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Smeet is a virtual world with aspects of social gaming. Users can create their own avatars and rooms as well as explore the different worlds. At the same time they can communicate with other users via text and voice chat, watch YouTube-videos together, compete in various minigames and collect points to reach higher levels.

Hasso Plattner Ventures has been financing the company since the end of 2006. In May 2010, Hasso Plattner Ventures completed another financing round together with Partech amounting to a seven digit figure. Eran Davidson, CEO of Hasso Plattner Ventures, “Smeet’s juvenile target group is particularly hard to please and expects innovations on a regular basis. Smeet continuously increases its user numbers, which proves the product’s high appeal and versatility. We trust that there will be further success.” Andreas Schlenker, Partech, reaffirms the renewed investment by saying, “We re-invest in Smeet, because after a strong start, we see tremendous growth potential based on the enormous innovative strength, the good management and the potential for a highly profitable and international business model.”

Young adults in France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain, Great Britain and Latin America enthusiastically use Smeet and thousands of new users register every day. During the past nine months, Smeet was able to record notably high growth. Strategic partnerships with big European social networks such as Netlog, Zoo and Fotka accelerated global development.

Read the full press release here (in German) 

Visit http://de.smeet.com/<span lang="EN-GB">sMeet</span>

Hasso Plattner Ventures announces its 18th investment.

SponsorPay is the leading virtual currency monetization platform in Europe. Together with Team Europe Ventures and Kite Ventures the round sums up to a total of 3.8 m Euro which will be used to accelerate growth in international markets
This latest infusion of capital is testament to SponsorPay’s tremendous growth – within the past year the company has expanded to 40 employees and serves local advertising offers to over 150 million users in more than 100 countries. "We are pleased with SponsorPay's progress so far and strongly believe that the innovative concept along with the talent across the company, which has already made SponsorPay the European leader, will take it to the next level internationally. Only one year old, they convinced us with their professional management and absolute will to succeed," commented Yaron Valler, partner at Hasso Plattner Ventures. “Congratulations to the team for reaching this next milestone,” said Lukasz Gadowski, partner at Team Europe Ventures.

Visit SponsorPay

Read the full press release (in English)

OpenSynergy announced the successful completion of a thirdfinancing round. Investors are the Hasso Plattner Ventures and the VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, managed by the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH. OpenSynergy offers solutions that make it possible to integrate consumer electronics software in an automotive environment. The COQOSfamily of products allows automotive OEMs and their suppliers to both address customer expectations on infotainment functions and Internet availability and tackle the increasing software complexity of new automotive functionality.

"The large car manufacturers are discovering COQOS", says Stephan Schulze, officer of the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft. "The positive response of the industry has convinced us that COQOS will quickly be accepted as a solution. Through our investment in this team, we want to enable and accelerate a global market penetration."

Yaron Valler, Partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures, is convinced of the significance of the product COQOS for the automotive industry: "We invest in OpenSynergy for the third time, because COQOS resolves the real challenges in the development of automotive electronics. COQOS makes it possible to reduce the number of electronic devices in a vehicle and the associated development and production costs. The concepts of COQOS have already started to influence the world of automotive software."

Read the full press release here (in German) here (in English).

Visit OpenSynergy

NACT Solutions and VOIPFUTURE today announced an agreement that establishes NACT as the exclusive distributor of VOIPFUTURE's Voice Services Monitoring capabilities in the United States and Canada. VOIPFUTURE's technology forms a new building block in NACT's product portfolio, enabling NACT customers to fully control the voice quality of their VoIP services.

VOIPFUTURE's solution enables communication service providers to monitor the quality of voice traffic crossing their IP networks, and use the data to troubleshoot problems, optimize the performance of their networks, and document the quality of individual call minutes exchanged between peering partners. This software-based technology is easy-to-deploy, and it allows voice carriers to guarantee premium services, reduce churn, increase network utilization, and also reduce the time and effort spent resolving voice quality problems.
VOIPFUTURE's Smart RTP Monitoring Probes are passive, non-intrusive measurement devices located at demarcation points in the network, such as SBCs, gateways or peering points. The integrated solution for network optimization, SLA verification and troubleshooting shows superior performance for full line rate analysis at 1 Gbit/s.

“Offering competitive voice services poses a number of challenges that are influenced by the dynamic behavior of IP networks, and effective, easy-to-use monitoring capabilities play an essential role for voice service providers,” said Jan Bastian, CEO of VOIPFUTURE. “NACT's new management understands our industry – and they've aligned all of the resources that we feel are necessary to develop a market for our technology in US and Canada.”

Read the full press release here (in English)

Visit VoIPFuture

BrightView Systems, a leading provider of in-line metrology-based process control and optimization tools for thin-film solar cell manufacturing is one of the five "Cool Vendors" selected for the April 2010 "Cool Vendors in Solar Energy, 2010, report by Gartner, Inc."

This report highlights the noteworthy vendors in the photovoltaic solar energy industry that are developing technologies and innovations that are likely to have a strong impact on the adoption of solar energy. All of these vendors are startup companies. Enterprises considering the use of on site solar power generation, vendors in the PV industry and investors will benefit from this insight into some of the up and coming solar players. James Hines, Alfonso Velosa, Dean Freeman and Philip Koh wrote the report.

"We see our selection as a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner as a strong confirmation of the instrumental role in-line process control is gaining to address the photovoltaic industry key adoption factors of relentlessly lowering the PV panel's prices while at the same time backing these panels with a 25 years operational warranty," said Benny Shoham, CEO of BrightView.

Read the full press release here (in English)
Visit BrightView Systems

What do you get if you cross Yahoo! answers with a service with Texperts, AQA or 63336? Hiogi. It's a free service, accessible via the web, mobile web, text, skype or email, which lets you ask questions and get replies. The German-based start-up has just come out of private beta.

What you basically do is ask a question, and then wait till the community answers it for you. When the answer comes back you can rate it positively or negatively depending on whether it's correct or useful or not.

I'm not convinced that Hiogi's going to gain a lot of traction in the UK market.

On the other hand, the only way it'll get better is if that community grows, so I encourage you to try it out, sign up, ask a few questions, and answer some too.

Read the full press release here (in English)

Visit Hiogi

BrightView Systems, a leading provider of in-line metrologybased process control and optimization tools for thin-film solar cell manufacturing, hosted the Prime Minister Mathias Platzeck of Brandenburg, the Minister of Economic and European Affairs Ralf Christoffers, Klaus-Dieter Licht of ILB (State Investment Bank), and Hinrich Soehlke Director from the Brandenburg Economic Development Board at their facilities in Israel.

As solar technology is one of the most innovative and fastest growing sectors in the Berlin-Brandenburg, production capacity is increasing rapidly and will soon exceed 800 Megawatt peak per year with the help of the region’s new photovoltaic power plants.

“We are honored to have this opportunity to showcase our products and team,” said Benny Shoham, CEO of BrightView. “As the Berlin-Brandenburg region is Europe’s largest solar cluster, we are keen to explore ways to further cooperate with the dynamic companies set in the region and foster mutually beneficial business and technology collaboration with the support of the state’s leadership.”

Read the full press release here (in English)

Visit BrightView Systems

Mr. Oswald P. Zimmermann, CEO datango AG, is gathering the fruit for his successful work. He will be appointed as a Senator of Commerce in the fields of E-Learning, process automation and navigation on 23rd of March 3pm in Kaarst. He is the sole Senator in this field Europe-wide hence he has a unique position at the European Economic Senate (EWS). The EWS is an expert’s forum for the EU.

Mr. Zimmermann says about his new challenge:  “I will pass my professional and entrepreneurial know-how as well as my experience to actively participate in the creation of the future of our country. And I will do my best to be a helpful consultant for the political decision-makers."

Read the full press release here (in German)

Visit datango

In 2010 the VIOSO Presenter was released as a brand new version of the old product smartprojecting. This software brings a change into the philosophy of presentations: away from simply show information to entertain your audience. Simply enhance your presentation without any previous knowledge. Use familiar programs such as PowerPoint, Word or PhotoShop as well as pictures, videos etc. and simply drag’n drop them into the VIOSO Presenter.

Read one pager on VIOSO Presenter
Watch VIOSO Presenter video on youtube

Together with the media server specialist AV Stumpfl, VIOSO developed Wings VIOSO to create and control professional shows and events. Wings VIOSO is a combination of VIOSO-technology, therefore providing automatic multi display projections, stacking and warping in addition to wall correction technology and AV Stumpfl’s powerful media server Wings Platinum.

Read one pager and features of Wings VIOSO
Watch Wings VIOSO video on youtube

Visit www.vioso.com

FACTON is the first Enterprise Product Costing solution to integrate global and up-to-date product cost data into your own cost analysis and makes such benchmark data available instantaneously.

FACTON GmbH has enhanced its standard costing solution with benchmarking data from over 1.000 regions worldwide. Overall, there are more than 45 million data records on wages, salary and overheads costs as well as tools, materials and logistics cost for the automotive, aerospace and equipment manufacturing industry.  The product costing data are updated quarterly. FACTON is the only software vendor to integrate Costdata’s benchmarking data into its costing solution.

Read the full press release here.

Visit www.facton.com