SEO Werkt!

We’ve covered them since before they existed, but now “Factory”, Berlin’s new, vast tech campus, is taking shape. As builders adapt old factory buildings (an area which will cover 107,000 square feet or 10,000 square meters), the privately-funded initiative has announced that Mozilla will become an anchor resident in the facility, which plans to house a number of startups large and small. Jim Cook, CFO of Mozilla also confirmed that Mozilla will be hiring in Berlin.

Confirmed so far are the startups 6Wunderkinder, Four Sektor, Toast, Urge iO, Views, and local tech blog Silicon Allee. But the expanding SoundCloud team will take on a large swathe of the vast amount of space available, which will feature a basketball court, gallery, conference area, cafe and – last we heard – a swimming pool.

Located in the central Mitte district at the site of the former Oswald Brauerei building, Factory borders the former, and infamous, wall which divided East and West Berlin. Comprising of five stories and a total of five buildings, the Factory team hopes the campus will provide a new epicenter for Berlin’s startup scene, which has seen other co-working spaces rise such as Betahaus and Ahoy Berlin.

We spoke to Simon Schaefer, Factory co-founder and Angel Investor with JMES Investments which is backing the project back in April and visited the building site later on with our camera (see below).

As you can see it’s quite some project. Startups won’t have to give up equity to be based there, but they will be curated by existing tenants and the investors in the campus.

Investeringsbedrijf Earlybird neemt een belang in de maker van online to do-lijst Wunderkit.

Try as they might the poor innovative startups of Germany – we’re talking guys like Soundcloud, Amen and 6wunderkinder to name just three – still have to deal with their industry’s most famous exports being out-and-out cloners. Germany’s most famous tech entrepreneurs are not Steve Jobs-like figures, original thinkers, but ruthless executors of other people’s business plans, and even designs. The latest has appeared today in the form of Lazada, an Amazon.com rip-off so close to the original we do rather wonder whether this time the Samwer Brothers’ photocopier in Berlin may have been used a little too liberally.

Southeast Asia is the target this time, and it’s ripe for development given that Amazon, Apple and other large tech firms rarely have local options, despite the region being highly populous. That’s their loss and the Samwer’s gain.

Lazada – aiming at Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan – will be the latest clone from the Samwer’s Rocket Internet incubator, and more are rumoured to follow. Zalora, a Zappos clone (geez, can’t they even change the first letter?) has already launched in Thailand, and a hiring spree has now been engaged to staff warehouses galore.

We can only assume that Oli Samwer is once again exhorting his cohorts to “Do Like In Russia”.

Hat tip: TechBerlin

Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder has just launched their private beta for their productivity suite Wunderkit. This is an extension to their simple, yet well designed task list manager Wunderlist, which was acclaimed both by early adopters and users.

With Wunderkit the startup is now taking a next step. They’ve stuck to the user experience that, while beautifully crafted on the one hand is surely tricky to get used to, and have taken their core task manager several steps further by wrapping a fully fledged social network around it. Whereas RememberTheMilk had been their primary competitor until now, the company is now directly competing with full virtual workspace apps such as Podio or Asana, all of them trying to re-invent peoples’ work and organize their private and professional lives.

Het investeringsfonds van Skypeoprichter Niklas Zennström, Atomica, neemt voor drie miljoen euro een belang in de hippe Duitse startup 6Wunderkinder.

Met de kapitaalinjectie wil het bedrijf de internationale uitrol versnellen en zijn technische team opschalen.

Ook het investeringsfonds van de Duitse overheid High-Tech Gründerfonds participeert in deze financieringsronde. Het is niet bekend voor hoeveel.

6Wunderkinder is een startup uit Berlijn die een dienst ontwikkelt om eenvoudig taken en projecten te monitoren en beheren. De dienst is gratis te gebruiken en draait op het web, Windows, OSX, Linux, Android en iOS. Deze dienst, Wunderlist geheten, raakt zichtbaar de goede snaar bij gebruikers.

Wunderlist ging in november 2010 live en ging in augustus 2011 over de grens van de een miljoen geregistreerde gebruikers heen. Dat is meer dan bijvoorbeeld Twitter, Foursquare en Evernote in 275 dagen wisten te realiseren. In de afgelopen drie maanden steeg het aantal gebruikers met nog eens een half miljoen.

De software is 3,5 miljoen gedownload.

Exclusive - Atomico, the pan-European investment firm started by the founders of Skype, has invested $4.2 million in 6Wunderkinder, an interesting startup out of Berlin that offers well-designed productivity tools for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the Web.

They earlier raised over 600,000 euros in early-stage funding.

The Series A financing round also comes with additional investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds, an earlier 6Wunderkinder backer, though the size of its contribution to the round remains undisclosed, as does an earlier T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) investment.

6Wunderkinder offers a cross-platform, cloud-based task management tool called Wunderlist, which enables users to make detailed to-do lists that can easily be shared with friends and coworkers.

The company has been hammering away at its next product in recent months though, namely Wunderkit, a platform that provides a central place for individuals to focus on their personal and professional activities, with an emphasis on collaboration.

To receive an invitation to the beta, you can sign up here. I gather that the beta product will be debuted ‘very soon’, meaning at some point in the next few weeks.

The Berlin startup’s Wunderlist software has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times to date, boasts 1.5 million registered users and is currently available in 30 languages and over 100 countries.

Interestingly, I’m told that 40 percent of the app’s usage and registrations come from the United States, which speaks volumes to the service’s international appeal.

Downloads of the iOS (iPhone and iPad) applications in October 2011 were almost double what they were 6 months ago in the US, 6Wunderkinder says, so evidently the company is going to use a big chunk of the fresh capital to try and boost further growth stateside.