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The recent winter storms across the whole of the UK wreaked havoc with public transport and generally disrupted the lives of millions of UK residents. Soon hundreds of thousands of UK residents turned to a Twitter-based application, the UK Snow Map. Created by freelance web developer Ben Marsh and powered by 34SP.com, the application lets Twitter users report where snow is falling and by which amount. It displays the reports in real-time on a map of the UK. It works regardless of the cloud cover, unlike weather satellites.

The system is deceptively simple: anyone with a Twitter account can report on her local snow conditions with the hashtag #uksnow. She rates the snowfall from 0 (no snow) to 10 (blizzard), and specifies her location using the name of the town or the ZIP code –no geo-tag support yet. Those tweets are then analyzed and placed on a map of the UK, giving a real-time visual picture of the local snow conditions as reported by actual residents on the ground.

The UK Snow Map has been active since February 2009, and has seen a huge increased in use, mirroring the Twitter popularity in the UK, as well as this year’s harsh winter. At the height of the snowfall last week, the map received 50,000 visits in one day –as many as the total number of visits it received last year. During the recent wintry weather, the application processed over 100,000 unique snow reports from all over the UK, with rates of over 100 tweets per minute at peak times.

Next step, using geo-location and more hashtags for real-time maps of fog and rain? Or to-the-minute traffic info? What kind of application would you build on top of it?

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The breakroom had a tweeter wall with live reaction of the attendance –hashtag #tcm09, check it out.

The first to present was Mathias Roth from iOpus.com. His message was quite simple: if you are a startup that wants to get attention, be the first to develop for a new platform, any new platform. The rational: if you are among the first, chance is that you will stick. Look at the top 50 add-ons to Firefox today: half of them have been introduced within the year Firefox made its add-ons development platform available. Mathias’ recommendation: get on Chrome’s bandwagon and develop your add-on now –there are only about 25 Chrome add-ons today. Even though Chrome’s add-ons website will not come before the end of the year, it will pay to be among the first.

Next speaker was Rainer Maerkle from Holtzbrinck Ventures. He gave a great talk about what it takes to launch a startup. I will not do justice by trying to reduce his talk to a few words, but it would come as something like: do your homework, focus, take risks, focus, execute, focus. Oh, and don’t wait for VC money, or don’t over-specify your product: just do it and get it out, then release often.

Then come the exciting part: 12 startups pitching for 3mn each + 1mn for question. Some did great, some did not do as well, but all show the enthusiasm of the entrepreneur. Disclaimer: I am sharing what I thought of the presentations and of the startups ideas and business models; this is a very subjective digest, go visit these sites and make up your own mind.

1. Goutez (food for friends). They provide an on-line market place to buy local food products. Lots of people tried to be on-line food resellers, but only a fraction is still alive. I don’t know whether there is a market large enough to have a sustainable business here.
2. Communote. They propose an enterprise microblogging platform. Basically, a secured place where people can collaborate and share info. It looks pretty slick, and it has already a few customers. But having a Twitter for enterprise might not be enough. They had quite a number of questions regarding their differentiation with respect to other enterprise collaborative platforms. Also, may I ask what if GoogleWave goes enterprise?
3. Graph.me. Good presentation on a platform that enables users to build up their own poll, which they ask friends or social network members to answer (Facebook, MySpace). Business model is to sell the resulting data pool to marketing research. Neat idea. Obvious question is the privacy problem.
4. CaptchaAd. Propose a video ad CAPTCHA. Instead of your usual textual CAPTCHA, a short ad video is played and the used must answer a simple question (e.g., what was the brand of the car in the video?) to prove she is not a spambot. Clever idea, but will the users enjoy watching 10 seconds of video ad to fill in a form?
5. Red Panda. Intentional browsing add-on for Firefox: it instantaneously shows on a side-bar links (news, product reviews, Wikipedia articles, tweets, etc) that are relevant to whatever web page you are currently displaying. Very cool. Business model is targeted ad.
6. intelliAd. They have a web platform to optimize SEM campaign, e.g., determine the best bid for a keyword to optimize CPI. Easy setup, nice GUI, these guys are flying with 20 customers and are looking in expanding in the US. Very solid product and business plan, a success in the making.
7. Vicommerce.com. They provide a layer on top of video players that is used to define clickable area by the on-line resellers. This results in a very entertaining on-line shopping experience. They already have some major customers, solid business plan.
8. Getyourguide.com. A platform to get travelers and local activity providers together. Nice but is that enough differentiation with Yahoo! travel and Tripadvisor, to name only two?
9. Directededge.com. They provide a user recommendation plug-in to businesses. Based on the fact that 20% of Amazon’s revenue comes from user recommendation click-throughs, this is definitely a good idea. The product is still in an early stage, stay tuned.
10. SnipClip.com. They aim at monetizing brands on social networks (Facebook, MySpace), which are known to have a very low clock-through rate. The idea is to sell branded virtual goods (mostly media). Creative, let’s see whether the social network community will bite.
11. Terminii. Propose a web-based appointment services for small and mid-size business. Definitely useful. Disastrous presentation: the presenter stopped his talk because of slides issue. Mike Butcher, the host of the event, did a great job to bring back the speaker and let him explain his business.
12. Valuescope. A news aggregator filtered with natural language analysis, targeted at sales and marketing. Extremely good presentation, very focused.

Mike Butcher’s top 5 picks were:

• #5: Vicommerce.com
• #4: Directededge.com
• #3: Valuescope
• #2: CaptchaAd

and his top one pick was (drum roll please):

• #1: Graph.me

Overall a very interesting day, very well organized, with a great host. It showed that Munich has talents and a good VC structure to produce a dynamic startup environment. Congratulations to the speakers and to those that came to pitch their startups!

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Twitter has been launched publicly in July 2006.  Three years of existence in the internet startup space is quite a long time.  But the buzz on Twitter really started about a year ago, when breaking news were made public first as tweets, when celebrities started to join the flock to break one-million followers, and when Twitter aimed at being the pulse of the planet with the first social network to reach one billion users.  That goal is still far away, but the number of users has been decidedly accelerating, en route to 18 million users by the end of 2009, up from the 12 million projected earlier this year.  Even though some are questioning whether that growth will continue, it looks like Twitter is here to stay.  Its recent closing of $100 millions funding for a $1 billion valuation shows how seriously it is taken by the investment community, even in the absence of a clear revenue roadmap.

I have to admit, when I read three years ago about Twitter as a company that would promote “micro-blogging”, I laughed.  Who in the world would write anything interesting in no more than 140 characters?  And who would read these one-sentence thoughts?  It looked to me that Twitter would just add more chatter to the internet, already clogged by an ever increasing white noise.  Proof to my point is that even if the number of register users has been frantically increasing, the vast majority are barely using their account.  Some estimate shows that 50% of the users tweet no more that once every two months and a half, and that 90% of the tweets are produced by the most 10% prolific Twitter users. To close that view of Twitter being a white noise generator, a quarter of the tweets are generated by bots.

Still, I decided to create my twitter account in August, and started to follow news and people, as well as (re)tweeting articles or news that caught my interest.  After two months, it is clear that my initial assessment of Twitter was incorrect.

Sure enough, the stream of tweets is just a clamoring of trivialities, self-promotions, and spam-like marketing.  But nobody (hopefully) listens to that noise as a whole.  One chooses whom to follow, reducing the hose to a very specific thread of information.  I myself follow less than 100 users, mostly news and tech oriented.  The consequence is that for the past month, I didn’t check the RSS of TechCrunch nor I accessed the CNN home page and GoogleNews directly.  Instead, I browse the tweets and click the links whenever I want to know more.

What I started as an experiment and an exercise of promotion of my blog ended up in changing completely my view of the service.  Checking the RSS or the web page of an information provider or news aggregator is no longer the first thing I do in the morning (after reading my email!).  It has been replaced with browsing the tweets.  After using the web interface of Twitter –as well as TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry–, I came to use TweetDeck, and I love it.  It allows me to group the people I follow by themes, and to conveniently browse and manage the latest tweets.  I wish TweetDeck provided a more convenient way of creating groups –e.g., by adding, subtracting, and intersecting groups of users–, but the early beta version I have been using is the way to go.

I came to discover that Twitter is much more than a Haiku receptacle.  It allows you to respond and interact very quickly with the content provider –no email, no comment, just a tweet, shared or private.  Re-tweeting serves as amplifying the relative relevance of information, which you cannot do with other providers’ modus operandi but with a rating system.  Also the 140 characters limit forces people to be accurate and to the point –strength of the message is in the title.  For me it is less Twitter’s own motto “What are you doing?” than “What is interesting out there?”.  Micro-blogging sounded ludicrous, still is, but tweeting a title and a link to a web page is altogether different.

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