Monthly Archives: November 2012

European Freelancers

Meeting missions and skills

Explanations are gonna be quick : Twago is a market place for freelancers or agencies on one side, and clients on the other side.

If you’re looking for a designer, a developper, a translator or an AdWords expert, there is a pretty good chance you can find it on Twago.

As a freelancer or an agency, whether located next door or on the other side of the world, you can bid on a project and create a profile describing your skills, your portfolio and past projects, etc.

Twago home page

To sum up, Twago offers everything you can expect from that kind of platform, with a freemium model that let you test the efficiency of the service.

Why talking about it?: there is a lot of competition on this market, but Twago is the first platform to really reach for a european scale, and considers the whole Europe as its native market.
This is not that common, so this is a fact United Startups of Europe could obviously not miss!

Visit Twago

You can use Twago as a neutral third-party for your payments. It’s a simple way to get sure the project comes to an end at some point for clients, and a good assurance to be paid in time for providers.

The site confuses “pure” freelancers and small agencies from eastern Europe or India (for example), even if both can be useful, depending on your project.
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Around the Corner

Bookmark and share places around you

Location bookmarking app Grafetee

The problem: where is that super-nice sushi place again? Don’t we have an art exhibit tomorrow night? That kind of questions comes back a lot. But finding the answer can be long and painful.

The solution: bookmarking real places – not websites – in a mobile app: Grafetee. Once you found back that restaurant, or the adress of this party, you can easily share it with your circle of friends.
Business managers can also offer discounts, or a full map of their stores.

What’s the catch?: why not use Foursquare, Yelp or TripAdvisor instead? Grafetee is a much more private-oriented app, closer to a personal adress book and you can share your good spots in a spread-the-word kind of way.

Visit Grafetee

The aggregation of multiple services (Foursquare and Yelp by default, but you can add more) makes the app more complete.
No need to switch back and forth between apps, you can find it all in one.

The user interface is still very geeky.
Not very attractive nor easy to understand, it makes first steps with the app quite difficult ones.

U.S.E.’s take on it

The local apps market competition is fierce. There is an interesting choice here, even if execution is not up to the stakes yet.

While it can be pretty useful to keep the address of rarely attended spots, it will not work for your favorite bars or restaurants. Which will dramatically reduce tips or popularity measures of those spots.

Still, sharing the good spots with friends can be nice: it’s a good way to promote local shops or dinners, as the business model seems to be mainly based on B2B. And it might be the best way for Grafetee to grow their user base on a market very hard to enter in.

Out final take :

  • No way this will work
  • Not betting on it, but the start is interesting
  • Need a bit fixing, but the path is clearly good
  • Where do we sign to invest ?

Our grade : 6/12