A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.

Right now Versus IO offers a relatively limited set of comparison types – it started with mobile phones only, and is slowly branching out into other types – but the company has great ambitions. As founder Ramin Far pointed out to me, comparisons are a regular feature of life:

“The market size is so huge. Whether you’re deciding which phone to buy or which city to move to, we compare all the time because we can reduce complexity. We started from this point, saying we just present the data, and that’s why we think the product is so successful. We will try to use the system everywhere.”

Of course, Versus IO isn’t the first outfit to go for data-driven comparisons: the big rival is FindTheBest, set up a few years back by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor. However, while FindTheBest shows an admirable amount of data about each product, it’s still up to the user to interpret what he or she is shown. And, at least in my opinion, the range of data points on offer can be quite overwhelming as they are presented.

Where Versus IO has the edge here is in the simplicity of its design, but also the natural way in which results are presented. If, for example, I compare the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the iPhone 5, Versus IO spells out what each of the comparison points means in a qualitative as well as quantitative fashion.

Why not compare apples with oranges?

Looking at the data point of maximum exposure length on the smartphone’s camera, the service tells me that the S4 offers “definitely longer exposure” then explains what exposure means and why a longer exposure can be beneficial for night-time shooting. It also tells me that there are “a tad more apps available” for the S4 than the iPhone 5 – I’m not sure that’s true, but it does demonstrate the sort of presentation we’re talking about here.

What’s particularly nifty about Versus IO, and what makes its future so intriguing, is that you can compare items that are not like-for-like. How about comparing the iPhone 5 with a Canon camera, for example? It’s more useful than it may seem at first – many people will want to know if it’s worth buying a point-and-shoot when the camera in their handset is good enough for many circumstances – and it also demonstrates the generic nature of Versus IO’s data model.

The next step, according to Far, is for Versus IO to start being able to interpret and structure user-generated sentiment. It’s a breakthrough that’s “coming very soon”, he promised:

“The crowd has more wisdom than I. Let’s say tomorrow we’re comparing universities or health insurances. So many people know much more than me, but if I ask somebody to tell me what the best health insurance in the UK is, it wouldn’t work. If we look to comments, there’s a lot of helpful input but it’s not structured enough.

“This means we have to find a way to structure this content from the user… but in the beginning you need a data model which is highly generic. We don’t have databases or tables for phones or cameras – this data model is so highly generic, nobody has it like this.”

Versus IO’s traffic is apparently growing by, on average, 35 percent a month, and Far says it’s currently seeing 2.2 million monthly uniques.

How quickly it grows in future will no doubt have a lot to do with its expansion into other item categories, and also whether or not people prefer Versus IO’s approach to that of far more established rivals such as FindTheBest. It should be noted that FindTheBest raised an $11 million Series B round a couple months back, and clearly isn’t sitting still.

That said, Versus IO certainly promises a lot and its user experience is impressively clean yet informative. It’s very much worth keeping an eye on.

As for me, a Capetonian by birth who is now living in Berlin, I’m going to sit back and contemplate Versus IO’s comparison of the two cities. Did you know, Cape Town apparently has “appreciably lower” sales tax than the German capital?

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ResearchGate, based out of Berlin and Cambridge, Mass., is one of a handful of large academic social networks that is trying to help researchers around the world connect and collaborate. Another example is Mendeley, which got got bought by Elsevier (see disclosure) a month ago, to the consternation of many users.

ResearchGate has previously had A and B funding rounds, where we knew who was involved (Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners typically feature) but didn’t know the amount. This time, we know the amount but not who bought the equity.

Apart from connecting people, ResearchGate also lets researchers treat their profiles as personal webpages for the purposes of republishing papers they have written. This effectively provides a way around the copyright restrictions that frequently irk academics (after all, most of this research is publicly funded), allowing ResearchGate to act as an open access repository for published papers. Users can also share experiment-derived raw data with one another.

ResearchGate recently started trying to make money, offering the eyeballs of its 2.7 million users to recruiters and conference promoters. It’s a safe bet that the money raised in the last week or two will at least partly go towards boosting the company’s sales force.

UPDATE (8am PT): This article has been updated to remove the suggestion that ResearchGate acts as an open access repository for published papers while Mendeley does not. In fact, Mendeley does offer similar functionality.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

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According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.

The engineers, who will be hired over the next year, will also develop machine learning technologies to be used across Amazon’s business.

“Locating the development of key parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud in Germany speaks to the broad set of talent here and the investment we are making in the country,” the managing co-directors of the new Amazon Development Center Germany, Ralf Herbrich and Chris Schlaeger, said in a statement.

Amazon’s big European data center is located in Dublin, Ireland, although it also has a couple of edge locations in Germany (Frankfurt, to be precise) for content delivery purposes. The company also already has teams of AWS sales and business personnel in Germany.

UPDATE: Someone who would know says:

@superglaze they've already been hard at hiring machine learning folks the last 2 months.—
Mikio L. Braun (@mikiobraun) May 03, 2013

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The features of Wunderlist Pro will come as no surprise, as 6Wunderkinder accidentally revealed them last month, but here’s the gist anyway: tasks can be assigned among friends or colleagues, and subtasks can now be created. This should make Wunderlist Pro an effective replacement for the axed Wunderkit, which was a project management counterpart to Wunderlist’s task manager.

The Pro version costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually, and is available now for iOS devices, OS X and the web. 6Wunderkinder tells me the Android and Windows versions will follow in a week’s time.

“Wunderlist Pro allows you to easily delegate to-dos and effectively track the progress of each task, yet this is just the beginning. There is still a whole lot more to come,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber said in a statement.

The first installment of that “whole lot more” will be the ability to attach files to tasks, which can then be shared for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the sharing functionality of the original Wunderlist has also received a boost through the addition of an “action bar” that allows one-click access to email and share lists.

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We wrote about Waymate and its rival GoEuro last month – both companies are trying to navigate the world of travel comparison services, but Waymate is taking the extra step of letting people book journeys directly from the service, rather than sending them off to the train or plane operators’ websites.

As we noted at the time, this is difficult from a data point of view, due to the complexity of the various services on offer. There’s an even greater barrier, though, in the unwillingness of many operators to let a third-party service handle their bookings.

Despite these hurdles, Waymate’s iOS app is now out and its website is fully up and running. In this initial version, users cannot book journeys directly from the app – instead, they can select a journey then email themselves a link, allowing them to complete the booking on Waymate’s website. The service is also yet to be internationalized, meaning long-distance journeys need to originate in the Eurozone and local journeys can only be searched within major German cities.

The chief benefit of Waymate is the ability to compare all sorts of travel modes: planes, trains and automobiles (car-sharing schemes and taxis are included), as well as metro services and buses. Price and journey duration are clearly displayed on a visual timeline. Sensibly, Waymate has scrapped earlier plans to have two separate apps for local and long-distance travel: this one folds in both ideas.

“Now the task is to expand the app and the website with thrilling new features — especially in social networking — and to internationalize,” Waymate CEO Maxim Nohroudi said in a statement. “In short, we want travel planning to be completely simple and joyful.”

It’s an ambitious aim and one that (as far as I am aware) no-one has been able to achieve so far. It would be no surprise to see the app that finally pulls it off come out of Europe, as the fragmented nature of the market creates a substantial need for a service like this. Now let’s see how far Waymate’s rivals dive into this space.

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On Monday the Berlin-based company’s Twitter account briefly spewed out links to a newsletter inviting the intended recipients to sign up early for a Wunderlist Pro account. Judging from the sneaky feature preview allowed by this accident, Wunderlist Pro will give teams more collaborative features – perhaps some of the functionality that was included in the axed Wunderkit project-management product.

According to the newsletter, these are the features to look out for:

• Assign to-dos to specific people on your team to know who is responsible for what
• An unlimited amount of sub-tasks allows you to split your project in smaller steps no matter how big it is
• 8 new backgrounds let you style Wunderlist the way you want it
• Work seamlessly together in teams by sharing lists and tasks with an unlimited amount of people on all devices and platforms
• Get access to latest beta versions and be amongst the first to use new features

A spokeswoman for the company told me that the newsletter was only supposed to reach “a small group of 5,000 users” and that it was sent out to help 6Wunderkinder figure out its pricing strategy for Wunderlist Pro – as it stands, the quoted price in the newsletter I saw was $4.99 per month (others apparently saw $3.99 and other prices, so the team was clearly testing out various options).

If all goes well, she added, Pro accounts will become available in April.

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A couple of moves revealed at SXSW on Monday may change that. The first is a drastic simplification and improvement of SoundCloud’s paid-for premium tiers -– the company’s primary source of income – while the second is the introduction of a so-called Pro Partners tier for brands. The Pro Partners tier is not only a serious potential revenue source, but it also introduces a visual element to the site that is likely to trickle down to ordinary consumer accounts in time.

Freemium boost

Let’s look at the simplified freemium model first (bearing in mind that free membership allows two hours of uploaded audio). Previously, SoundCloud had four paid tiers, starting on the Lite package, which offered four hours of audio for €29 ($38) a year, and grading up to a Pro Plus package that included unlimited audio and various analytics for €500 a year.

There are now just two paid tiers for the average user: a Pro package that is priced the same as the old Lite (€29 annually or €3 a month) and offers the same amount of audio storage, but with added analytics and controls; and a Pro Unlimited tier that adds unlimited storage at €9 a month or €99 a year.

In short, becoming a very heavy SoundCloud user just got significantly cheaper and more attractive.

Paving the way for ads?

The Pro Partner program is in beta for now, with early users including Snoop Lion, Red Bull, The Guardian, Kevin Smith’s SModcast and even the Grammys (for the CenterStage talent contest). These brands and musicians are able to promote their profiles in the “Who To Follow” section, and they can also create what SoundCloud calls “moving sounds” — essentially, image slideshows that run behind the service’s trademark soundwave representations. Moving sounds can be reposted just like any normal audio stream, although they don’t work in embedded streams yet.

As SoundCloud co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss pointed out to me, the company has been working with artists and major labels for a while now, but this move opens up new possibilities:

“We’re changing the canvas so it becomes more visual. It’s cleaner and simpler. As an audio partner or a brand you get that canvas to express your identity on. It works for brands who are creators of audio content as well –- we’re only bringing on brands that are creators as well right now.

“Some features — or all even, we hope –- will eventually trickle down to all of the tiers.”

For artists, I can certainly see the introduction of “moving sounds” providing an opportunity for simple, stylish visual expression. The images will need to fit into the bar format used for all SoundCloud sounds, which differentiates the potential results from, say, those slideshows people create when wrangling an audio track into a terrible makeshift YouTube video.

But the real opportunity here will be for advertisers. It is now much easier to imagine a scenario where brief ads are inserted into streaming playlists, in between tracks, with both audio and moving graphics being part of the deal. And, asked whether this is the direction in which SoundCloud is heading, Wahlforss certainly didn’t deny the possibility:

“In general, there is a whole movement of native advertising. We’ve seen success with YouTube with promoted content, so we feel there isn’t anything happening in audio on the native advertising side. We think we’re the best positioned of any service out there to do that and to really work with creators.

“[However] we’re in the early stages right now; it’s in the experimental phase. Right now these pieces of content won’t appear unless a friend of yours reposts the content.”

Wahlforss’s caution is well-advised: SoundCloud may be the de facto user-generated audio platform on the web now -– an expensive game to be playing -– but it is not invincible. People are willing to tolerate ads to some degree, but not if they are too intrusive. Monetizing this platform will mean walking a delicate line.

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There are a lot of interesting challenges in a shift like this, especially when you’re trying to provide a slick experience for Android’s enormous range of devices. Luckily, CEO Jens Begemann was more than forthcoming on the matter when I spoke to him ahead of the launch.

Meyer: How big is your push into mobile?
Begemann: At the moment a little more than half the team is working on mobile. A year ago it was 10 percent, but since then we’ve doubled our number of employees [to 250] and at the same time increased the share of people working on mobile.

You have many millions of users – how come you’re only targeting Android now?
A year ago, when we made this decision to invest heavily into mobile, we were very aware that we wouldn’t automatically be successful on mobile because we were successful on the web. Because of this, focus was extremely important. We decided to focus on one platform, and that was iOS. In the spring and summer, we saw downloads continue to grow and our new games were on the right track.

Diamond Dash is an extremely popular game – on Facebook we’ve seen 70 million people play it, and on iOS we had over 30 million downloads. We still have over 20 million active users every month, so the expectations from our fanbase are very high [regarding any new version]. We put up a page on November 21st where people could sign up for the Android version, and we have collected 850,000 email addresses.

How different was the experience, coding for Android?
You have so many devices out there, so many carriers, so many versions of Android. We don’t want to disappoint people and this has been the biggest challenge. Overall, development is obviously different for iOS than for Android, but I wouldn’t say one is easier than the other.

The amount of code we could take over from one platform to the other was relatively little. We could reuse graphics, but basically the game has been rewritten. We used Objective-C in the case of iOS and C++ on Android – it’s not such a huge difference, but because the APIs are different it was basically rewriting. This is to be expected if you don’t use something like Unity.

The biggest task in building a successful Android game is to make it run well on a large range of devices – it’s easy to make something run well on the Samsung Galaxy S III. In terms of testing, we used a mix of in-house testing and testing in the cloud. We have more than 50 devices in-house, covering a broad range of screen sizes, CPUs and GPUs, but then we use cloud-based solutions. There’s a couple of providers coming up just now, where via the internet you have remote access to devices running thousands of kilometers away. We do that currently for over 100 real devices.

So you’re covering a broad base then. How far back are you going, in terms of the Android versions you’ll support?
We set a limitation intentionally: we have said that Android 2.3 is required, and a minimum screen resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. The game would run on older devices, but we can’t ensure a good quality, and we want to make all users happy.

It used to be a truism that any developer should address iOS first. It certainly sounds like Android is a lot of work if you want to address it comprehensively, but is that offset by way in which Android is overtaking iOS by numbers? Also, there’s a bit more fragmentation of iOS itself these days, in terms of new resolutions and so on. In short, does that truism still hold?
Everybody has to make their own conclusions. Regarding fragmentation, what we see on iOS is that all the time Apple brings out new devices and OS versions, but we see that the upgrade cycle is very fast. This means devices that came out three years ago don’t need to be supported anymore and OS version that came out two years ago don’t need to be supported anymore.

For example, the iPhone 5 introduces a new screen resolution, but at the same time for new games you don’t need to support the iPhone 3GS and its non-Retina screen resolution anymore. The iOS upgrade cycle is also fast, so today it’s enough to support iOS 6 and iOS 5.

Wait – 3GS owners can run iOS 6, the latest version, but you’re still not going to support them?
For new games in early 2013, we won’t support the iPhone 3GS anymore. We want to create artwork that is really optimised for Retina, and the non-Retina market share is declining.

One other thing about iOS. It’s true you have different screen sizes, but besides that the devices behave unbelievably similarly. Some devices have the same chip – the iPhone 4S and the new iPad Mini and the iPad 2 and the new iPod Touch all have the same A5 chip. They’re virtually identical in terms of performance and RAM.

And this is something that may be relevant for Android developers. In the case of iOS, if you have an iPhone 5, that’s an iPhone 5 worldwide. With something like the Galaxy S III, internally it’s about 10-12 different models. They’re small and slight variations, but as a developer you should be aware of this fact.

So in other words, Android is still way more labor-intensive?
It depends a bit on the level of quality you’re aiming for and how broad you want to go. We try to support an awful lot of devices, so it’s a bit more work. But it’s encouraging that Google tries to standardize – the Nexus devices help.

Finally, any thoughts on being plugged into Facebook these days? Will that work the same on Android?
We obviously have experience from iOS and we don’t know how it will be on Android, but we expect it to be very similar. We have deep Facebook integration so you can see your score versus your friend’s score, and we found that makes the game much more interesting. People who log in with Facebook are about twice as active, and they monetize about nine times better – if they’re competing against their friends, they’re more likely to buy a power-up.

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The point of the site is to show current Android and iOS users that their favorite apps are also on Windows Phone – or, if the apps aren’t available, to suggest similar ones that are. The site is powered by Berlin-based Xyo, which we last covered under its former name Xyologic.

Xyo is an analytics firm that, after selling its services to support two quiet years of development, went public in August with an multiplatform app search service.

The company is relentlessly keen to point out the limitations of the search services used in Apple and Google’s app stores – and it has a point, as most people only ever discover a limited set of expensively promoted apps. This is why the big numbers thrown around by Apple and Google about their app store populations are largely meaningless. Xyo tries to sidestep this state of affairs by presenting many genres and subgenres of app, so lesser-known apps can surface.

Nokia will be promoting App #Switch in retail stores and on Lumia phones themselves, and will also be using Xyo as the international app search provider for its Welcome Home content-importing app for PC and Mac.

Xyo is understandably using the opportunity afforded by the Nokia deal to big up its wider services. The company claims to have seen a pretty high install click rate from users since that August launch.

“22 percent of our users intend to install an app directly from Xyo.net,” CEO Zoe Adamowicz said in a statement. “That’s good news for our search product — it shows that a large percentage of users find what they are looking for. But it’s also great news for the whole industry: It shows that there are great apps in the app stores and users are keen to install them — they just need better tools to find them.”

For app discovery companies such as Xyo, partnerships are probably the most sure-fire way to bring in cash – data-wrangling is a special talent and in great demand these days. See also, rival Quixey‘s Ask.com partnership, announced a couple days ago.

To be frank, the Nokia deal doesn’t reflect terribly well on Microsoft. The whole point of Xyo is to make up for the failings of the standard app store model, and bringing Xyo on board in this way smells like a tacit admission on Nokia’s part that customers may not be able to easily find what they want on Windows Phone – even if it’s there, somewhere. That’s not to say Windows Phone is worse than its rivals in this regard, just that it’s apparently not better either.

But you never know. Nokia’s post-China-Mobile-deal share price bump yesterday may reflect an alignment of stars for the Finnish firm and for Windows Phone as a whole. If data-driven services such as that provided by Xyo help accelerate takeup, then all the better.

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So how big is it? On Tuesday, as the service took its ‘Next’ web app version out of beta, it revealed that 180 million people interact with SoundCloud each month through the service’s website, mobile apps and embedded players. It should be stressed that this does not mean 180 million registered users (the last update there was 20 million-plus, back in May), but still. Woah.

And that’s not enough, it seems. As co-founder Eric Wahlforss told me, the revamp is largely aimed at increasing engagement and attracting more users:

“If you go on the front page it’s a more friendly appearance. We’re basically accepting any kind of user – it’s a broadening out.”

How will it achieve this? The biggest new feature is reposting, which should make it easier for sounds to spread. This feeds into the newfound ability to curate sets of sounds – a feature that Wahlforss reckons should appeal to music bloggers and even labels and radio networks.

There are other handy tweaks too, such as the introduction of continuous listening, keyboard shortcuts and a realtime notification infrastructure (the last two there came out of internal hacking projects, of which CTO Wahlforss says he is especially proud).

According to Wahlforss, the rather lengthy gestation phase for Next (it was in beta for seven months) showed a 30 percent increase in overall engagement, with the main metric there being the time people spend listening.

However, the most important metric for SoundCloud is really its number of premium subscribers – and there, the company is staying pretty tight-lipped.

SoundCloud operates a freemium model, with charges ranging from €29-€500 ($38-$654) annually, and that’s pretty much where all its revenues come from. Ask Wahlforss whether ads might invade the service at some point, and you get a swift circling-back to the subscriptions angle. So is SoundCloud profitable yet? “We don’t really comment on those numbers in public. We’re focused on growth.”

Overall size does matter. But it remains frustratingly difficult to evaluate whether that growth is translating yet into the kind of premium subscription uptake that SoundCloud needs for a sustainable future.

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