Hi there home-lockups! The 4th episode of Weekly digest is out, today in less than 15 minutes you’ll get compressed news about the startup and entrepreneur scene in Prague and the rest of Europe!
Czech/Berlin news:
We spoke about an application called eRouška, which comes from COVID19CZ FB group, the new remote coaching / mentoring service called CoachHub from Berlin that also operates in Czech. We mentioned super-affordable glasses from a Czech company called DOT Glasses that improves the vision for hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries and was recently funded by Tilia Impact Ventures and Nation 1.
The good, the bad and the ugly of European and international start-ups and tech.
The good: ESCALAR an initiative by the European Commission and EIF to put €300M into European Scale ups with a benefit of €1.2B as VCs and other investors will put in the rest. This is to deal with the challenges scale ups have in the EU versus other regions/countries. (Source: tech.eu)
Sextech boom. Reported by Sifted.eu → Pornhub have seen a 13.7% increase in their traffic and Emjoy has seen a 160% increase in downloads but a lot of that has been for self compassion and Bodies/Boundaries instead of erotic stories and guided masturbation. FERLY has also seen organic downloads up 65% (Source: Sifted.eu)
The bad: SLUSH, a mainstay of European tech conferences has been cancelled even though the event is in November. This is obviously Covid-19 driven. Mika Huttunen says they will pursue their mission of helping founders in new ways.
The ugly: In the US more jobs have been lost in 3 weeks than in 18 months during the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009. A study showed that in start-up land 204 start-ups have laid off a staggering 16,229 people during the period.
Robin from tech.eu reports that European startup investment fell from €6Billion in January to €2Billion in March a fairly awful drop…
THE EXTRA: Please read “Prepare for the ultimate gaslighting” - it’s free on Medium and talks about how we will be targeted like never before so we can reduce the pain of being stuck at home, brands will try and sell us stuff to feel better. The author calls this time the “The Great Pause” and urges people to use this time to really reflect on their lives. (while acknowledging the obvious tragedy that Covid-19 creates).
https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0