names-to-be-self-evident/

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/01/25/just-me-iphone-beta-launch/

If you have iOS6 and want to try the beta, DM Keith on Twitter – @kteare

Screen Shot 2012-11-05 at 11.11.56 AM

M.dot launches and also attracts $600k in additional seed funding

Comments

Archimedes Labs was the first investor in Dominik Balough and Pavel Serbajlo’s M.dot. We are pleased to see that the founders have been busy on 2 fronts. Firstly their app has been launched in the Apple app store. It has garnered a ton of positive reviews quickly.. A great example is this one:

Very cool

by Derek Sneed
I’ve only been messing around with it for 10mins, but so far I’m extremely impressed. I’m a web developer, so I was prepared to be jaded. But I found it to be smartly designed…. quite intuitive which surprised me really. The gathering of image or textual content from my existing website is very genius…. Specifically I want to say thank you for allowing us to pick and choose content, rather than just importing all of it. Great job. Look forward to fiddling some more.

Additionally, the team has closed $600k of additional seed financing from Mike Maple’s Floodgate, SV Angel and others.

Congratulations to the team.

mdot_logo_big

M.dot joins the Archimedes Labs family.

Comments

We are pleased to announce that after a series of dates we have decided to become betrothed to M.dot (pronounced em dot). Archimedes has invested in the company. The funding closed on Friday July 6th.

Terms of the investment are not being disclosed.

M.dot’s vision is that all businesses can be Mobile accessible and discoverable. The platform allows businesses to create, maintain and promote their mobile presence, all from a smart phone app. In many ways M.dot is similar to the web creation and hosting companies that have served individuals, small and medium businesses and other groups during the web’s growth era from the mid 1990s to today. M.dot’s difference is that it is completely mobile-first without any legacy complications and is entirely focused on providing a mobile presence and mobile specific features such as location awareness and “click-to-call” functionality to these same customer segments.

“I believe everybody with a WWW.dot will want an M.dot in the next several years”,

said M.dot CEO Dominik Balogh.

“Companies will want to take advantage of Mobile specific features and so will want to do much more than simply re-represent their existing web site to a mobile user. We are committed to an aggressive roadmap that will support customer needs in delivering those Mobile specific features.”

Dominik is joined by co-founder Pavel Serbajlo. Pavel is an engineer by background, and Dominik is a designer and user interface developer. They have developed the M.dot platform following a successful partnership with their prior company PoweryBase.

Keith Teare led Archimedes Labs partnership with the founders and our investment in the company. He is a veteran of the Internets web era, responsible for major UK network and services provider EasyNet and also an early investor in NetNames (Now part of
Peer One). Keith said:

“The Internet is moving rapidly from the WWW phase to the M.dot phase. Small and medium businesses, and individuals too, will need to have a strong mobile presence. M.dot’s platform is second to none in giving that. We are proud to be shareholders”

Said Keith.

“the M.dot IOS app is a real breakthrough in power and simplicity. It will be in the App Store later this year.”

CrunchBase Information
M.dot
Information provided by CrunchBase
Heckerty_with_sign_231 x150 Final v02a

Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble. Heckerty is here!

Comments

Broomstick Productions is Archimedes Labs latest portfolio company to launch into the world. Jan Ziff and Allan Davidson have a very special person in their life – Jan’s Mom. Or, because – like myself – Jan is from Yorkshire in the North of England, I should say Jan’s Mum…..

 

Jan’s Mum had the very special privilege of telling stories to the children of Prince Charles, either the future King of England or at the very least the father of the future King of England.

During her stint at that very unusual job she developed the character of Heckerty(TM) the Witch and her trusted sidekick, Zanzibar(TM) the cat. These stories have never been published before, and certainly never been animated. As Jan herself says:

 

When Princess Diana wanted to send her sons, Princes William and Harry, to weekly musical storytelling sessions as part of their education (click the links to see rare photos of the young princes), she chose my mother, Ann Rachlin.So when my mom asked Allan and me whether we were interested in bringing one of her favorite story characters to mobile devices, we jumped at the chance!
Stacks Image 622
Bringing Heckerty’s gentle, zany adventures to life for kids around the world was just too good to pass up! I had grown up with Heckerty’s magic and we both loved my mother’s many CDs and books (iTunes, Amazon).

Today, they are available on the iPad, iPhone and on the Kindle Fire.

Meet Heckerty is the first of many stories to come and we feel sure that, Hollywood will soon be knocking on the door of Broomstick Productions seeking to take these adorable characters and stories to the big screen

Blurtt launches in the app store

Comments

I first met Jeanette Cajide early in 2011. She was a founder at Blurtt – a company that was then focused on delivering a web based photo-upload service, permitting users to send printed postcards of said photos to friends via mail.

A few things were quickly obvious.

 

1. Blurtt is a great name, but not for sending postcards.

2. Mobile is the right place to develop what Blurtt could be.

3. Blurtt should let people Blurtt things out…..

4. Combining images with text produces a very powerful means of communicating emotion-rich messages.

5. Jeanette is a force of nature and simply refuses to fail.

 

So, Blurtt became archimedes labs second acceleration company, after Tomer Kagan’s Quixey. The 12 months since have been great. Jeanette weathered many storms, and succeeded in building a set of relationships that allowed her to ship her product today, with significantly less than $100,000 spent. You can get it from the app store now.

I couldn’t be more thrilled for Jeanette, Laura, Kuba and the team at Dialexa in Texas…..Congrats

I know that the team is planning lots of new features. Can’t wait to see where this journey takes us.

 

 

 

Archimedes Labs opens for business

Comments

Palo Alto, CA, 12 December 2011

Today is an exciting day at Archimedes Ventures. We have some announcements to make.

Firstly, going forward we will be known as Archimedes Labs LLC. This is to make clear that we are an incubator, not a venture capital company.

Secondly, we can now announce that in August this year I established a managing entity – Escondido Labs LLC. It has been the sole manager of Archimedes since that time.

Thirdly, we can reveal that in the future investors will be added at Archimedes Labs as partners in the entity.

Finally we are announcing the following members (aside from myself) at Escondido Management LLC:

Kambiz Hooshmand – Former senior executive at Stratacom which Cisco acquired for over $4 billion in 1996; Cisco SVP; and CEO at Applied Micro (AMCC), Kambiz is now CEO and a General Partner at Escondido Management and runs the management of Archimedes Labs.

Patrick Gannon, a founder at Lending Club, Patrick is Chief Investment Officer at Escondido Management.

Kevin Doerr, VP and Chief of Staff (Products) at Yahoo.

Matt Kaufman, VP Product and Engineering at Oodle.

Bess Ho – Mobile Architect, Lecturer & Book Author.

See the team page for more details.

In the first 11 months of 2011 we have incubated just.me, entered into an acceleration agreement as a co-founder at Blurtt and invested in Quixey, Incident Technologies and Broomstick Productions.

In 2012 we intend to do more incubations and accelerations.

Happy Holidays to all….