As a Founder, technology investor, CEO, Chairman and board member, I’ve seen a number of portfolio companies go through long, below-the-radar, rebuilds of their core product engines. It’s always a nerve-racking process as you invest for a long time without seeing the fruits ; you fear for what might emerge from all the market research and long nights of coding, the team growth in size, become more major and certain over time.
 
Great then, to see what the Pixsta Team (the Visual Search Engine for eCommerce company) have produced with our first branded launch EMPORA www.empora.com <http://www.empora.com> , a fashion service that allows is users to shop by style, shapes and colour from a very large pool of about 1000 brands and 100,000’s of products. 

It’s a big leap forward for Pixsta, from academic origins, our cloud display’s so many copied by other meto startups) to creating a user experience that meets its audience’s requirements. Most importantly, Pixsta seem to have solved key scaling challenges in the back-end that free them up for upcoming growth. The engine at Pixsta is most likely the highest throughput engine for visual analytics on pictures, which has been developed. I personal call this process “structuring of unstructured image data”. We have seen such developments in text, but as I predicted 3 years ago, by creating the company able to do it with images we would enable a new form of online monetization. In my mind the essentials of Pixsta is a Cloud Computing solution solving one problem: “Answering questions asked in the form of pictures in return with pictures”.

Myself and the team at Pixsta went through a heavy consultation period with our user base, finding out what people really wanted from Visual Search technology when looking to buy clothes online <http://www.empora.com/> . The KPIs I’m seeing now seem to justify those long nights and two years of constant efforts. 
 
It’s exciting to see Pixsta emerge as one of the most disruptive start-ups in eCommerce we have seen since a while. Even more exciting is that the business has taken much less capital then expected to develop such outstanding platforms, which will be essential for our future growth. 
 
We recently have seen a pickup of writing by the industry press, starting with Drapers <http://www.drapersonline.com/news/other-sectors/multi-channel/empora-shopping-portal-launches-online/5003210.article>, StyleBlogs and lots of Twitter remarks how pleased users are to have such an offering available. 

Alexander Straub
Founder, Strategy Director and Chairman 

New Architecture Delivers Improved User Experience, Simplified Management and Performance Boost

Truphone today launched Truphone 3.0, a major new upgrade to its mobile VoIP application for the Apple® iPhone™ that dramatically builds upon the success of previous versions of the iPhone’s first ever VoIP application, enhancing users’ instant messaging and account management experience, faster than ever before, and delivering a new standard for call quality.  

Among the many improvements in Truphone 3.0 are increased ease of use, speed of function response, intuitiveness and simplicity – all designed to enhance the users’ experience. Further, Truphone has improved voice quality making the app for the iPhone better than it’s ever been before.

Using Truphone’s integrated messaging tool that unifies all IM communities in a single place, users can now simply manage all their IM communication from a single page within the application, eliminating the need to constantly jockey between different applications or even different pages within an application. IM services currently supported include Skype, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.  

“Customers tell us they want three things: simplicity, quality and a good deal. Those principles drive our innovation, and Truphone 3.0 delivers on all three. We’ve dramatically improved our UI and account management tools. We’ve eliminated the need for compression by utilizing new advances in signal processing, making calls crystal clear. And, just as we always do, Truphone 3.0 sets a new benchmark in terms of quality and performance that competitors will have a tough time matching”, said Geraldine Wilson, CEO Truphone. 

“With these improvements, we believe Truphone 3.0 is the best application on mobile for our customers’ international calling needs as well as staying in touch with all of their IM communities, in or out of Wi-Fi.”

Similar improvements to Truphone for the Apple iPod® touch will be announced soon.

What Truphone already does:

Free calls when in Wi-Fi to:

Other Truphone users
Skype and Google Talk users

Free Instant Messages when in Wi-Fi to:

Skype
MSN Messenger
Google Talk
Yahoo! Messenger
AIM

Incredible savings on calls to:

Call landlines and mobiles around the world at cheap rates

Most importantly all these communication opportunities are also available outside of Wi-Fi by using Truphone Anywhere for calls (charged at a local rate in your home country and then routed over Truphone’s network – not for use when roaming), and 3G for Instant Messaging.

Account Management:

See rates for calls before initiating a call
Display recent call history, showing the Truphone customer exactly how much a call just cost and how long it lasted with the ability to see a summary of calls made month by month
Top-up from within the application, without the need for web windows to open separately
Top-up in a variety of ways: credit card or PayPal
Change calling tariffs within the application

LONDON–Jan. 21, 2009—Truphone today announced the immediate free availability of its Truphone Anywhere application for Android™-enabled mobile handsets, including the recently released G1 phone. The application is available now as a download on the Android Market in the U.K. and the U.S.

To coincide with T-Mobile’s announcement earlier this week of the availability of the G1 mobile phone in March 2009, a German version of Truphone Anywhere for Android is available and will be the first native language multi-communications application in the Android Market in Germany and Austria when it launches at CeBIT 2009.

Truphone Anywhere for Android delivers an all-in-one conversations hub that allows customers to take advantage of Truphone’s low international call rates, in addition to the cost of a local call*.

As well as being able to make low-cost international voice calls, Truphone customers can also easily instant-message their friends across a variety of networks including MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk™ and Twitter from within one Android application. Customers can also call friends anywhere in the world on Google Talk for the price of a local call, and similarly will soon will be able to instant-message and call their friends on Skype.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for people to have conversations with their communities around the world in whatever form they choose,” said Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson.

She continued: “We passionately believe in devices like the Android and iPhone which offer easy user access to applications through the Android Market and the App Store in Apple’s iTunes. The G1 and the entire Android platform is an obvious and important distribution channel for us.”

Truphone is now available on Android, the Apple iPhone, the Apple iPod touch, Blackberry and Nokia devices.

January 6^th 2009 – London and San Francisco: Truphone today debuted the ability to make and receive Skype™ calls and instant messaging (IM) to the entire Skype user base on its iPhone and iPod touch applications. The service is scheduled to be available to all customers during the week of 12^th January 2009.

The introduction was made at Showstoppers on the eve of MacWorld and will be showcased on the Truphone stand (#3228) at MacWorld for the remainder of the week.

This represents one more step towards making Truphone the open ‘all in one conversations hub’ for iPhone and iPod touch users.

Truphone customers on both Apple devices can now reach their Skype friends on their Skype ID. This further expands the universe of people with whom Truphone customers can stay in touch. This is in addition to the series of Instant Messaging services also announced today.

“The introduction of Skype calling and instant messaging represents yet another breakthrough for Truphone,” said Geraldine Wilson, Truphone CEO. “What this means for Truphone’s customers, is that they can now call or message all their Skype friends using their iPhone or iPod touch. This allows iPhone and iPod touch users to have a choice in how they stay in touch with friends and colleagues around the world all within the one application.”

Truphone to Skype communications are free over the Internet and iPhone users can also place and receive Skype calls and messages when not in a Wi-Fi accessible location, for the cost of a local call*, using the Truphone Anywhere feature.

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January 6^th 2009 – London and San Francisco: Truphone today introduced full two way Instant Messaging over MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk on the iPod touch and also announced availability on the iPhone week commencing 12^th January 2009.

Customers can also make and receive voice calls on Google Talk and calling functionality will be added to MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger in the coming weeks.

Truphone has also integrated Twitter into the TruFriends view so you can see what your friends are talking about and post from within the Truphone application.

“We understand that customers increasingly want more integrated communications and like to switch between chat and voice. With these new features, Truphone customers can now choose which mode of communications they want to use according to the moment all from within the one application.” said Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson. “This represents another step towards making Truphone the open ‘all in one conversations hub’ for iPhone and iPod touch users.”

The introduction was made at Showstoppers on the eve of Macworld and will be showcased in the Truphone booth (#3228) at MacWorld for the remainder of the week. This is in addition to the introduction of Skype calling and Instant Messaging also announced today.

Customers of Truphone for both the iPhone and iPod touch can now very simply import all their contacts from these accounts to Truphone and chat with them from the Truphone interface. The Truphone client on both devices shows who is ‘online’ with its built-in presence functionality.

Instant Messages are always free of charge to send and receive when in Wi-Fi. iPhone users can also Instant Message when out of Wi-Fi and data charges will be covered in the customers unlimited data package*. Truphone will also add the same functionality to other leading Instant Messaging services throughout the year.