Miicard is is about creating a system of trust online amongst people, and between people and businesses, to improve the safety and convenience of our online transactions.

As a beta tester, you can set up your public identity through your online bank account and have that verified. In return, you get 6 months free service when it launches.

More details available at: http://www.miicard.com/blog/201110/beta-testers-wanted-digital-passport-miicard

Also, you can check out a recent video demo of miicard at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTyDCGyZQAE

From what I can tell, DAD’s an installable app like DropBox, but potentially more user-friendly, more tailored to sharing media like photos, movies, and music, and specifically designed for use within friend and family groups. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to try DAD myself, because there’s currently no Mac version—but it’s coming soon!

We got to know DAD when its CEO and founder, Julian Ranger, came to speak at Launch48 Edinburgh in October 2010. Julian is a serial entrepreneur; in the past, he sold one of his companies to U.S. arms giant Lockheed Martin. Back in October, Julian was giving Edinburgh startups and entrepreneurs some of his top tips for implementing a global strategy. Now, he’s looking for their advice. Julian says:

We launched DAD at the end of last year and have been reviewing early feedback on both our messaging and our product. As a result, we’ve made changes to the product and simplified the message, as DAD does a lot of different things. We’ve got a significant development program planned for the next six months and experience tells me that our plans probably don’t exactly match what our users will want—hence early feedback is useful, if not essential.

So what can you do? Well, for one thing, if you use a Windows machine and you like sharing music and other media, check out DAD. If you want to try it, let me know: I have a discount code for anyone interested in giving Julian some feedback on the product.

The code gives you two months’ service for free, plus three invite codes so you can start exploiting the sharing functionality immediately. The catch is that at some point in the future, I’ll send you an email and ask how you’re getting on with DAD. Simples.

If you’re interested, get in touch on hilary@startupcafe.co.uk.

Kiltr, a social network for Scottish professionals, aims to help Scotland based professionals and overseas Scots to network together.

We met founder Brian Halferty earlier in the year when the site has just opened up to a private alpha, things were very optimistic and Brian was expanding their team. Last week, Kiltr has finally opened up to a public beta.

So why do we need another social network you ask? Well, when we asked Brian, his vision for was site was to reach people that might be slightly scared of the major social networks. It’s not really aimed people who tweet constantly but people outside of IT or of the older generation, who might want to get involved in social networks, but don’t know how to, or feel that Facebook might be for the young ‘uns.

On arriving to the Kiltr website, you can use your linkedin, twitter, Facebook or Google account to sign in. I used Linkedin, just because it seemed cleaner to link all my professional accounts together. The site then brings up the familiar status update interface that you’ve seen in other social networks. One thing that i do like is the fuzziness of the “status box”: you can specify whether you want to share a status update, a job, a thought or a question and who with in two simple drop down boxes. Its quick and easy. Facebook privacy settings eat your heart out.

After that, you can view the Network activity, who has viewed your profile, find lists of people, groups, organisations, events and products that might be of interest. You can also “check in” your location, although i’m not sure what i can do geo-location wise beyond that.

Adding people seemed to be relatively simple – none of that linkedin – “how do you know each other?” mess, just a simple add connection. Although at the time, i had to click several times before the add request seemed to go through; that and the fact that the list of connections only tell you the people’s titles only so there seems to be lots of Managing Directors and CEOs, but I have no idea what they are the head of. It shouldn’t surprise you, but there are quite a lot of the business community here already.

As with any social network, it requires you to invest time into it to make it worthwhile. I have to say, as I’m looking around, I question myself on how much time I can devote to pruning and maintaining a whole network on Kiltr on top of all the other social networks that I’m on. I’m assuming that social media consultants would just give me generic advice like “make sure you be very specific and target what you want to do on what network and allocate time appropriately” but all the same, it’s getting increasingly challenging to find a right balance between virtual networking and physical networking (both have its advantages).

Despite that, and without sounding sale-sy, Kiltr does look distinct and worthwhile enough to spend time on. To me, the niche aspect means that it does a better job of merging the virtual and physical worlds together because I might be more likely to meet these connections in real life (by virtue of physicality). So check it out. And please be my friend … 

Friendbet is a new social gambling startup based in Paris and London. They recently launched a beta version of their site in both France and the U.K., and are among a handful of companies to have obtained a online sport betting license in France.

Here in Edinburgh, our close proximity to The Company Formerly Known As HubDub (aka FanDuel) has given us a decent insight into what it takes to succeed in the online gambling industry. Indeed, FanDuel has conspicuously chosen to target the U.S. market. Is there room for a new gambling website in Europe? Is there a market for it? What makes Friendbet different? We spoke to Maxime Speroni, Marketing Manager at Friendbet, to find out.

[Note: the information below has been edited for brevity and clarity.]

Who’s working at Friendbet?

There are five of us working on the project, plus our developers.

Timothee Luneau and Charles Antoine Idrac created the company one year ago. Timothee previously worked as a Strategy Consultant at Arthur D. Little, and had the idea for the website when he was organising the office bet during World Cup 2006. (He took his time to develop it .)

Charles worked in marketing at Come & Stay (a French web agency), and was originally an engineer. I joined the team six months ago with another, Max, to help develop the website and work on the commercial launch, and we have Caroline, who’s been with the team from the beginning as a communications expert.

You officially launched in April. How long has the team been working on Friendbet?

Timothee and Charlie created the company in May 2009, and secured a UK Gambling License shortly thereafter. In the meantime, they started their first capital round to develop the website. A second capital round was finalised before the commercial launch.

In May, we worked days and nights for four weeks to apply for the French license (the French market only legally opened in June). We received the French license last week. This is probably our greatest achievement, since there are only 10 companies authorised to operate sport betting in France.

We are still running a semi-private beta, but the website should be live before the start of the Premiership and the Premier League in August.

Have you learned any interesting lessons, or had any particularly good advice along the way?

The first lesson was maybe to persevere when everybody was telling us it was not possible, particularly with the French license. Other candidates for the license were large multinationals (some of them have more than $1B turnover). Everybody advised us not to spend money and time on this project, but an entrepreneur must not be afraid to jump into the dark. It’s definitely not easy, but it is a must.

By contrast, the betting industry in the UK is a very well-structured and closed sector. There are few differences between the bookmakers, and not a lot of room to innovate. We learned to fight for our vision because we thought that betting amongst friends was not represented by the actors present on the market. For us, when we think of betting, we do not think of bookmakers offering odds, we think of betting with our friends, supporting our team, sharing banter, and having a laugh.

Last, but not least, we learned that working days and nights and only eating pizza with the team is not very healthy, but it is always good memories.

Now that you’ve launched, what’s your biggest challenge?

I see three challenges for the days coming:

1) Recruiting our first users;
2) Making sure they have the best experience possible because they are the ones who will promote our product;
3) Continuing to develop the website according to users’ expectations, sorting out all the great ideas, and choosing the most pertinent for our future developments.

You have a lot of controls in place to try to prevent people from becoming addicted (in a bad way) to gambling on your site. For instance, you allow users to voluntarily restrict their access to the site, and place a maximum on the amount users can bet each week. Why did you choose to implement these controls?

Addiction is a big problem and I was confronted with this when I was working in a bookmaker. What is great on Friendbet is that you do not bet exclusively for money; you bet to make your point to your friends, to show who is the daddy and to share banter.

On Friendbet, there are absolutely no possibilities to bet alone, so the risk of addiction almost does not exist. Traditionally, betting is often practised in a very lonely way, and that is a risk factor. Our goal is to make sure this activity has the conviviality it deserves.

In reality, most of our users will probably bet in other places as well, so we wanted to truly inform them that gambling involves the risk of addiction. That is why we set up all these limitations. Across the industry, several bookies are now setting limits as well, and informing the customer of the risks (Betfair, Betclic), and many improvement are being made.

What should people do if they want to check out the site?

We opened the beta this month. Anybody can enter our beta version using the Facebook connect button: https://beta.friendbet.com.

Kwwika is a cloud-based service which provides an infrastructure to allow anybody to add real-time push data and functionality to their website, web application, Rich Internet Application (RIA), deskop application or service application. It also allows anybody to easily distribute their data in real-time to thousands of others.

Data in real time? Isn’t all data available in real time you might ask?

Phil explains, web content is published instantaneously (which is the
traditional bit). However, the real-time web changed things by making that web content instantly discoverable. This was pioneered by Twitter, and Google soon followed suit by speeding up their crawl rate. Phil agrees with the current belief that the next step in the evolution of the web is that users should now make a single request for information (a subscription) and be instantly pushed any new content as soon as it’s available without the need for the user to ask for an update. This paradigm should work whether you are making your subscription from a web server or a web client.

For instance, in search.twitter.com, every so often, the page updates to tell you there are new tweets for that search but doesn’t actually show you the new search results. Traditionally, this is done using a polling mechanism, where your computer constantly asks the server whether new tweets are available. Under Kwwika, the service will deliver the new data to your computer every time it becomes available. It does this by maintaining a constant connection with the Kwwika service after the first time the user connects. Phil has recorded a video that demonstrates this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweAhqN4Sfw&feature=player_embedded]

This model benefits both the user and the service provider. One, as
the user, you don’t have to constantly refresh the web page to get the most up-to-date data (e.g. the current football score). On the other side, as a data publisher or website owner, the Kwwika service acts as a hub to help take the load off your server by removing the need for those resource draining page refresh requests, and allowing you to publish your data update just once into the Kwwika service which then instantly distributes that data to all clients viewing your website or application. An example of this might be where Kwwika could replace the existing mechanism is the live scores/commentary that you can get from the BBC Sports website, which presently uses a polling mechanism, where each poll-request uses valuable BBC server resources.

In addition, you can have all the data that you want in one place; meaning that you can develop neat mashups real-time push easily.

Phil explains that he’s collected lots of Opta Stats data from the world cup, and is hoping to make that available so that you can replay all the matches from Quarter Finals onwards. You can view a few applications using this real-time World Cup data now here:

http://wiki.kwwika.com/competitions/world-cup-2010-real-time-push-web-app-competition/entries

Over the coming months Phil is planning to get a user dashboard section of the Kwwika site up and running, plus opening up the registration, which is currently in beta. He’s also looking for more beta user application developers who want to build demos or applications on top of the system and is willing to share/open-source some existing application code that they have.

If you’re interested in what Kwwika is, head along to kwwika.com (no www) to check it out. Or you can contact Phil directly on (phil@kwwika.com).

The company, started by Andrew Williams, is currently one of the many companies being nutured in the Edinburgh Pre-Incubator Scheme (EPIS). He started building the tool around 18 months ago, when he noticed the challenge of conveying the progress of a software project from developer to manager, especially since progress on software projects tend not to be as straightforward and linear as other tasks (e.g. construction).

So, he decided to build a tool which allows software managers to track the progress of the team easier, and in doing so – produce happy developers and managers!

Primarily aimed software development teams, their first product “Heads up” allows project members to:

• easily see the number of commits on the project
• see a rough indication of whether the project is on-time
• share files related to the project
• track bugs and issues (with a built in issue tracker system)
• read/edit documentations and be able to comment on them
• host your own private repository to solve dependencies (which I’m assured will allow managers to manage the software in a modular way – which is good)
• read an automated history of all the project items
• perform automatic continuous integration in the background

With support for Java and XCode, Andy is preparing to launch a beta version of the product in the next week or so. The tool will be good to support teams from 5-100 members.

So if you’re in a SME, are doing Java/XCode development, and are interested in taking part in the beta trial which comes with a heavy discount from the full launch price, you can contact Andy, or read more about the Heads up tool on their website.

Vidiowiki is a web app which allows researchers to communicate their research through video summaries:

It’s not always easy to understand the latest developments in research. Researchers often find it difficult to summarise their work.

VidioWiki aims to bridge the gap — and help you explore the latest from the cutting edge. By recording a short video explaining your work, and attaching your publications, we can help you show what you’re working on, and how it fits in with other researchers’ work. You might even find similar work you hadn’t known about…

If you want to get an invite, then drop an email to kate@startupcafe.co.uk from the *.ac.uk that you want to use, with the subject “Vidiowiki Beta Invite”.