Must-know, new, strong, unique apps — from Seoul to London
3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 262
News 1. Yanolja — the new super star
Yanolja is the rising star, an unicorn from South-Korea in the travel industry, B2C and B2B. They offer travel, accommodation search and booking in a super app with all imaginable functions around travelling. And a complete suite for hospitality (with a focus on process automation). It also has grown to own physical spaces like hotel rooms (10.000) but also what they call “SPACE”, an area to relax in malls for example. Opinion: Yanolja brutally landed on our radar with an unusually big financing of $1.7bn from nowadays prudent largest VC fund, Softbak Vision Fund. Yanolja is not only strong in technology and innovation, but also has a great inspiring design.
Yanolja — a real discovery that we missed so far (we don’t cover Korea in our research, but this one will cross borders!)
News 2. BreezoMeter measures air pollution
BreezoMeter gathers and predicts air pollution, location based — granularity of 5 meters in fact, they gather 434 different pollution agents and 13 plants for pollen. From multiple sources, including 47,000 sensors worldwide. Prediction goes up to 3 days. In the news with a new invest of $30m ($45m in total).
Opinion: BreezoMeter is above all an API for pollen, air pollution and wildfires. Prediction is a typical case of AI application. The areas of use that BreezoMeter propagates are interesting: mobility, in-doors, clinical research and insight for media/advertising.
What an important health topic in our modern times. Try the air mapping on the website! (Good in our Hamburg office, moderate in the Berlin one).
News 3. Polywork — poly of social media
Polywork is a new social media platform — a mix of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Built for people to network (section “Multiverse”) and for business collaboration & invests (section “Space Station”). Just raised $13m from famous VC and angel Andreessen Horowitz.
Opinion: Polywork is (like Clubhouse in January) with invite-only, but it is easy to get one. A new professional network? And we all tested it: difficult to say what Polywork is and what the user is meant to do. Post, network, find investor, region, language?
A difficult start for the user, but a great one for the founders with the backing of a16z (Andreessen Horrowitz)!
Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.
Come back next Monday and share your opinion.
