Little Huddle achieves global reach with InterCall partnership

Written on 11th February 2009                                                                                                              10 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

Huddle of Bermondsey, London, has announced a partnership with InterCall headquartered in Chicago, the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, aiming to “deliver the world’s first unified collaboration, communication and social networking platform for the enterprise“.

The deal means that InterCall conferencing customers can schedule phone and web meetings in Huddle (and its applications within LinkedIn and Facebook) and share dial-in details, documents and meeting minutes. They can also use Huddle’s range of project management & collaboration tools, such as discussions, whiteboards, tasks, document versioning, and audit.

By the same token, Huddle customers will be introduced to InterCall’s services, with events like teleconferences and web meetings created, scheduled and managed from within the Huddle environment.

I spoke to Andy McLoughlin, Product Director and co-Founder of Huddle, pictured below right with CEO and co-founder Alastair Mitchell (on left), on the eve of today’s announcement in London, and put a few questions to him.

Q: Andy, this is some deal. How long have you been cooking this?

A: We were approached last year, the better part of 7 or 8 months ago. We are a small company and can move fast, so we were working at the pace to integrate with a large company that can marshall over 1,000 sales people on their phone lines globally. They serve around a million different businesses, with 30-40,000 new businesses joining them every month, so it’s taken a while to get everything lined up.

Q: You’re going to scale to potentially having 1m new customers hitting your servers tomorrow. How have you prepared for this?
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NetCamp and NetStartup – Romanian web and startup conference

Written on 2nd December 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr

Ok, here you go. This is the last web event I am presenting for this year which takes place in Romania on 3rd of December (which means tomorrow).

The event’s name is NetCamp and during this conference there is a section called NetStartup (where the internet startups have a chance to showcase their products or ideas and pitch potential investors – kinda Techcrunch 50, The Next Web Conference or Seedcamp).

NetCamp is at its second edition, hosted at the same Howard Johnson Grand Plaza Hotel from Bucharest which hosted other web events from Romania (Webstock, RoNewMedia). It’s organized by Evensys, a conference and seminar organizer, in partnership with Nokia and Beko as sponsor.

The event has some prestigious guests like Tristan Nitot (president & co-founder, Mozilla Europe), Alexandre Almajeanu (founder, Gentica), Alexis Bonte (co-founder & CEO, eRepublik.ro) si Jan Vichr (board member, Swiss Venture), Bobby Voicu (Yahoo Romania), Vlad Stan (Seed Money), Zoli Herczeg (Microsoft Romania) and others.

At this conference people will discuss about user-generated content, social web, online communities, new business models, blogs & wikis, web analytics, the challenges and opportunities on web. This conference is oriented towards internet professionals, telecom, software, hardware, advertising & media, creators and distributors of online products and services.

On NetStarup section projects or products already on the market will be presented having these themes:
• Content Websites
• Online Applications
• User Generated Content Websites
• Mobile Applications
• eCommerce Sites
• other projects and products (internet & mobile Internet)

This year there are 10 finalists which will showcase their startup to the jury of six members (mostly investors). Each member of the jury can award a 5,000 euro amount to the starup they choose (approx. $6,300). In exchange, the investor gets 10% of the company (sounds like YCombinator investing style).

The investor will be involved also in the next round of financing once the project reached a certain level.

There’s the possibility that all investors could invest in the same project and they will share those 10% of the company (a company can get as much as 30,000 euros – $40,000 without giving up more than 10% of the company…or get 5,000 euros and give up 10%…or get nothing).

And that’s it for this year for Romania.

I’m expecting other people to present web conferences and web festivals from their countries (if there are any).
If you want me to write about them please use my contact page and email found here.