Nach dem erfolgreichen Umzug in das neue Kölner Headquarter, bietet das kreative Team der GrandCentrix GmbH jetzt als echter Full-Service Dienstleister auch sämtliche Leistungen rund um die Smartphone Entwicklung.

Kunden von GrandCentrix bekommen ab sofort alles aus einer Hand.

Die Realisierung größerer Projekte, wie zum Beispiel die erfolgreichste deutsche Mobile TV Anwendung für “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, können auf Basis der vom High-Tech Gründerfonds geförderten Plattform Technologie besonders schnell, effizient und zuverlässig realisiert werden.

Das Kölner Unternehmen ist klar auf Wachstumskurs und sucht dafür Verstärkung: iPhone Entwicklern, Grafik-Designern und Java/Spring/Hibernate Experten seien die aktuellen Stellenanzeigen wärmstens ans Herz gelegt.

This is High-Tech Gründerfond’s official press announcement (download English/download German):

GrandCentrix attracts new investors with exciting clients, technical finesse and a managerial team with an extraordinary amount of experience. High-Tech Gründerfonds adopts a leading role on board the Cologne start-up and thereby invests in the strongly expanding “Smartphone Analytics“ technology.

Smartphones and mobile computers have been the talk of the town since the Apple iPhone at the latest. These all-round multimedia talents are fascinating an ever-increasing number of users and transforming the recreational and professional world like no other consumer electronics device before it. The trendsetter GrandCentrix has recognised this rapid progress and has in response developed a service platform which is scaled to a high degree and is suitable for all networks and devices resulting in their services now being put to successful use by companies in all branches.

The idea behind GrandCentrix is as simple as it is ingenious: enable companies to conduct measurable mobile business with modules which are perfectly adapted to their needs and which can be rented – without high initial investments.

Case study: enjoying interactive television in a mobile form

For example, millions of Smartphone users are able to watch all entertainment formats of their choice on their mobile devices and that in real-time. Famous clients such as RTL interactive place their trust in the technology which has been developed by GrandCentrix and thereby greatly increase the range of their TV formats. This talent which the team has is not only well-received in the entertainment industry, however. Imagination and the technological possibilities know no bounds – the team from Cologne is currently working on a concept which could make the hearts of many car drivers skip a beat.

Roland Freygang, CEO at GrandCentrix: “Millions of Smartphone users are able to enjoy our leading-edge technology and that is what makes us successful in one of the most exciting growth markets.”

As far as the Technology Manager, Ralf Rottmann is concerned, GrandCentrix is a dream come true: “With our platform, we want to sustainably innovate the world of Mobile Analytics – in the same way as the Application Server did with the web in the 90s -.“

“The company has already acquired strong partners and clients and it is currently entering an unoccupied market niche, which promises extreme growth in the coming years as a result of the development in the Smartphone and applications market“, was the forecast made by Markus Kreßmann, Investment Manager at High-Tech Gründerfonds.

At the same time that the High-Tech Gründerfonds goes on board, GrandCentrix GmbH also announces that it will be acquiring a minority participation in digame mobile GmbH, a European market leader in the field of mobile value added formats. digame mobile will continue to promote the sales in the “Media Participation Solutions and Interactive Television“ field on behalf of GrandCentrix.

About High-Tech Gründerfonds:

High-Tech Gründerfonds invests venture capital in young technology companies that are full of prospects and which implement promising research results in an entrepreneurial manner. With the assistance of seed financing with maximum amounts of 500,000 EUR, the start-ups should lead the R&D project to the provision of a prototype or a “Proof of Concept“ or the market launch. The High-Tech Gründerfonds has a fund volume of around 272 million EUR. Investors in the Public Private Partnership are the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, the KfW Bank group and the six industrial groups BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Carl Zeiss.

Over on the Chatroulette Clone blog we’ve just announced the official introduction of an affiliate program.

Under the terms of the program, website owners with high traffic sites can easily start reselling Chatroulette Clone licenses. A generous revenue split and straight forward terms of service have been combined into a program, that will facilitate expansion of our business based upon fair business relationships.

If you are into the business of Internet Marketing, you should definitely check it out and get in touch with the Chatroulette Clone team.

As a proof-of-concept we’ve created a full Chatroulette clone, which adds some additional features missing from the original. The project is currently in early beta and can be found at www.CamCarousel.com.

Click to enlarge

Though we’ve received quite some feedback, we are not yet sure, what we’re going to do with it. Ideas range from handing it to the open source up to adding support for white labeling and theming and selling CamCarousel to website owners.

CamCarousel has been entirely developed as a Adobe Flex application and does not require specific server technology. It includes a light-weight, RESTful service backend, based on PHP 5.

Multimedia streams (audio/video) are handled peer-to-peer, thus the bandwidth requirements to operate a CamCarousel site are reasonably low.

Should you be interested, feel free to contact us via Twitter.

The problem the application solves is finding the nearest pharmacy which is on duty in case of an emergency. In Germany drugstores are not open 24/7. Instead 2.000 out of a total number of 21.500 stores provide emergency services. “Apotheken” [iTunes link] has been integrated into the backend services of Germany’s pharmacies head association, which maintains the daily list of emergency drugstores.

Shortly after release to the German iTunes App Store “Apotheken” ranked #3 in the “Utilities” category. Today it climbed to the pole position in “Highlights”, effectively bringing it to the front page of the mobile and desktop App Stores.

Within a single day the program jumped into the Top 25 of the “Most Purchased” apps, ranking #20 at this moment.

Given the fact that some have forecasted the end of valuable utilities for the iPhone in favor of an App Store where only games sell well, acceleract GmbH is extremely proud to prove, that solutions which deliver real value are still doing fine.

“Apotheken” leverages the latest iPhone OS 3.0 features and integrates nicely with the on device Contacts and Maps apps.

With this success acceleract continues to be one of the leading German resources in the iPhone and iPod touch development space with a focus on commercially successful, value-added applications.

Here is the official Alcatel-Lucent press announcement:

San Francisco, January 22, 2009 – Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), today announced it has acquired SDE Software Development Engineering GmbH (“SDE”). SDE’s primary product, called Genesys Customer Interaction Portal, is a web-based thin client software solution that helps service providers deliver hosted contact center capabilities, such as self-service and agent-assisted service, to enterprise customers. The customer interaction portal is a key component in Genesys’ hosted contact center solution strategy.

With the acquisition of SDE, Genesys acquires the Genesys Customer Interaction Portal (GCIP) product, all associated intellectual property and the intact SDE development team. The company is a privately held limited liability company organized under the laws of Germany and was formerly part of VoicInt Telecommunications, GmbH.

“Customer service software needs to support the Anywhere Enterprise,” said Sheryl Kingstone, Director of the Yankee Group’s Customer-Centric Strategies service. “Contact centers are not just located in a single location today, and the technology needs to reflect that. In addition, for service providers to expand their offerings, they cannot be limited to premise-based offerings. Portals are a critical need and we are seeing the rise of software as a service because virtualization and choice of deployment is becoming so important.”

This acquisition benefits both service providers who deliver hosted services and enterprises as service providers seek to create new product offerings that deliver high value to enterprise customers. GCIP addresses the common roadblocks to service delivery, including the complexity and time it takes a service provider to package, deploy and maintain multiple service offerings to multiple customers. GCIP was designed with both service providers and their enterprise customers in mind. For service providers, it supports the notion of ‘products’ and makes it easier to create and package solutions for multiple customers. Enterprises often need multi-tenant provisioning and flexible application control capabilities, and gain simplified access to, and increased control of their contact centers through GCIP’s anywhere-based web portal. By increasing the efficiency to create new offerings, GCIP provides higher profit margins and more lucrative business models for the hosted contact center services market.

“Forward-looking service providers recognize that enterprise users have high demands for both control and flexibility in their hosted customer service solutions such as call centers. Adding SDE to Genesys sustains the total solution that delivers this agility and level of control, and helps us deliver on the promise of enabling service providers to create innovative, profitable products to sell to their customers, which is one of the key values in forming the Alcatel-Lucent Application Software Group” said Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, President of Genesys.

Peter Nowack, Managing Director of VoicInt, said: “Genesys is a natural fit to acquire the GCIP technology through our SDE spin-off. The fact that the engineering team will now work for Genesys is testament to the world class skill set, engineering best practices and ability to deliver that we consider hallmarks of our operation.”

The financial terms of this cash transaction are not being disclosed and do not have a material impact on Alcatel-Lucent.

About VoicInt Telecommunications GmbH and SDE

SDE is a spinoff from VoicInt, a global provider of unified contact center solutions, specializing in deployments of Genesys CTI environments whose common, standards-based software platform gives organizations comprehensive, enterprise-wide functionality that helps them succeed by maximizing productivity and providing the most effective customer service. The company has pioneered Genesys complimentary standard solutions for large and x-large enterprise customers. With VoicInt’s GAdvance Suite contact center operators grasp the capabilities of their business and achieve sustainable increases in productivity through integrated holistic process management. The company is an established OEM supplier to Genesys and has recently spun off its successful carrier class provisioning solution paving the way to refocus it’s entire engineering workforce on the further evolution of the GAdvance product portfolio. VoicInt customers represent a wide range of brand-name DAX 30 companies. For more information, go to http://www.voicint.com. 

About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. 

Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the only company that focuses 100% on software to manage customer interactions over the phone, web and in e-mail. The Genesys software suite dynamically connects customers with the right resources – self-service or assisted-service – to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use resources. Genesys software directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day for 4,000 companies and government agencies in 80 countries. These companies and agencies can leverage their entire organization, from the contact center to the back office, to improve the overall customer experience. As a result, Genesys helps stop customer frustration, drive efficiency and accelerate business innovation. For more information, go to http://www.genesyslab.com.

About Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions that deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 17.8 billion in 2007 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com.

(Source: Alcatel-Lucent)

2008 has been an exciting and eventful year crowned by the acquisition of the VoicInt Telecommunications GmbH Spin-off by Genesys, a 100%  Alcatel-Lucent daughter. Shortly after we closed the deal, which I’ve mostly been preparing and accompanying throughout last year, I’ve decided to resign from my day-to-day operational duties as VoicInt‘s Vice President for Sales and Strategy. The remaining VoicInt shares will now be hold by acceleract GmbH. As the owner of acceleract GmbH I’ll remain very grateful to the company and stay in touch from a healthy distance to accompany VoicInt’s future evolution.

I’ll be happy should you be interested in keeping in touch and subscribe to the acceleract RSS feed.

Barack Obama’s outstanding campaign to become America’s 44th president has proven most impressively the power of social media and social networks. I don’t understand why German companies tend to be slow in using these modern marketing tools while Accenture, British Airways, McDonalds and others already make use of them heavily.

acceleract GmbH is consequently going to leverage the potential of social media marketing. I’m also available to help you leverage real-time and social media for your business.

Yours sincerely,

Ralf Rottmann