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May 31, 2006
Fuel Cell Component Startup Gets Seeded
Fuel cell component company Bac2, based in Southampton, UK, has secured £0.5M seed funding to enable it to further develop its components for fuel cells, which it calls ElectroPhen.
It is also getting a government grant of £0.25M. The startup's tech offers a cheaper and easier to manufacture alternative to existing fuel cell components, it says.
The investment round was lead by London Seed Capital in conjunction with the London Business Angel Network (LBA) and the LBA EIS Tracker Fund III.
Founder and Technical Director Graham Murray Holding The ElectroPhen Product
Posted at 06:17 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Qlayer Virtualizes Servers To Storage
Qlayer has raised a first round of venture capital from Big Bang Ventures. Its co-founder and CEO, Kristof De Spiegeleer, also founded web hosting company Dedigate (which was acquired by Terremark last August) and DataCenterTechnologies (acquired by Veritas/Symantec early last year). Interestingly, the founder tapped the same VC this time around.
The Belgian firm, founded in 2005, says it brings together three virtualization technologies into a "single easy to use platform": server virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization.
Read- Big Bang Ventures II invests in Qlayer(press release)
Posted at 05:48 PM | Posted to Software | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
British Online Recruiter Acquires Germany's Refline
MrTed, a venture-backed online HR services provider, has acquired Refline, a German rival.
Based in London, MrTed is backed by Holland Venture and BVCapital. It targets large-sized organizations and claims 50,000 corporate users.
There's what we hope is a typo in its announcement. It says: "As the war on talent heats up, companies need to find the most efficient methods to secure the best talent faster."
We're assuming it means that the competition for talent is heating up and not that they want to wipe out talent with their efficient methods.
Read - MrTed Acquires
Posted at 11:13 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 30, 2006
Burda To Spend On Internet Acquisitions
Burda, the German publisher, said today that it is considering acquisitions up to a value of €500M in an effort to double its sales in the digital media/Internet markets, according to a report by German press agency dpa with quotes from executive Jürgen Todenhöfer (pictured here).
The publisher of popular magazines titles such as Focus, Bunte, and InStyle, wants to double its sales via the Internet by 2007 after turnover in that segment grew by 36 percent last year to €174M.
The firm's execs said acquisitions from €50M up to €500M are being considered. It is looking intensively abroad.
Burda already has shares in Abebooks (online bookseller), Onvista (financial portal), and Elitepartners (online dating), in addition to several online portals and ad networks in Germany.
Here's a quote from its press announcements today that will lead to flights of fantasy among startups and VC looking to sell out to a larger buyer.
The digital revolution will continue to change the media mix in favour of digital media. Hubert Burda Media does not see this development as a threat, but rather as an opportunity. The sales and profitperformance contribution of the digital sector will continue to increase.
Read - Burda setzt auf Internet (dpa)
Posted at 03:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
BV Capital Offers Open Office Hours In Hamburg
Most VCs over here rely on their "networks" for dealflow, but here's one that is doing something a little more innovative. Christian Leybold who works for BV Capital, a VC firm with offices in Hamburg and San Francisco and backers of GoToMyPC and del.icio.us, has posted an open invitation on his blog and and writes:
I have reserved Wednesdays between 4-6pm CET (6hrs ahead of EST, 9h ahead of PST) for these office hours. Since I may have to move them to other days when I am traveling, please make sure you drop me a line with your contact info (preferably Skype) and a few words about the subject at christian at bvcapital dot com to let me know you would like to chat. I will reply with a time/date for a brief conversation. If the Wednesday time slot does not work for you, please suggest another time window.
Why's he doing it? To generate dealflow and to make the clubby world of VC a little bit more open.
Many people are frustrated about approaching Venture Capitalists because they think VC is club for the well-networked, and there seems to be some voodoo around the fundraising process.
Posted at 12:01 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Italian Online Mortgage Broker Wooed To IPO
Investment bankers are wooing Italy's Multui Online, a mortgage broker, now that it's showing quick growth in sales. According to BusinessWeek, the founders raised a million in seed financing in 2000 in "half an hour".
MutuiOnline turned profitable in 2003 and hit $19 million in revenues last year, up 76% over 2004. With an estimated valuation in excess of $128 million, the company will likely pay investors handsomely for their steely nerves.The co-founders -- now a post-bubble success story -- field calls from investment bankers eager to take them public. "Their execution was excellent," says Michele Appendino, founder of Net Partners Ventures in Milan, which provided seed money to MutuiOnline. "There is still a lot of room for growth."
Interesting to see Net Partners quoted. It is a VC fund that was formed to invest only in Internet ventures in the late nineties, a rare Italian based early stage fund. It has obviously survived, although we note a bit of style drift circa 2003, with investment into a retail clothing chain and a manufacturer of super-small motors.
Read - Venture Capital Takes Off (BusinessWeek)
Posted at 09:56 AM | Posted to IPO | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Doughty Hanson: European VC Interview Series
Which tech entrepreneurs in Europe are having the largest impact on the most people, India's emergence as a source for exit-oriented M&A in the software sector, and why European VCs are feeling a bit more positive again, are some of the things revealed in our latest in the European VC series of interviews.
This time Nigel Grierson, Managing Director of Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, gets the treatment.
Q. Your firm just sold Azure Solutions to an Indian company, Subex. Do you think that we will see more Indian and Chinese tech companies making acquisitions in Europe?
A - It was the largest software company acquisition by a listed company in India. It was the right deal at the right time.
Asia is figuring out how to engage with the western world. Actually, I should rephrase that and say the western world is figuring out how to engage with many countries in Asia, including China.
Either way, the chasm [between the regions] is narrowing.
So with funds available and a new found excitement to become global, I think it is inevitable companies from these economies will look to buy.
Big deals such as Huawei buying Marconi and Lenovo buying the IBM PC division demonstrated this and I think an upward trend is inevitable over the long term.
For the VC-backed company, my advice is – get a strategy early which figures out how your business model captures value from this trend.
Q. One more question on M&A trends. We've seen Alcatel and Lucent merge, Cisco has not done an acquisition over here for quite some time, and Intel is about to undergo a restructuring. This does not look for very good for VCs looking to sell firms to those buyers. What do you think?
A – There have been quite a lot of acquisitions in the last two years, so I am not sure I would agree with this view.
As we experienced with the acquisition of our portfolio company Alphamosaic by Broadcom, acquirers are increasingly able and willing to execute deals internationally. If there is a high quality asset that fits the need to add capability, there will always be a willingness to make an acquisition.
The revival of the stock markets across Europe enabling IPOs again is a catalyst for a healthy M&A market, as capital from a public listing is a competitive alternative to M&A, with the result that you get improved pricing of assets.
Q. How are you generating dealflow, anything new or innovative to attract founders in Prague, Porto, or even Geneva.
A - Most of deals come from our proprietary network of contacts. In fact 80% of the investments we have made were sourced through this network. We are also currently sitting on some ideas for which we are seeking outstanding entrepreneurs to take and run with.
Q. Can you be a bit more specific on that?
A. Our areas of focus for investment are semiconductor, cleantech, web software and telecommunications. So, you can guess the areas in which our ideas-in-waiting reside.
Q. Which companies/entrepreneurs in Europe do you think are having the biggest impact on the most people right now, and why?
A - You can't ignore the immense success of Skype of course. Free telecommunications has to be a very disruptive business thesis, as voted for by over 50 million people to date. And of course there are icons such as Trevor Baylis [inventor], James Dyson [inventor] and Hasso Plattner [SAP].
Then there are people who intend to have an impact in the future, three examples:
Mike Harris and Tom Ilube have a history of changing people's lives. They developed First Direct Banking and Egg Internet Bank to change the way millions of people use banks.
Now they are challenging the status quo once again with their new venture, garlic [Doughty Hanson portfolio company]. garlik will allow individuals to get control over the information that exists about them on the web and in the digital domain generally.
garlik enables the consumer to fight back against abuse of personal information.
Peter Malcolm of Orchestria [Doughty Hanson portfolio company] is developing software that stops you sending e-mails that, with hindsight you wish you hadn't.
Orchestria is a massive aid to hundreds of thousands of people in the financial services industry where e-mail mistakes have cost money and careers.
Q. Skype, or the “Skype exit”, and the high valuations given to Internet companies in recent M&A deals are the main reasons for VCs interest in the sector again. What is your take on the opportunities?
A - Consumer media consumption is shifting towards the Internet and mobile. This is to the detriment of traditional TV and print - hence the shift in the economics and potential creation of wealth.
When markets are in transition there are new winners and losers. Being positioned to capture a market in change is effectively how Skype captured so much value.
There is a new world of wide open Internet audiences, with massive bandwidth and available technologies. And the old world seems to be ill-prepared for the changes ahead.
At the same time, the development of a second generation Internet economy based on some really exciting technologies and business models (generically referred to as Web 2.0) has the ability to make this transition happen quickly.
So, it seems like the mantra for a while is ‘Be quick or be dead’.
Q - Doughty stopped making new investments during the downturn. Do you think that it was the right thing to do? Couldn’t you have bought in at more favourable valuations back then than now?
A - When it is hard to predict the timing of the upswing, it is hard to be sure that it’s the right to time to put your investors’ money to work. I believe we made the right decision to restrain our investments then.
In my thirty years in the technology industry, the arctic winter at the beginning of the 21st century was probably the longest and deepest downturn I have experienced.
Q. If I look at your portfolio, I see software-as-a-service, next-generation mobile content, SDR wireless chips, as being in favour. Will you continue to invest along these lines?
A – If you take semiconductors as a specific example, there is constant innovation and new ideas. So as micro-sectors emerge and become saturated (WiFi silicon for example), new ones emerge.
The trick is to visualise what will be big in four years’ time and get ahead of the curve.
So, I do not see our macro focus changing but the micro areas typically have a window of about 18 months - after which you might be too late to catch the winner.
Even though there are a number of major obstacles to overcome, the television experience over the Internet presents an opportunity to be a winner or a loser.
Or is it the Internet experience in the television environment? Either way you can visualise the recreation of the massive wealth created by the development of the Internet in the last 10 years being created all over again.
And there will be entrepreneurs who can monetise the opportunity in new ways and incumbents who will lose out. I guarantee it. Interview me again in 10 years and let’s review the new winners and losers scorecard. I know who my money is on!
Posted at 07:48 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Startup-job.net Très Web 2.0
Looking to work at a startup? Moovement, a French corporate communications and recruiting consultancy, has launched startup-job.net whose usability is très Web 2.0.
We've been hearing good things about Moovement's ability to reach highly sought after talent via its portfolio of specialized job blogs.
The startup jobs blog is only in French right now, but we checked with the site's co-creator Richard Menneveux and he said the plan is to go international.
Posted at 07:01 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
VC Deals: Germany And France Outdo UK In April
The largest transactions in Europe in April were completed by two French and one German startup (listed in the table below), says corporate finance boutique Go4Venture in its latest newseltter.
Go4Venture also said that VC investment in Europe is ahead on a cumulative basis compared to the same period last year with a €555M total transaction value to the end of April 2006 as compared with €476 million at the same point last year. But April activity was down onprevious months.
Read- Monthly European Technology Venture Capital Bulletin (go4venture)
Posted at 05:27 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
May 29, 2006
Emailvision acquires Belgian eMarketing Startup
France’s emailvision, which is a provider of on demand email marketing solutions, said today it will acquire Belgium-based Barnes & Richardson for €1.5M. This is the French firm's first acquisition since floating on Alternext. The buy adds some new competencies and geographic markets.
Barnes & Richardson is specialized in viral e-mail marketing services and has developed a complementary e-mail marketing technology platform, Deep[blue]eyes.
Read -Emailvision announces acquisition(press release)
Posted at 05:20 PM | Posted to Advertising | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Lux Mobilephone Niche Starting To Fill
Reuters said today that Nokia's high-end lux phone biz is growing at a rapid clip. The Vertu phones are given costly finishes and come with a concierge (info number) service customized for the end user.
We found this quote quite telling about the actual size of the market: "It may take even more than 10 years to reach the threshold of selling 1 million handsets. "
It is a distinclty low-volume biz but it has not stopped competitors from emerging to serve wealthy status symbol seekers. One we picked up on recently is Goldvish from Geneva.
Read Nokia's luxury brand Vertu says expanding rapidly
Posted at 04:20 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Fuel Cell Startup P21 Raising New Capital
P21 GmbH, a developer of fuel-cell based emergency power generators, is looking to raise up to €10M to finance international sales growth, according to an article in Manager Magazin.
The startup was founded in 2001 as a management buy-out from the Mannesmann/Vodafone group. It targets the telecommunications and IT sector and markets its fuel cells as uninterruptible power supplies. Backed by Target Partners, Conduit Ventures, Techfund Europe, the firm raised a €6M first round in 2004.
It was seed financed by angel investor Eberhard Faerber, who founded IXOS, a software firm that was acquired by OpenText, and tbg.
This bit of info was found in a feature story that tapped investor, founder, and LP opinons on the current state of the VC industry in Germany. If you don't read German, the verdict is that the turnaround point has been reached. Stats show that investors are putting money into startups again, and exits are improving. LPs are cautiously optimistic about the prospects for VC investment in Germany and Europe. And few VCs are excited about state-backed investment funds - with four out of five thinking that the money will be wasted backing the wrong kind of firms.
Read - Ein Breiter Strom (manager magazin)
Posted at 11:12 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Intershop's Founders' New Ventures
The alarm:clock euro takes a look at Intershop today in one of our periodic Where Are They Now? posts. We had been hearing one or two founders of Intershop, the former dotcom star, had left over the years, but we didn't realize until this week that all of them have now moved on to start new ventures.
The tipoff came from a paper published by Guido Buenstorf and Dirk Fronahl, two Max Planck Institute of Economics researchers. The two have examined the Intershop story and determined that some 27 startups can trace their roots to Intershop (many of them are located in the Intershop tower in Jena- image right). We have a link to it below and a list of Intership founders and their new ventures.
Intershop founders do the serial entrepreneur thing.
- Frank Gessner (open source mail order software founded in 2005)
- Wilfred Beeck (joined in 2002 bringing software product line for SMEs from Intershop) Update: URL and company name corrected. June 1, 2006.
- Karsten Schneider (operator of online photo processing sites for consumers acquired by HP in December 2005)
- Stephan Schambach (Woburn-based ecommerce on demand software company founded in 2004 backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners)
Intershop was founded by a team of entrepreneurs in 1994 who had the smarts to sell their software in the US just as the online retail market started to take off. It became one of the top 3 vendors of ecommerce software with sales peaking at €123 M in 2000.
Much was made about the founders growing up behind the Iron Curtain and the fact that they had raised venture-capital. They became famous founders. The startup went public with a fantastic valuation. Then the stock market bubble burst. Demand for its software tanked and so did its share price.
In the meantime, it has been called one biggest annihilators of investor money (a dubious distinction granted it by a German investor protection association).
According to estimates made by the association, stock valued Euro 10,000 at the end of 2000 would have a value of Euro 27 at the end of 2005.
Despite all that, Intershop is still in business, serving high-end large-sized companies with its ecommerce software. Its latest annual sales figure is €17.8M and is calling for profits this year and has started to hire staff again. Employee numbers had shrunk from 1200 at its peak to 219 as of April. It also announced in 2005 that it had settled the shareholder lawsuit that had been hanging over the firm.
Read - B2C - BUBBLE TO CLUSTER? THE DOT.COM BOOM AND SOFTWARE ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AN EAST GERMAN REGION*
Posted at 07:24 AM | Posted to Where are they now | TrackBack | Permalink
Orchestria's Messaging Watcher
We talked to one of UK-based Orchestria's backers, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, recently and they had good things to say about the startup. Looks like eWeek also thinks the same, as it has named it to its Excellence list of the "top innovative and relevant enterprise" vendors of the year.
It is a list otherwise dominated by giants: Microsoft, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Bea, and the like.
Orchestria sells email and IM management software that can prevent users from sending a message or an email that they shouldn't.
With email scandals fresh in their minds, it is the investment banking sector that was the quickest to adopt Orchestria's tech. Customers include Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. The software is also integrated into Bloomberg's messaging app.
Based on policies that are pre-programmed, its software detects when emails or messages contain information that they should not, and either prevents them from being sent or makes the user think twice before pushing send.
Next target market is the pharma industry.
Read eWEEK Announces Sixth Annual Excellence Awards Winners (eweek)
Posted at 05:44 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 28, 2006
VC-backed Setanta To Raise More Cash
Publicly mulling plans to offer major sports content over free satellite channels and broadband to reach the magic audience numbers it requires to break-even, Setanta is putting the word out that it will need to raise more capital.
The pay TV group that recently ended BSkyB's dominance of live Premier League coverage confirmed yesterday it would screen matches on Freeview and broadband internet services as well as on cable and satellite.Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan, founders and joint chief executives of Setanta, dismissed suggestions from analysts that the company had overpaid for the rights and announced plans to launch a fresh round of fundraising for the company, which is 40% owned by venture capital firm Benchmark.
Setanta starts fund raising and seeks new investor (The Guardian)
Posted at 11:32 PM | Posted to Media | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
May 26, 2006
What Sort Of Startups eBay's Looking To Buy
In a Barron's article that repeats the familiar negative refrains about European entrepreneurship and VCs, there was a nugget about what type of companies eBay International's M&A executive, Gil Penchina, is looking to acquire and a word of advice for VCs that might be insisting on too quick a path to profitability.
Penchina says companies like eBay who use their valuable stock to buy new technologies, are rarely interested in acquiring revenues. Instead, he says, eBay is looking all over the world for certain businesses, such as local classified advertising Websites. Ebay's acquisitions represent a buy-versus-build strategy that covets large scale, robust technology and market-leading brands, Penchina says. .... The eBay M&A specialist realizes that financial backers, not entrepreneurs, place the revenue and earnings demands on young companies. He urged the audience to persuade their VCs to eschew early financial returns for rapid growth. New companies "need to get big fast," he asserts.
Read - European VCs Not Venturesome Enough (Barronsonline)
Posted at 05:20 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
OLED-T Takes Over Elam-T Assets And Gets Financed
OLED-T, a UK startup that has taken over the assets of ELAM-T, a display materials developer, has raised £3.8M in a deal led by E-Synergy, reports eetimes. Aberdeen Asset Management, Foresight Venture Partners and Gartmore Investment Management have also invested as part of the funding round.
The company makes materials for OLED displays that it claims have a longer life than competing materials. Capital will be used to fund an R&D facility to scale up chemicals production and hire staff
Read - OLED materials specialist gets funds, adds CEO (eetimes)
Posted at 01:21 PM | Posted to Displays | News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Esmertec's Bumpy Ride
A week ago mobilephone software developer, Esmertec, saw its share price take a dive on the SWX Swiss Exchange after issuing negative sales guidance. It’s share price and valuation are now down by 75 percent from its successful IPO pricing.
Esmertec's Stock Price Movement Since Its IPO
It is not unusual in today’s market to see a growth stock fall 30 percent on news of missing targets. (It is one reason that IPOs in the US have been shunned in favour of an M&A type exit).
But Esmertec's fell by much more than 30 percent last week. So what happened?
Our research shows that it was a combination of things: the negative sales news, changes in the top management, and an illiquid stock.
The stock was positioned as a high growth venture, so when the Javaphone software developer announced that sales would be 50 percent lower than expected in the first half, down to about $10 million compared with $20.1 million a year earlier, the stock market reacted accordingly.
It didn’t matter that the downward sales numbers was due in part to a move to focus on shorter term sales contracts meant to make revenues more sustainable. That notion was overshadowed by the news that competitive pressure was affecting the price for its flagship software product.
The negative sales guidance was mentioned in the same press release that said that the CEO was stepping down to be replaced by the COO.
That particular announcement came very close in time to news issued just the week before by Esmertec, that gave the dates for the scheduled departures of the firm's two founders and another C-level manager.
The firm's board was doing something that is not uncommon, switching out top management because they are not the right people for the job anymore.
"There is no exodus of management from Esmertec but an adaptation of the current team to the market changes; our technical team was java only and we had to adapt," said Jean Schmitt [Esmertec board member and Sofinnova partner].
But the press here and shareholders didn't see it the same way. They saw it as the top level management jumping ship.
And because Esmertec is a fairly illiquid stock, something confirmed by a Zurich based investment bank, a selloff resulted that battered the share price.
Venture backers are still holding Esmertec stock and retain the same amount of shares stated in the startup's 2005 annual report, according to Esmertec's IR executive, Deborah Choate.
Schmitt said:
Sofinnova and Earlybird to my knowledge as well did not sell shares; we are supporting the company and are believers. The company has lots of great assets, lots of customers, lots of new opportunities.
Hopes are pinned on the company executing on its new strategy under the leadership of the new CEO Jean Claude Martinez.
"Jean Claude is the leader of the company; he is not a show man but an execution animal," commented Schmitt.
Esmertec is a vendor of embedded systems for javaphones. It was founded in 1999 and completed about half a dozen technologies acquisitions over the years, a veritable low-budget rollup machine with a strong focus on consolidating JVM developers, which enabled it to grow to $40M in annual sales and achieve profitability before going public.
In late January the firm announced it was having difficulty collecting royalties and that it was adapting its accounting methodology to deal with that. It also said that expenses were on the increase due to investment in Chinese and Japanese R&D.
In Februrary it said it would open a new market segment beyond the handset, the mobile network operator market. It kick-started this move with an acquisition in France, Cellicium.
The next scheduled newsflow from Esmertec is expected at the end of August. By then it will be clearer how the firm is doing reducing its dependancy on the Java embeded product and if it has found a way to generate more reliable revenues.
Posted at 08:50 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Software | TrackBack | Permalink
May 25, 2006
Vencap's List Of Euro Tech Pioneers
We came across a slide from a recent presentation by Vencap International making the case for European VC. Vencap International is a fund of fund manager, that is, it invests in VC funds.
Here's its list of the current crop of European VC-backed tech pioneers, basically companies whose products break new ground in the tech sector.
We agree with most of its choices, although it is not an exhaustive list. What's interesting to note is that several alt energy startups are in the mix.
Posted at 04:48 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
IPO Will Give Trolltech's Trolls A New Reason To Dance
Trolltech has filed to go public in Norway, according to a post in today's PE Week Wire. The developer and distributor of professional software development tools for Linux phones and devices, which has been making the moves that presage a float, such as expanding its board and hiring C-level execs, has filed with the Oslo Stock Exchange.
If Linux takes off in the mobilephone market the way the firm hopes, it will be a startup to note.
Trolls forming the Qt 4 logo in the Qt 4 Dance music video
But we say that Trolltech already has dibs on a place in tech history because it is one of the first where employees created their own music video upon the release of a new version its software. The image above is an outake from it.
Founded in 1994, Trolltech raised an undisclosed amount of VC in 1999 and a series B round of $6.7 million about 16 month ago in a deal led by Index Ventures, joined by previous investors Teknoinvest and Northzone.
View - Qt 4 Dance Music Video [Needs the Quicktime 7 preview to play]
Read - Trolltech has filed an application for listing / (press release)
Read Trolltech has filed(PE Week)
Posted at 04:03 PM | Posted to IPO | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Benchmark Takes Stake In B2B Music Platform
Ricall, which runs an online platform for music research and clearing licensing rights, has raised an undisclosed amount from Benchmark Capital's European fund.
The deal was announced a few weeks ago, but the a:c euro just came across it today via an announcement that it won what we'd call an outsourcing contract from Five, a UK TV station. The contract gives Five a fully managed digital music facility for in-house staff.
The move into providing managed services for broadcasters looks to be new, as its typical transactions, listed on its website, are for single titles. For example, it cleared Britney Spears Oops I Did It Again for Gala Bingo, The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again for Swiss bank UBS, and Sugababes' Push The Button for Heart FM.
Founded in 1998, the firm said this was its first round of institutional funding. Ricall's platform brings together professional buyers and sellers of music to enable licensing of titles for use in advertisement, films, TV, video games and the like.
The deal was led by Ynon Kreiz, who joined Benchmark Capital Europe's team as a GP about a year ago. He is http://www.ricall.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsdetail&asset_id=51&type=1also the founder of Fox Kids Europe. This is one of several media-related he has closed in recent months.
Kreiz said in a statement:
"Ricall has a highly experienced management team and has created a market-leading online service that has proven its value to an impressive and growing client base. Ricall is poised for rapid expansion and we are delighted to be able to play a meaningful part in that."
Ricall secures multi-million pound financing from Benchmark Capital
Posted at 03:36 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
German Publishers Bring On Google Print Rival
Two associations of German book publishers are asking members to join an effort to make the full text of their books available online in a new full text database.
A prototype of the project is expected to go online in October and it will cost about a million euros, according to a report in PTE.
While scenes like those on the right are not about to disappear from society, book publishers in Germany are taking pains to make sure they keep control over their online version of their content.
The technical leads on the project are two subsidiaries of Holtzbrinck, namely hgv publishing services und MPS Technologies, based in Delhi.The plan is to eventually create a retail business selling electronic versions of books.
It is all about control. Here's what the initiators said:
The companies Google and Amazon are offering to deal with this task for publishing companies
by providing the digitisation, storing, search and limited presentation of full texts on their respective websites, to be followed by options linking to the corresponding sales channels. With these proposed solutions, control of access to book contents is restricted to these providers.
Read -
Volltextsuche online: Prototyp im Oktober 2006
Read- Fulltext Search Online Project (press release)
Posted at 08:02 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 24, 2006
Rebtel's Global Mobile Calls At Local Rates
Swedish startup Rebtel generated some buzz at Innovate Europe last week. We got around to checking it out today.
Besides having a corporate identity that looks a bit like the old Credit Suisse one, we think that this is looking like a service that will catch on with consumers and small businesses that want to avoid the high cost of international calls from mobilephones.
Rebtel requires users to enter their contacts' names and numbers and then assigns each party a local phone number to call. The local number is sent by text message to each party.
It doesn't require a callback like Jajah does. And it doesn't require a PC or special handset like Skype does. The service costs $1 a week, plus an interconnect charge that it promises to keep "low".
Rebtel has a cheap and efficient way of acquiring new customers for a VOIP service and handles mobilephone users well.
Maybe Vonage, which does not have a cheap and efficient way of acquiring new customers, could learn a thing or two from this Swedish startup.
Rebtel was founded in January and has offices in Luxembourg, Sweden, and Redwood City, Calif. It is founder-funded.
Read - Innovation in telephony (Florian Dargel Blog)
Posted at 04:37 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Paris-based Galileo Back Open Source Startup
French blog, Altaide, alerted us to a €2.1M venture capital injection into open source software startup Talend by Galileo Partners.
We would describe Talend's flagship product as open source data integration software, a form of middleware. It is ideally used in datawarehousing, grid computing, and datamart environments.
Looking at a recent presentation by Talend, it clearly aims to compet with commercial software venors Informatica, Sunopsis and DataMirror. MySQL is a reseller of Talend's software.
Read Press release from Talend (Chausson Finance blog)
Read Talend une star ( Altaide blog)
Posted at 10:55 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Software | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Strangely Spotted Dog At Movistar
Telefonica's new brand for its moble services targetting Spain and Latin America, Movistar, has won accolades from Brandchannel for its marketing efforts.
Now take a look at Movistar's latest ad and guess who provides the search default for its mobile Internet homepage as of this month.
Google has quietly been signing partnerships with mobile network operators for mobilephone search over the past year. Movistar is the latest to go live. Other recent deals include T-Mobile and KDDI. On Google's corporate website, it claims to be working with AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS, Nextel, Palm, Handspring, and Vodafone, too.
We're not sure how much people use the search on their phones but Google is certainly making inroads. Anyone have any thoughts on how Google's growing position in moblie market can affect startups?
Read - Brandchannel's ranking for brands in 2005
Posted at 07:52 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
The Jag Mobilephone
After panning Siemens' vision-in- pink effort to design a phone for women, ARCchart, a wireless market research and consulting firm, commissioned Ocean Observations to design fashion phones based on the brands of Diesel, popular clothing line, and Jaguar, the lux automobile brand.
The project was not sanctioned by either of the two companies, so Ocean derived design platforms for GUI and industrial design from their own research.
They say it should "only be seen as a study" but it shows the way that some people believe phones are going.
This might get people to buy new phones, but we're not so sure it will make them use the services more. There needs to be some serious improvements on phone configuration for Internet access, not to mention more thought into pricing plans.
We think that the new breed of virtual mobile network operators (MVNOs) emerging here and elsewhere will be doing some disruptive things. The alarm:clock euro has been contacted by a few of the founders of such startups and we will be profiling these agents of disruption in the coming weeks.
Read - Pink is the new grey
Read - Ocean Observations: our work
Posted at 07:19 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2006
Ask Us Any Question As Long As You're In The UK
A UK mobilephone service startup says : Ask us Anything...
82ASK gamely offers to answer anything, except something illegal or offensive. Some examples:
Where can I buy a pink silk tie in Leeds?
In its interim results what was mmo2’s half year revenue and profit?
The service, only available in the UK at the moment, replies to users by text mesage. The answer costs £1.
Re5ult is the company behind 82ASK, and was founded by Sarah and Thomas Roberts, two former investment bankers. It is angel and founder backed. Business must be good because the company is hiring and has a few jobs on offer for what it calls "Textperts", people that sort through the questions sent in and answer them in a concise way, only 160 characters to work with, we note.
Posted at 03:57 PM | Posted to Early stage | Wireless | entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
Eutelia buys Getronics' Italian Unit For One Euro
Italian telco Eutelia has acquired Getronics' Italian operation, Getronics Solutions Italia (GSI), for one euro. With sales of of €221.9m in 2005 and a net loss of €74.8m, Getronics Italian unit, which employs 1800, was deemed not worth keeping by Netherlands-based Getronics.
Read - Eutelia acquires Getronics Solutions Italia (Ovum UK)
Posted at 01:48 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
France's Tagsys Moves To US, Raises Pre-IPO Round
French RFID systems developer, Tagsys, which recently moved its HQ to the US East Coast, is expected to announce today that it has raised $35M in what it hopes to be its last round before going public.
The round was led by JPMorgan Partners and brought in one other new investor, Cazenove Private Equity, as well as the previous investors Elliott Associates and Endeavour. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bernard Vogel chairman of Tagsys' board and managing partner at Geneva-based Endeavour, the startup's earliest investor, told the alarm:clock euro that it was a 3-digit million valuation, which was an up round over the previous one.
Vogel added that this round is the pre-IPO round, expected to take place within 12 to 18 months.
Tagsys Customer, Pfizer, Is Using RFID To Combat Fake Viagra Floggers
The reason investors are bullish on this 5 year old company is that it has been winning some pretty hefty sized sales and hardware integration contracts, in particular it won the first commercial rollout for RFID labels in the pharmaceutical industry with Viagra-making Pfizer.
It has also recently won a deal with Pfizer-rival GlaxoSmithKline, according to Vogel. The RFID pharma market is a hot one now that the regulatory authoritiy for the drug industry in the US, the FDA, has mandated all drug companies to use the tagging systems instead of barcodes.
"This is the breakthrough that the RFID sector has been working towards - the first high-volume application for item level RFID tags," commented Bernard. What he means by "item level tags" is the RFID labels that go on every single bottle of pills.
All The Places RFID Tags Are Used
Companies like Alien Technology, which recently filed for an IPO, deliver RFID technology too, but their core business has been tags for tracking and tracing palettes and containers. The item level application is a higher volume one and explains investor interest in Tagsys.
Tagsys is on a roll for the time being, but there are lots of competitors in this market as RFID has been attracting quite a bit of VC money (see a roundup of recent Euro RFID deals in the link below). And Alien Technology is not sitting on the sidelines: it recently announced a tech partnership with Vue Technologies to enable it to address the item level tagging market.
If all goes according to plan, the IPOs of both these companies should make for some lively competition and some serious money flowing into an emerging tech market.
Read -Alien Technology Valued At (a:c)
Read- VC Euros flowing to RFID startups (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 09:00 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Intel Capital: Wimax Telco Tycoon
If Wimax takes off the way that Intel is hoping, it won't just be a chipmaker anymore, it'll be a shareholder in a number of growing alternative telecommunications companies, practically a telco tycoon via the efforts of its corporate venture capital arm, Intel Capital.
We're saying that becuase Intel Capital has just announced backing two more municipal telecoms operators that have Wimax ambitions.
Both Orascom Telecom WiMAX Limited, a joint venture with Orascom Telecom of Egypt, and Worldmax, a joint venture with Enertel Holding of the Netherlands, will be getting some capital and tech know-how from the chip giant.
The deals are conditional on some undisclosed approvals and criteria.
These two follow several others in the UK and in Germany earlier this year (follow links below).
Intel's hoping that Wimax is going to be deployed all the way from the backhaul to the end user device.
Its kickstarting the market for Wimax chips has the side effect that several startups, such as US-based Aperto, an access network systems provider, along with UK-based PicoChip (Pond Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, among others), a wireless chipmaker, and Ubiquisys (backed by Atlas Venture), a wireless network access box-maker, may feel market demand earlier than they could have normally expected.
Read - Intel Capital Extends WiMAX Investments Worldwide
Read -Intel backs second Wimax (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 07:14 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2006
Streaming Map Tech From Sweden
When someone steals your car or your boat, this startup's technology can show where your gear has gone.
Easygard (shown here) is one product that is based on a new mapping engine developed by Swedish startup, Idevio.
It claims a greater than 10 times improvement on the compression and publishing of digital maps. In fact, it says it reduces the size of topology databases by 90 percent.
Since Scandinavia has a few freshly capitalized VCs, we're wondering why this startup has escaped their purview.
Read - RaveGeo Powers Easygard
Posted at 03:27 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
vpod.tv Founder On The Business of Online Video
Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz is the co-founder of vpod.tv, a nine month old European online video publishing and distribution service provider. We talked to him about his business model and the firm's strategy after he announced a €5.1M first round commitment from Innovacom*.
Anyone who has been to a tech ventures event in Europe in the past year will recognize the gregarious Sepulveda Schulz and his ubiquitous slab of electronics.
First point, although the functionality of vpod.tv is similar to that of YouTube and Google's venture in this area, the French entrepreneur is not planning on taking them on in the US market. The focus is Europe.
It's not as weak an approach as it sounds at first hearing. Kellkoo, an online shopping directory, took that approach and it managed to achieve a valuation of €500M by the time Yahoo acquired it in 2004. It was also backed by Innovacom, among others, pointed out Schulz.
Second point, vpod.tv has a viable business model. It is set up to support three revenue streams. For the consumer market it will insert super short ads into selected videos via its own ad serving technology. The startup hired a team from TVMadrid to do the development, confirmed Schulz.
Publishing and distribution of videos is free for consumers but users have to agree that vpod.tv will insert ads into their content, either at the beginning, middle, or the end. A revenue sharing model is the plan.
Not all video pulbishers will want to have ads inserted into their content, goes the theory, so they will pay not to have ads. The payment scheme is not being disclosed yet but will be a based on a volume/traffic/file size calculation. vpod.tv already has a first customer in this category, a FilmFestival.com, an organization with 40,000 members.
A third category of sales is targeting online retailers to encourage them to make their own videos of products and product demos. "We can offer ecommerce sites time and costs savings," said Schulz.
The startup has a peer-to-peer technology partner to save on its bandwidth costs and is working with a US-based content distribution network, also to manage bandwidth, but it is not disclosing either name yet.
Services like vpod.tv and its rivals are set up to be easy for mobilephone users to shoot send and publish videos.
But a spoke in the wheel for this concept is the cost of using wireless networks for video file transfers. "The price for GPRS is outrageous," comment Schulz. He believes that new MVNO will focus on data service and offer some smart packages for consumers that want to use the networks for video file transfers, which should boost the use of his company's video platform.
In the meantime, the founder is travelling Europe and the US to sign customers and advertisers for vpod.tv, aiming to win a chunk of advertising sales away from traditional television and broadcasting channels.
Update: At least two rivals exist in the French market with a similar approach to video publishing online, Banex Ventures-backed Kewego, and DailyMotion.
(*Ed. We reorted earlier that the Innovacom invests on behalf of France Telecom, but that was not correct. FT owns a share in the management firm Innovacom. And Innovacom has a mandate to manage an older Orange Ventures portfolio. But the firm's funds are invested and raised independently of the telco.)
Posted at 11:22 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Scottish VC Goes To Europe On Back Of Home Runs
Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) is close to closing a new tech fund with a remit to invest in the UK mainly but also will add European ventures this time to its mix.
It would be its 70-times return-on-investment in semiconductor manufacturer Wolfson Microelectronics, 
that has helped the Glasgow and London-based firm garner commitments of €120M on its new fund that will back between 25 and 30 companies.
SEP, which also backed another poster-child of Euro tech VC investment, Cambridge Silicon Radio, a Bluetooth chipmaker with a market cap of £1.6B (€2.35B). Its style of investing covers semiconductors, healthcare, and energy sectors. It does both early stage and later stage investment, it said in an interview in the Scotsman this weekend.
Current portfolio firms includes goodies like the mobile portal software firm, Surfkitchen, and Wimax chipmaker, PicoChip.
A rare insight into the VC fundraising process was provided in the newspaper's report. We have the quotes below.
Not every venture capitalist has to pitch for funds, but Paterson suggests that they should: "It is remarkably good for the soul to have to sit on the other side of the table and make your case. I would recommend it as a process of improving self-awareness for all venture capital professionals....At times, it felt a bit like Groundhog Day, but it was a pretty quick and efficient process. Language has not been a problem - I did think about taking some lessons to brush up on my very basic French, but it was suggested that I should try to master English first!
...Paterson emphasises that SEP will not rush into a string of overseas deals. He says: "I strongly believe that to do VC well, you have to spend time with your portfolio companies and invest in other ways than money. Some of our competitors are investing on a pan-European basis and in the US. That is okay, but there is no compelling evidence that works any better than focusing on one country."
SEP's own investors are more cosmopolitan now - the last time the firm raised money, all of its backers were based in the UK. This time, traditional supporters such as the Royal Bank of Scotland were joined by investors from France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium.
We know that SEP has been moving towards more independence from its original parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland, but are not sure how far along in the process it is now.
Read - Venturing further afield(The Scotsman)
Posted at 06:32 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Benchmark Europe Backs Classmates Clone Bebo
Saying they are trying to pick the next Yahoo, Benchmark Capital has taken a $15M stake in Classmates.com clone Bebo, based in the UK with the plan to take it to the US. No disclosure on terms but we note that the founders still own the largest stake in the company.
According to a report in the Guardian, Bebo has been winning market share in the UK from MySpace and is now the number two to MySpace's number one.
As alarm:clock, our sister site, has been reporting there is plenty of competition already in the US market. We're wondering what it is that makes Benchmark think this British upstart has a chance. Its London team has at least one partner with a strong television industry background. And both of the big exits in this field have been driven by TV companies, Friends Reunited was bought be ITV and MySpace by Fox Interactive - is that the direction they will go with this one? And as for saying they want to back the next Yahoo, we say: who doesn't?
Read - Setanta backers spend $15m in search for the next Yahoo (Guardian)
Posted at 05:38 AM | Posted to Media | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
vpod.tv Takes On Cash For Online Video Biz
vpod.tv, a startup based in Paris that hosts and publishes videos has a €5M commitment from Innovacom, which does VC investments for France Telecom and mobile network operator, Orange. We'll be updating this post after our scheduled interview with the founders later today. In the meantime Om Malik has some thoughts on the startup.
Read - Fellow Blogger, Broadband Fanatic (om malik)
Posted at 05:29 AM | Posted to Broadband Services | News And Updates | Venture Capital | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
May 21, 2006
Difficult Times For VC-backed Esmertec
Mobilephone software developer, Esmertec, is now valued at SFr 79M after its share price fell by over 50 percent on Friday on the SWX Swiss Exchange. When it floated last September, one of the first venture-backed IPOs here since the bubble burst, the market valued it at SFr 288M.
The stock was positioned as a high growth venture, so when it issued a press release on Thursday that said that growth was not on track, the market reacted.
Check back. We're looking into the latest turn of events at the acquisitive seven-year old mobilephone software developer.
Posted at 07:27 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro Kitchgeist And P2P Live Streaming
Lordi, Lordi, that's the chant that welcomed the Finnish winners of this years' Eurovision Song Contest when they performed last night in the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that was live streamed via peer to peer tech from Octoshape and broadcast to an estimated audience 100 million.
Lithuania's We Are The Winners Song Failed To Convince
Andorra's Team Forgot Their Costumes And Didn't Make The Finals
The Ukraian Brittany Spears- Shakira Did Not Win
Finland's Lordi Did
The schlock "horror" band received the top prize at the more than 50 year old event that pits 38 nations against one another in pursuit of fame.
The BBC said that the Big Four countries (France, Germany, UK and Spain) were accused in recent years of not taking the contest seriously, but we suspect no one has taken it seriously in the past few decades.
Voting was by text messaging and "100 percent democratic", said the shows organizers. Viewers paid premium SMS prices for each vote and the maximum number of votes from one number was 20.
The a:c euro notes that this year's show was broadcast live on the Internet using new Peer-to-Peer realtime software from Denmark's venture-backed Octoshape, a sign of the times in our eyes, the contest was originally launched back in the fifties to promote a newfangled technology called television.
Audio, video, and photodownloads are also available on the Eurovision.tv web-site.
In the tradition of Big Brother, which originated in Netherlands, the US market is apparently going to adopt the format, according to an Associated Press report. NBC announced plans earlier this year to replicate the formula in the US with acts from different states competing for viewers' approval.
Link- About Octoshape
Posted at 05:42 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 20, 2006
Something In Common With 1998
BusinessWeek's article, "It Feels Like 1998 All Over Again", looks for signs of a Silicon Valley venture bubble.
The only thing that we could see from our Euro vantage point that was like 1998 "all over again", besides a certain mushrooming of consumer Internet startups, was that Europe had more IPOs activity than the US had last year, just like it did in 1998.
In 2005 Europe's public capital markets raised more new money in IPOs than the US and Greater China combined, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. And in 1999, corporate finance boutique, ICON, published that little icon noting a similar outperformance on the IPO market in Europe, driven mainly by telecom, media, and tech stocks.
There is a key difference between now and then:in 2005 the IPO numbers were driven by several other types of stocks: telcos yes, but oil and gas companies too. Bank floatations and food corporations were also in the mix. So we doubt the observation has much relevance.
Read- PwC IPO Watch 2005
Posted at 11:30 AM | Posted to IPO | TrackBack | Permalink
May 19, 2006
What It Takes To Sell WiFi: Bunnies and Social Routers
We've been watching vpod.tv's coverage of Innovate Europe and this little WiFi guy was the buzz of the show.
It's the heart of a social networking service called Nabaztag, from French startup Violet,
which was founded by this straightalking guy, Rafi Haladjian,
who is also the founder of this Wifi telco,
which competes with this Wifi telco,
which doesn't have a bunny, but does have one of these.
It's Friday and we didn't have the bandwidth to find out what Fon means by "social router" (the WiFi router above), so if any Foneros read this, do tell.
Posted at 11:47 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | Wireless | entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
Personal Beamer From Cambridge
University spinoff, Light Blue Optics, in Cambridge, England, has reached the demo stage of its match-box sized personal beamer. It's only black&white for the time being. But the plan is to develop the tech so that a mobilephone, laptop computer, personal media players such as the video iPod™, and digital cameras can be used to projec