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August 31, 2006
ZBD Raising VC For E-shelf Displays
On the back of completing successful customer trials in the UK market, ZBD Displays has raised £2.86M, according to an announcement we received from Esprit Capital Partners
Co-investors include QinetiQ Ventures, The Dow Chemical Company and TTP.
The use of electronic displays in public places for advertising and among retailers is replacing paper at a fairly rapid clip, according to a recent article in the WSJ about outdoor advertising. It is not growing as fast as online advertising, but the spending on it is significant (see link below).
Although, ZBD is not in the outdoor ads business at the moment, we think that it benefits from the general trend of digitization of signage.
The startup's original invention was a bright, flat display (based on liquid crystal display tech) that does not use power to hold an image -- only when the image actually changes does the display need power.
It came out of one of Britain's military technology research units, Qinetiq. Over the years, it has had to figure out how to commercialize it, choosing electronic shelf pricing systems targeted at retailers. To do that, it also developed the software and systems to manage the pricing indicators, hone it for supermarkets, and then convince them to try it out.
In the meantime, competitors are emerging that compete directly, although the ones we looked at do not have the brightness and contrast that ZBD is showing, or they rely on infra-red and wireless tech.
So it still has a marketing and sales challenge ahead of it, and if it finds it too challenging, we say there enough potential acquirers that have shown an appetite in the recent past for such startups. ZBD has raised £14.9 so far, with Esprit's Prelude fund having invested a total of £5.6 million to own about a third of the company now.
Read - Technology Boosts Outdoor Ads (WSJ)
Posted at 08:37 AM | Posted to Displays | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock Online For Job Boom At Startups In Europe
Some good news from the alarm:clock today. We have launched two new sites for startups to post jobs.We have Techgigger , which covers North America, and alarm:clock eurojobs for positions open at European startups.
Most techies don't have the stomach for start-up life, but the people that read the alarm:clock are different, they want to be a part of a startup team.
We're offering a free trial phase for European startups. So we encourage founders and VCs who love their startups to post your positions. Recruiters are also welcome.
Try it out and find out why quick-growing startup companies in North America are paying $75 to post their positions on our Techgigger job board.
Posted at 07:35 AM | Posted to Sponsored Post | TrackBack | Permalink
Angels Back Hitflip's Cross Border Ambition And Growth At Home
Hitflip, an online DVD and CD trading exchange, turned down venture capital offers this summer in favour of raising capital from a syndicate of angel investors. The one year old firm, which employs 20 in Cologne, did not disclose the amount raised, but told us that it was a single digit million euro amount, enough to fund its expansion into Austria and the UK, to invest in scaling up its platform, and to take a bigger chunk of eBay Germany's DVD and CD business.
We interviewed by email Hitflip's 26 year old co-founder and CEO, Jan Miczaika (he's on the right here), about Hitflip's digital media swapping platform. Read on to find out what Hitflip is all about, its growth plans, and who its backers are.
He describes Hitflip as a website "rich with data, recommendations, and other peoples' opinions for finding and discussing new media products".
When a user "finds something interesting, press one button, and you receive the products hassle-free and without being afraid of ripoffs". The price is "almost free," he said, adding that listing an item on the exchange is free. When a trade takes place, the receiver of the item pays 99 Euro cents. The sellers' items are valued and exchanged based on a points system.
Hitflip's traffic puts it ahead of competing online service providers in its niche, both those that rent DVDs and those that provide an exchange platform, says Alexa, while Nielsen shows similar numbers for both DVD rental startup Amanga [now owned by Glowria] and Hitflip, Miczaika added.
To grow quickly now Hitflip will have to beat eBay in the pre-owned digital media niche in the German market. Miczaika says that eBay has 90,000 listings at any one time in the DVD area. His firm has about 45,000 titles.
The challenge is convincing those that would normally sell on eBay or similar auctions sites to use Hitflip's trading platform instead.
The idea of an online trading platform is not obvious to most consumers. "When someone wants a DVD or CD, normally one wonders where to get the best price for a DVD, probably Amazon or eBay. Trading is a latent demand, not something one actively looks for," said Miczaika.
He sees the new eBay Express service as validating his firm's alternative approach, that it shows that "eBay recognizes that the auction/fixed time model is not right for everyone".
But Hitflip will also have to do better with the number of sellers and buyers that find each other. "More of [eBay's] transactions close, but we are getting there. A key point is that it is not always to the benefit of the consumer to simply close the transaction regardless of the closing price" said Miczaika
In addition to directing his team's growing the market in Germany, Miczaika is launching in two other European markets, hoping to have at least one new country online by October.
He's looking at potential acquisition targets, but said that he would ideally like to acquire a "complete team with deep local expertise and networks", not necessarily one that is already running a similar company on another technical platform.
"We are tracking a number of possible acquisition targets. What we would be buying is traction [an installed base of users or customers]. But I don't really think buying another platform makes sense for us right now. Getting
consumers to migrate from one community platform to another is hard. So while we are open for discussion, what we are looking at is finding complete teams for new countries," he said.
Miczaika is counting on his private backers to face some of these challenges. He's already had help from Oliver Samwer, formerly of Jamba and Alando, with the marketing controlling system.
Some of the others, mainly successful tech entrepreneurs that made their fortunes either floating their technology ventures, or selling them in so-called trade sales, include Bernd M. Michael, the former European CEO and now advisor to Grey, the second largest advertising agency in Germany, Hans-Ruedi Heeb, a co-founder and early CEO of Esmertec, a developer of mobilephone software, Peter Schüpbach, CEO of Genevalogic, Gerrit Schumann, founder of element 5, an ecommerce software firm acquired by Digital River and Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Spreadshirt. Two companies, brains-to-venture, the corporate finance boutique and Net AG also took minor stakes.
Posted at 07:19 AM | Posted to Early stage | News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
August 30, 2006
Euro Seen As Expensive By US VCs
Even after all these years of Euro being the standard currency in Europe Union (except for the UK and a couple of the Nordic and new EU countries) there are still some strange notions about it. A new one we heard yesterday is that US VCs think of it as "expensive" when considering a European investment.
The Euro : Colorful, Controversial, Practical (And Less Currency Conversion Makes Our Jobs As Journos Easier)
It came up during a phone interview yesterday with Nicolas von Bülow of Clipperton Finance, a corporate finance boutique that is specialized in tech and media deals, while working on a feature story for one of our freelance markets.
He said he often has to help the US investors get over the perception that the Euro is "expensive". He said, "For some reason, they think the Dollar and the Euro should be on par. Why should it? What's that all about?"
Indeed, instead of looking at that, all the US VC has to do is look at the valuations, which are still lower over here than in the hotter US market. Clipperton recently put together good-sized syndicates for two semiconductor startups here: Sequans, specialized in Wimax, and Dibcom, specialized in mobile TV.
Read - Sequans raises $24m in financing led by Kennet Venture Partners (clipperton)
Read -DiBcom raises €24.5M round led by Partech International (clipperton)
Posted at 02:02 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Free Web Photo Album Software Pulls Nordic Venture Partners
While other VCs have been chasing hastily slapped together online photo sharing community sites, Nordic Venture Partners has invested in JAlbum, a developer of software for Web photo albums. We learned of the deal of an undisclosed size in the daily PE Week newsletter.
The application is apparently available as freeware and is the work of a single software developer. It has a pretty big following due to its ease of use, and features easy uploading and publishing to websites. But what the plans are for JAlbum as a business we don't know - but will update if we hear more.
JAlbum's Software Lets Users Put Their Photos Online In Customized Albums
Read - Deal News (pe week newsletter)
Read - Jalbum Nominated For Gearhead Awards (networkworld)
Posted at 11:59 AM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
Kelbook: The Inside Story Of Kelkoo
We've just finished reading a book about how Kelkoo's management and backers created the European online shopping comparison company that was acquired in early 2004 by Yahoo for €475M.
Entitled Ils Ont Reussi Leur Start-Up: Le success story de kelkoo! , also known as Kelbook, it was written by Julien Codorniou and Cyrille de Lasteyrie, a Microsoft executive in France responsible for the software giants' relationships with venture backed companies in Europe, and a journalist, respectively.
It is the story of the deal that pretty much started off this cycle of venture capital investing in Europe and worth reading (if you read French). It entertainingly imparts a lot of lessons, ones that are more able to be emulated than some of the tech venture success stories that emerged during the bubble, without being dry and educational.
Structured as a timeline, the authors document the formation, the launch, the switch in business models, the near misses, the conversations, the penny-pinching, the bravado, and the deals made by Kelkoo's management, headed by Pierre Chappaz, and a host of supporters, on their way to creating a quick growing, profitable Internet company that was worth half a billion dollars.
The story climaxes with a dual track exit strategy and a showdown between Chappaz and Yahoo's top brass. It is worth buying for that chapter alone.
Although the Kelkoo deal was not the largest exit valuation to take place in Europe in recent times, nor did it deliver its VC backers their biggest return ever -- they quintupled their money -- the book is useful also as a source of insight into on some of the personalities active in the Internet and technology venture scene in Europe today: people like Chappaz, who was Kelkoo's CEO, and is today the Co-CEO of Netvibes (the personalized homepage company backed by Index Ventures and Accel), and Wikio (a news and blog aggregator with a user rating engine).
Or Dominique Vidal, who actually was working for one of Kelkoo's two principal venture capital backers, Banexi Ventures, and was then hired away by Chappaz to work for him at Kelkoo. Vidal now heads up Yahoo Europe.
Besides these two and a host of others, there are the three Bull engineers behind Kelkoo's core shopping engine that are also part of the story, and have gone on to new things, namely Maurizio Lopez, who had been heading up Bull's R&D unit and is now travelling, Remy Amouroux, now a chief software architect at Yahoo, and Christophe Odin, who now heads up Kapirsk, a business angel investment vehicle.
We're seriously thinking of translating the book, so stay tuned.
Link (Julien Codorniou Blog)
Link (Cyrille de Lasteyrie blog)
Posted at 09:43 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
August 29, 2006
More Cash For Online Shoe Shop Sarenza
As sister-site alarm:clock has been pointing out online shoe stores are a "bright lite" among ecommerce ventures these days. It also seems to be the case in Europe. France's Sarenza, which sells sometimes hard-to-get, trendy, and well-known brands of footwear, has taken on €4M in new capital, just a few short months after raising €2.5M from Galileo Partners and business angels. It's first round was announced in December.
Clean, Clear Web Design And Shopping By Brand Is The Mode At Sarenza
Francis LeLong, Co-CEO of Sarenza said that sales in France are growing faster than it expected, which inspired the team to raise new capital to "consolidate" its position in France, and to begin to expand into the UK and Germany. The firm's marketing chief said that it will be "adapting" the model it established in France as it crosses borders, working with local ecommerce partners in each country as it goes along.
For this round SGAM (Societe Generale Asset Management) joined Galileo in leading the round. SGAM said that Sarenza is ahead of its competition in a statement explaining why his firm's VC funds were allocated to the startup.
Read - SARENZA.COM, leader de la vente de chaussures sur Internet en France, lève 4 millions d’euros auprès de SGAM et GALILEO PARTNERS (vecteurdimage)
Read - 8 mois après le précédent, 2nd tour de 4M pour Sarenza (chausson finance blog)
Posted at 05:24 AM | Posted to News And Updates | eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
August 28, 2006
BW Seek's Europe's Best Entrepreneurs Under 25.
BusinessWeek.com says it is "embarking on a search for Europe's Best Entrepreneurs Under 25". It's looking for people running their own companies, not business plans.
The editorial team is casting a wide net and doesn't specify that the startup has to be in the technology sector. That's a good thing as it wouldn't t find too many entrepreneurs under the age of 25 among venture-backed companies -- the rule of the day is to fund so-called serial entrepreneurs and few are that young.
Even Ehssan Dariani, co-founder of StudiVZ.com, the popular German Facebook clone (angel-backed by Lukasz Gadowski of Spreadshirt, and the Samwer brothers) is 26 years old.
StudiVZ Founders (l to r) Ehssan Dariani, Dennis Bemmann und Michael Brehm
Link - Europe's Young Entrepreneurs (businessweek)
Read - StudiVZ wächst schneller als OpenBC! (gruenderszene)
Read - Capitalist Manifesto (newsweek)
Posted at 01:41 PM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
French and US VCs Team Up For New Travel Search Startup
DoHop, Kayak, and travel shopping comparison engines inside some of the larger portals have a new venture-backed competitor on the scene now that Sofinnova Partners and Walden International have invested €8M in Travel Meta Search, a recently formed search engine business for airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, and the like. The company was created this year when Coelis, which runs the Tazzoo travel site, and Fare.Net, based in Singapore merged. It's targeting the East Asian and Indian users, as well as European users.
Posted at 09:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Expansion Capital For Dutch Software Startup Servoy
Servoy, a Dutch startup that sells software development tools for database and web services application developers, has raised expansion capital from Dutch private equity firm, Newion, which manages the Private Plus Fund, along with its early, private backers.
The amount raised was not disclosed but we know that Newion caps investments by its Private Plus Fund at €2M.
The founders, three Europeans and one American, were involved in their own software and systems integrator businesses and formed Servoy a couple of years ago to develop Java software that would solve some of the issues they ran into when doing application development for big name clients.
The US-based co-founder came out of the Filemaker application developer market. Filemaker, an Apple subsdiary that has annual sales of about $85M, is a competitor, according to industry sources, but Servoy is also used by Filemaker application developers to develop so-called web frontends.
Its software development tools are positioned as enablers of rich Internet application, or more integrated web applications, that can pull data from various legacy databases, such as those from Oracle, Sybase, and MySQL.
Read - Servoy: AJAX, SOA, SaaS Platform for Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, MySQL Receives Funding (ajax sys con)
Posted at 07:13 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro's Most Read Posts Last Week
Here's the list of the stories posted last week that generated the most views by your fellow a:c euro readers:
Mangrove Backs Nimbuzz: Free Mobilephone Instant Messaging Service
Nordic VCs Back Windows For Mobilephones Startup
Web 2.0 And The Mom Reality Check
Two More Euro VCs-That-Blog
Grouper Networks Acquisition, A Quick Flip For T-Online Ventures
Awox' Raises Second Round For Home Networking Play
Index Ventures Backs StubHub Clone
Posted at 03:54 AM | Posted to Top 7 In Last 7 | TrackBack | Permalink
August 25, 2006
Mobilephone Casino Startup Raises GBP4M With AIM Listing
Instead of raising venture capital, the founders of Probability, turned to AIM in London yesterday, raising £4.1M, about £3.7M of which flowed back to the company. Its valuation at the time of the listing was £13.7M.
Probability has a gaming license in the UK (Channel Islands) and develops casino games, bingo, and lottery services that runs for mobilephone network operators.
The London based company was co-founded in 2003 by Charles Cohen, whose name might be familiar to some readers -- he co-founded Beenz.com, which promoted a virtual currency or e-cash on the Internet.
It raised about $80M during the bubble but it flopped and closed in 2001. Cohen was quoted in TIME in 2000 as saying: "I believe we'll start to see beenz listed against other major currencies."
This time around, he has chosen a more established business model, than trying to establish a new currency. With backing from undisclosed investors Probability went live in 2004. The company claims 20 million wagers taken to date.
Read - IPO Probability IPO First Day (allipo)
Posted at 08:35 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro Venture Quiz Winner
Congratulations to this week's venture quiz winner, Chris Grew, partner at WilmerHale, the legal advisory firm.
The quiz question this week , Name three former Intel Capital team members that are now partners at European venture capital firms, has proven to be a tough one. Grew was the only person to get the answer and he even added a bonus one.
Dr. Christian Waldvogel --Vinci Capital
George Powlick -- Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures
Nigel Grierson -- Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures
George Coelho -- Benchmark Capital
He knows who's who in the venture market as his firm does a lot of VC work in Europe and the US. He writes: According to VentureOne, we are counsel to more European companies receiving venture financing in each of 2004 and 2005 than any other law firm, and counsel to more European venture-backed companies, than any other law firm.
Posted at 08:20 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
August 24, 2006
Electronic Arts Buys Phenomic Game And Other Fresh Euro Deals
Investments
SWEDEN Replisaurus Technologies Has Raised $14.4M in Series A Wellington and Northzone Back A Disruptive Wafer Process Led By An Imported American Serial Entrepreneur (Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment )
ISRAEL B-hive Networks Has Raised $7M in Series A Deal Led By Venrock Associates and Index Ventures (Enterprise Data Network Monitoring And Control)
M&A
GERMANY Phenomic Games Has Been Acquired By Electronic Arts For An Undislcosed Amount Phenomic creators of the popular Siedler/Settlers and SpellForce real time strategy games to become new studio in Europe for EA. (Real Time Strategy Games For PC, Web, Platforms)
LONDON, UK Sky Media Buys The Shares Of Auro Sports That It Didn't Already Own (Online Sports AdSales)
PARIS, FRANCE Comverse Technology [Nasdaq: CMTV] To Acquire Netonomy For $19M. Netonomy Had Raised $36M in VC Funding (Self-service Bill Analysis and Point of Sale Solutions)
NEW YORK, NY Italy's Dada US subsidiary Dada Mobile Has Acquired Upoc Networks For $7M. Upoc had raised around $27M in VC Funding (Wireless Internet Content/community/commerce)
Posted at 07:38 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 23, 2006
Shoulder-Bag's Solar Panel Recharges Cellphones On The Go
Until technologists come up with longer life batteries, a Swiss startup that gave itself a trendy Chinese name, Dauchu Go (the Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger says it means "everwhere") has a chance with its synthetic shoulder-bags that come with a built in recharging unit driven by solar power. It can be used for recharging hand-held devices, including brand-name mobilephones and MP3 players, the company website says.
We found a report in the Tages Anzeiger about Dauchu Go that says the idea came from a couple of 20-year old university students. They source the bags from East Asia and assemble them in Staefa, near Zurich.
The flexible solar panels are removable (image left) and are sourced from Flexcell, another Swiss startup that recently received a strategic investment from Germany's Q-Cells, a solar cell manufacturer.
Read - Solarpower für Handy oder iPod (tages anzeiger)
Read - Qcells Invest in Swiss Solar (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 04:06 PM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
Two More Euro VCs-That-Blog
Two partners hailing from European venture capital firms have started up new blogs, commenting on deals done, growing technology businesses, and they sometimes deliver the occasonal bit of gossip on the comings and goings at VC firms on this side of the Atlantic before the private equity journals do. 
They are: Fred Destin (r), a partner at Atlas Venture, whose blog byline is "A VC in Europe: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Entrepreneurs", and Nic Brisbourne (l), a partner at Esprit Capital Partners (the name of the combined technology investment firms Cazenove Private Equity and Prelude Ventures) whose blog is called the Equity Kicker.
Link: The Equity Kicker (Nic Brisbourne, Esprit)
Link: Fred Destin (Atlas Venture)
Read: More Euro VC Blogs (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:56 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Grouper Acquisition, A Quick Flip For T-Online Ventures
Sony has acquired Grouper Networks, which runs a popular video sharing site that exploits peer-to-peer technology, for $65M, a deal that gives a European corporate venture capital fund a quick exit on one of its recent investments.
According to ipdemocracy blog, T-online Ventures invested $1.75M last December, as part of a total of $5.25M Grouper raised since founding in 2004.
The venture capital arm of Deutsche Telecom is not exactly known for cultivating the fine art of the quick flip, but in the case of its investment in Grouper, a Silicon Valley-baesd , it got one.
VC Ratings blog has some good background on other deals in this category.
The price Sony paid is not bad for the amount of VC reportedly raised and the time to exit, but the size of the deal will not be wowing other venture capital firms, who need to eventually sell their investments in consumer oriented video publishing sites for a lot more than that, at least 5 times, in order to make an impression on their fund's performance - depending on the size of their fund, that is.
Read - Sony Buys Online Video Sharing (vc ratings)
Read - Upstart Grouper Lands Funding from Deutsche Telekom (ipdemocracy)
Posted at 06:39 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2006
alarm:clock euro Venture Quiz Question
Name three former Intel Capital team members that are now partners at European venture capital firms. Hint: one's a managing partner at a VC fund in Switzerland, one's a general partner at a large London-based venture fund, and one is a partner at a big-name private equity outfit that used to invest in early stage, but is now into expansion venture capital and buyouts.
Click the Comments link below or the Contact Us link to the right and fire off an email to win fame, if not fortune, in the a:c euro venture quiz question this week.
Posted at 09:33 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
August 21, 2006
Mangrove Backs Nimbuzz: Free Mobilephone Instant Messaging Service
Nimbuzz, a Netherlands-based mobile service provider, which launched in Beta today, is offering free instant messaging to mobilephone users. The a:c euro interviewed Evert Japp Lugt, CEO and co-founder.
The company behind the service is Buzzaa Media Group, and its backer is Mangrove Capital Partners, now famous for having backed Skype in its early stage.
Jaap Lugt told us about how he met last year with the Mangrove team to discuss the business concept after developing a prototype with his own capital ( from the sale of a previous venture).
The plan was not to raise VC money, but he decided to do it, he said, after he got the feeling that he was "not the smartest person sitting at the table" . "It's the first time I've seen smart money [in the Benelux region]," he said. 
The amount Nimbuzz raised is not disclosed but Jaap Lugt said it was "significant". The deal went through about 8 months ago.
Nimbuzz enables registered users that have installed its Javaphone client to have free messaging. It's based on the Jabber IM platform and offers open access to MSN Messenger, GTalk, and Nimbuzz contacts. The plan is to make it available for Symbian smartphones soon.
Communications are over IP and users access the Internet via the network operators' gateway. We said the service is free from Nimbuzz but the user will be paying some kind of monthly fee to his service provider. Our operator, for example, includes data traffic up to 2MB per month at no extra charge to our monthly package.
We tried both the messaging and the voice call application and can report that it works. Helpful features, such as tones to indicate incoming messages, and being able to ring up a contact (Buzz feature) to notify that you want to chat, shows that they've thought about how people actually use their phones. Voice quality was as good as Skype.
Nimbuzz plans to offer premium service to its users, including Nimbuzz to mobilephone and fixed line voice calls, conference calls, voice messaging, and related services.
This is not Jaap Lugt's first venture. He also founded @media, which developed a Palm Pilot data comms application for the pharma market, which he sold to NOB Mobile in 2000. After leaving NOB Mobile he's also been an active angel investor. One of the conditions of Mangrove's investment was that he agree to lead the company, which employs 10 in Amsterdam.
Posted at 06:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Web 2.0 And The Mom Reality Check
Over at the fairly new Dead 2.0 blog, its skeptic-in-chief is running some of the "consumer Internet" terminology -- terms such as wiki, RSS, and social networking -- by his Mom, who is not exactly an Internet newbie, to see if she actually feels driven to use these online services (once she's discovered what they are). And we've linked to the results.
It's worth reading if you are a person whose eyes light up at the sound of "consumer" and "internet" used in conjuction the way our eyes light up at a big piece of Black Forest cake.
One of the site commenters said that maybe his Mom is not the right demographic for his questions - maybe it should be "kid brother" or "little sister".
But then again kids don't give a thought to what this stuff is called, they just want it, or use it, if they're friends are into it, as a post on Bebo's popularity on the Irish blog, Free Roaming, makes pretty clear.
Read - Bebo (free roaming blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats Social Networking (dead 2.0 blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats RSS (dead 2.0 blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats A Wiki (dead 2.0 blog)
Posted at 05:23 PM | Posted to Online services | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Nordic VCs Back Windows For Mobilephones Startup
Colochrome, a Finnish manufacturer of protective lenses, or windows, for mobilephones and hand-held devices, has raised a Series A financing round from Eqvitec and Creandum. The arrangement also includes debt financing from the OP Bank Group. The amount of capital raised was not disclosed.
The new funding will be used to ramp up manufacturing capacity of Colochrome's line of scratch resistant and display enhancing windows. The firm has been working since 2002 to create manufacturing process that is responsive and to a level demanded by high volume consumer electronics manufacturers. It will be ready to go online in early 2007.
"The market of protective lenses in mobile telecom handsets alone is estimated to grow to 2.5 billion units by 2010. Colochrome addresses this significant market need with a very promising new solution. Colochrome also shows that it is still possible to develop telecom manufacturing business from Scandinavia with new innovations and a global mindset from the start," says Jussi Hattula, Investment Director for Eqvitec Partners, advisor for Eqvitec Technology Fund III.Read - Colochrome Secures Financing for Global Market Entry (colochrome)
Posted at 12:54 PM | Posted to Hardware | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Awox Raises Second Round For Home Networking Play
AwoX, a French developer of software and consumer gear for Internet TV and home networking, has a raised a second round of financing of an undisclosed amount from INNOVACOM and CIC Capital Privé.
The company, which was founded by a team that parachuted out of Palm Computing Europe, sells software that manages video on demand, Internet Radio and electronic programming guides, as well as things like a universal remote and customer premises equipment. It's using Texas Instruments and Intel chips for its platform. Target customers are consumer electronics manufacturers.We did not find a list of reference customers on it website.
Read - AwoX réalise une deuxième levée de fond pour asseoir sa position de leader dans les technologies de convergence numérique (intelink)
Posted at 08:17 AM | Posted to Interactive TV | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 20, 2006
alarm:clock euro's Most Read Posts Last Week
Here's the list of the stories posted last week that generated the most views by your fellow a:c euro readers:
Index Venutres And Accel Take Big Bet On Netvibes
Early Stage Rivals: Bix vs BattleOut
Ajax And Soc Network Analysis Hot, Mashups Less So,
Why Wintel And Dell Might Be Shopping Soon, And Where
Getting Personal: Flakes versus Vibes
Index Ventures Backs StubHub Clone
Fun Technologies Acquires Flash Games Startup, Its Seventh Acquisition Archives
Posted at 04:23 PM | Posted to Top 7 In Last 7 | TrackBack | Permalink
August 18, 2006
Index Ventures Backs StubHub Clone
Index Ventures has not confirmed it yet, but Red Herring says that it has invested in Viagogo, which is running an online platform for German and British consumers to buy and sell sports event, music, and concert tickets that they alread own.
Marketwatch calls it an online ticket scalping business and points out that StubHub in the US has been doing it in the US market for six years.
After reading the reports and taking a look at the site, we can say that the investors are following a tried and true formula of importing a US online business to Europe. But this time they got two of the US entrepreneurs responsible for StarHub, Eric Baker and Christopher Miller, to actually come here and try to re-do in Europe what they did in the US.
And the board that has been appointed should give Viagogo some credibility in the online world (and business press), such as famous founders Fabrice Grinda, who recently sold his mobile ringtone startup Zingy, and Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com, as well as Yahoo's Dave Katz who heads up the online giant's sports and entertainment media group.
Red Herring describes the transaction-based business model here:
So how does Viagogo work? Suppose there’s a ticket on sale for $100. The buyer will pay $110 to purchase the ticket, factoring in a 10 percent commission to Viagogo. The seller receives $85, thanks to a 15 percent commission on the other end. But Viagogo doesn’t just sit back and collect its profit; the company actually takes care of the shipping labels itself, tracks the package, and holds the entirety of the payment until the deal goes through.
Read - Ticket Hub Launches in UK (Red Herring)
Read - Online ticket scalping comes to Europe (marketwatch)
Posted at 07:00 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Getting Personal: Flakes versus Vibes
With rival Netvibes raising €12M this week, we asked Pageflakes, which we've been keeping in contact with since it launched a similar personalized homepage application in February, if the news was keeping the team up at night.
Christoph Janz, Pageflakes co-founder and CEO answered that it is customer feedback like this: “I’ve been using MyYahoo for six years now. But now I’ve switched to Pageflakes!” that keeps them up.
He is suggesting that the entrepreneurial team is motivated to work harder because happy users, might lead to happy revenue-generating users. When a business is following the freemium model it is as good as it gets. (See Link below).
But what about the Netvibes competition? “I think Netvibes is a very serious competitor, but competition can also be helpful in conveying the general concept of personalized AJAX [Java Script and Extensible Markup Language] desktops to a broad audience. There’s a German saying, Konkurrenz belebt das Geschäft,” said Janz.
In other words, the fact that there are several teams trying to promote more open personal "homepages" for users means that it could fire market demand, encourage software developers to make adds-on for it, and attract strategic partners.
It's a classic emerging technology pioneer scenario, although we're more accustomed to seeing it in the chip or enterprise software market.
The competiton is pretty close. Both tapped deep-pocketed venture capitalists. Pageflakes is backed by Benchmark Capital's European fund. Netvibes is backed by Accel's, along with Index Ventures.
Pageflake's "homepage" application, like Netvibes’s, makes available small applications, or modules, (Flakes as the German firm calls them) to put webmail, ToDo lists, and user applications all in one place, and it displays newsfeeds that the users can easily add, edit, and remove.
We interviewed Christoph Janz for a profile a few weeks ago and took a quick look again this week, noting that it has been developing a lot of “Flakes” in-house, particularly ones that can bring in some affiliate marketing revenues, such as shopping comparison engines, music downloads, and text messaging, among others.
Pageflakes also has a feature that makes it easy to share a homepage with other users.
Comparing usage, Pageflakes, the younger site, is getting 20,000 visits a day, about 600,000 visits a month, and the users are typical early adopters, said Janz, confirming that most are tech savvy. Netvibes says it had 5 million such visits in July.
We note here that the companies are talking about "visits". We checked with both firms and neither could tell us the number of actual users that the visits numbers represent, those that have created a homepage, put a name on it, and filled it with personal favourite feeds, and widgets. They say that the way people use the application, combined with a lack of good analytics software make it difficult for them to give such numbers.
We asked Janz how Pageflakes will attract a less techie set of users to sustain growth. He answered, "By developing modules targeted at mainstream users, it should become more attractive for them."
There's a good team there to help him do that. Pageflakes was founded by a team of five, one of whom, Ole Brandenburg was a co-founder of the German auction site alando.de (which was acquired by eBay a few months after it raised venture capital), while Janz, founded in 1997 DealPilot, an online shopping comparison engine, and he stayed on for some time after it was acquired by shopping.com in 2000.
Since then, Janz spent his time providing management consulting for three startups, starting work on Pageflakes in 2005. It was launched in February '06, about six months after Netvibes.
Interestingly Netvibes’ Co-CEO Pierre Chappaz also built an online shopping comparison business in his previous venture, Kelkoo, one of Europe's homeruns back in 2004.
In both cases, as we understand it, the entrepreneurs did not focus on generating sales until quite some time after actually launching – getting traffic was first on the agenda. What is more, they changed business models at least once in the lifetimes’ of the ventures, eventually getting right.
In other words, both are following a formula this time around that they know. It is not a bulletproof way to go. The upstarts are trying to attract some of the same users that the bigger names in consumer-oriented web portals are getting today. And there open questions: will traffic growth levels continue and more importantly, will they find a way to make money, and finally what kind of exit is going to be possible now that they raised VC money.
It is risky, but then again, let's state the obvious, what is venture capital without risk.
Read - Biz Model With No Name Gets One: Freemium (alarm:clock euro)
Read - Netvibes Raises €12M B Round (alarm:clock euro)
Read - Netvibes Founder Says Usage Up, But Still No Biz Model (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:23 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
German Telcos In Demand, As Acquisition Targets
Is the German broadband services market going to get more competitve or less competitive? More competition would be good for online service and media companies whose businesses rely on lots of users having big fat data pipes, as prices would drop and adoption would increase.
We are wondering about it because the German press is reporting that private equity giant, Apax, and the UK-based telecommunications giant, are both looking to buy German telcos. AOL's AOL Deutschland business is up for sale, but there are others that they are eyeing too.
BT says it would consider businesses doing €100M and up to €250M in sales, while Apax has a wider price span.
Apax's plan is to do a rollup, while BT's is aiming to find new revenue streams.
The Apax strategy seems kind of counterintuitive from where we sit as it would lead to less competition in the telecoms market, rather than more.
Read - Das große Fressen (manager magazin)
Read - VDSL: BT Group rechnet mit ungehindertem Zugang (pcwelt)
Posted at 06:21 AM | Posted to Broadband Services | TrackBack | Permalink
August 17, 2006
In The VC World You Can't Say Cherchez La Femme
VentureWire Alert is reporting today the number of women running venture backed companies is on the decline, sourcing its sister research company, VentureOne, whose database is fairly definitive, we hear.
The percentage of venture-backed companies with female chief executives has fallen from roughly 8% in 1999 to about 5% in 2005, while the percentage of companies with women in management at a level of vice president or higher has fallen from 41% to 33% during that same period.Through the first half of 2006 the downward trend continued, with less than 4% of the CEO jobs at venture-backed companies going to women, and the percentage with female top managers falling to about 30%. Both figures would be 10-year lows, according to the study.
We guess that the data makes it one place where when buckets of money are lost, you cannot say, "cherchez la femme".
Read - Meanings and origins of phrases (phrases.org)
Posted at 03:53 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
August 16, 2006
How To Be A Famous Incubator
European university incubators and science parks could learn a few things about how to market themselves from the recently formed Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. It gets regular attention in the business and tech trade press, which is bound to help some of its startups get noticed by potential partners, customers, and new hires.
Yes, it helps that there is a billionaire founder that is sponsoring the institute, one that a lot of journalists like, but carrying out timely and sensational launches, or demonstration of technical wizardry, is something that the HPI is doing right.
Take its latest press campaign, for example, demonstrating a 3D visualization software from one of its startup teams. It shows the outline of the Berlin Wall (in red) and No Mans Land in between, something it released almost to the date of the 45 year anniversary of the wall going up, and almost 17 years after it came down.
Read - Europe's Computer Genius (newsweek)
Read - Virtuell steht die Berliner Mauer wieder (spiegel)
Posted at 04:36 PM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
Swiss Synova Raises Capital For Semiconductor Equipment Expansion
Synova, a Swiss company that sells equipment to cut up wafers into chips using an innovative water jet-guided laser technology, said it had raised financing SFr 10M ($8.1M) from "Swiss banks".
The type of financing was undisclosed, but we doubt it is equity financing as most Swiss banks dropped their venture capital funds four years ago.
Synova, founded in 1997, and based in Lausanne, said it will use the capital to open up a couple demo and development centers, one of which will be in Silicon Valley. Its technology is used to squeeze more dies out of a wafer, which is important in pricey LED chips and some of the higher end semiconductor devices.
There are two other ventures that are based in Europe that offer competing technologies, ALSI, which is backed by Falk Strascheg, a Munich-based venture capital and institutional investor, and XSIL, has been funded by its founder, Peter Conlon, who sold his last venture to Agilent for €100M in cash.
The press section of the websites of these have not been updated in over a year, so we cannot tell you if business is booming or if they are losing out to Synova in this niche of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment sector.
Read - Synova Secures CHF 10 Million (USD 8.1 Million) to Drive Global Expansion Efforts (prnewswire)
Posted at 10:06 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro Organic Electronics Market Takes Shape, Investors Ignore It
We noticed that the Organic Semiconductor Conference to be held in September in Frankfurt dropped the "Semiconductor" from its name. The change highlights the trend that sees polymer or organic electronics, a technology that so far is mainly targeted at flat screen displays, moving into radio frequency ID chips, solar cells, and memory devices.
Memory Devices On Polymer Are Lightweight And Dramatically Increase Storage, Says Thin Film Electronics
But we're wondering why there aren't any venture capital firms or investment banks scheduled to take the podium or take part in the business and marketing panel discussions.
Looking at the roster, there will be a lot of startups on hand. There's the ones we know like Novaled, Oled-T, Nanoident, MicroEmissive Displays, Liquavista, PolyIC, and Plextronics (which just got funded this week, according to sister pub alarm:clock).
And we see some new names like Xaar, out of the UK and Thin Film Electronics out of Sweden, which looks like it has some pretty interesting printable memory "chips" in the works. It was recently trying to raise funding but didn't close the round as far as we know.
Read - Plextronics Close To Closing (alarm:clock)
Read - Speakers at Organic Electronics Conference and Exhibition 2006 (oea-osc)
Read - Organic semiconductors: history, industry and funding (oea-osc)
Posted at 07:18 AM | Posted to Displays | TrackBack | Permalink
German Ticketing Co Acquires Swiss e-Ticket Startup
CTS Eventim, which sells electronic ticketing systems for theatres and other types of venues, acquired six year old Basel-based e-ticketing company TicTec AG for less than €10M. TicTec develops eticketing software and runs the www.tictec.ch website. It is expecting to do sales SFr 2M this year.
We've seen several entrepreneurs in the region try out the e-ticketing market but few make it internationally, and usually end up getting acquired in deals similar to this one.
Read - CTS EVENTIM (financial.de)
Posted at 06:56 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 15, 2006
Ajax And Soc Network Analysis Hot, Mashups Less So, Says Report
Technology market research firm, Gartner, says it has taken a close look at Web 2.0 trends with a focus on "user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models" to see if they could reduce costs, increase revenues, or improve productivity among users of the technologies in the business and enterprise market (via Technofile blog).
Its findings: Social Network Analysis (note not social networks per se) and Ajax are likely to have high impact, while Mashups will have a more moderate impact. (We're intrigued by the Social Network Analysis software category and are going to keep an eye out for developments or projects in that area.)
Gartner sent us this interesting graphic mapping emerging technologies on its Hype Curve - it's worth taking a look (pops up in new window).
Gartner also says that a category it calls "Collective Intelligence" is not going to have an impact for five or ten years - a good thing because we don't have a clue what kind of software or applications it is referring to by that term - sounds vaguely Soviet. From the description it could be the Wiki concept but it could also be the open source way of developing software. We've got a question in to the analyst that wrote the report.
Read - Gartner's 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle Highlights Key Technology Themes (gartner)
Read - Gartner Blesses Web 2.0 (technofile)
Posted at 01:06 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Fun Technologies Acquires Flash Games Startup, Its Seventh Acquisition
FUN Technologies, which was founded in 2002 and went straight from friends and family financing to an AIM listing, has made its seventh acquisition, buying Teagames, a casual games developer that works in FLASH (Adobe/Macromedia) that was founded in 2003.
No financial details were disclosed. FUN's founders are still running the company. It is publicly traded on the AIM and TSE and is 51 percent owned by Liberty Media.
FUN says it has acquired a popular games developer that will expand European reach and market size.
Read - FUN Technologies Acquires UK Casual Games Site, Teagames (press release)
Posted at 11:28 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 14, 2006
Early Stage Rivals: Bix vs BattleOut
Sister site, alarm:clock published a post last week analyzing Bix.com out of Palo Alto. It has a European rival doing something similar, called BattleOut. Both are early entrants into a new kind of online contest where users particpate in the creation of competitions and vote the winners. Both offer prizes.
Bix.com runs karaoke and photo contests, and has raised $6.78M in VC funding from firms like Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Stanford University. Bix founder and CEO Mike Speiser previously launced Epinions.
We tried BattleOut and believe that it has the better designed interface, but is mainly focused on offering contests between two challengers, rather than several the way that Bix does. At the moment it is focused on photo contests - winners are judged not necessarily based on the quality of the photo, rather the attractiveness of what is pictured, e.g who owns the nicest car or has the prettiest girlfriend.
Email notifications tell contestants when new "battles" starts and when they end. If you don't cancel, new battles keep getting set up by the platform. So it is sticky, as the web insiders say.
It also encourages contestants to get friends and colleagues to sign up to be a registered user as a registered user vote is worth ten times as much as a casual passerby vote. The Dusseldorf-based creators are currently looking to raise angel funding, we hear.
Read - Epinions Founder Raises (alarm:clock)
Posted at 03:39 PM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
Stellent Acquires VC-Backed SealedMedia
US-based Stellent, a content management solutions company, has acquired SealedMedia, a digital rights managagement software firm, for $10 million in cash and up to $5 million based upon the achievement of certain financial milestones. The startup had raised more than $15M in venture financing, the latest being an internal round of $8.5M about a year ago, funded by Crescendo and Pond Ventures.
So this exit was probably not a big winner for the backers. The company founder will join Stellant.
SealedMedia is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) software provider that has a patented ability to give content owners control over files even after they've been downloaded and used by end users. It supports a lot of different file formats, including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, GIF, JPEG, MP3 and QuickTime) and gives the rights to purchasers, rather than a particular device, the company said.
Read - STELLENT STAKES LEADERSHIP CLAIM IN CONTENT SECURITY WITH TWO ACQUISITIONS (stellent PR)
Posted at 12:03 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink
Index Venutres And Accel In Big Bet On Netvibes
Over at Kelblog, Pierre Chappaz says that Index Ventures and Accel have invested €12M in Netvibes, the popular "personal portal", aka feedreader and web gadget/service aggregator. (Index backed its seed round too.)
Update: The official press release came out today, August 16, and it was a Series B financing. The earlier round led by Index, which we mentioned, is counting as a Series A round and not a seed round. In addition, Accel led the round.
The Netvibes co-CEO said the capital is to be used for hiring new developers ("Ajax and web standard gurus wanted") and to hire "top guns" to establish partnerhsips. It says it has 5 millions users as of today.
There have been no official comments about the valuation but the size of its first round - which is about four times a typical first round for a company at its stage of development -- can give us all a bit of clue.
Read - kelblog : Netvibes lève 12 millions d'euros (kelblog)
Read - Netvibe Boucle Un Tour (techcrunch France)
Posted at 11:00 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Mangrove's Tluszcz On Opps In Eastern Europe And Mobile Services
Mangrove, the young venture capital fund that is best known for being a Skype early backer is quite secretive about its activities, but one of its partners, Mark Tluszcz, has started to write occasionally on the corporate blog of its portfolio firm AllPeers (software company developing a Firefox plug-in for better media filesharing).
The blog, aptly named Peer Pressure, also has a New Business Models category that we like to read.
So far, Tluszcz has posted short items about investment opportunities in Eastern Europe, mentioning portfolio firm, AllPeers, which is based in Prague (with a North American and a French founder), but also stating that his firm is "about to invest" in Quintura, a search startup that has R&D in Russia.
That is him in this short video from vpod.tv founder Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, which we were allowed to publish here earlier this year.
Another area he's interested in is businesses that want to take a chunk off the cost of mobile communications, particularly in the areas of roaming, messaging, and video file transfers.
We agree with him on the latter point. There's a host of companies zooming in on this opportunity, some that we've already mentioned here, and more that we have not been able to get around to profiling yet.
Read - Mobile Communications Expensive (peer pressure blog)
Read - Look East and You Could Find…. (peer pressure blog)
Find New Business Model Posts on Peer Pressure (peer pressure blog)
Related a:c Euro Posts
Read - Startups Sink Fangs Into Cellcos
Read - Rebtels Global Mobile
Read Truphone Backer Touts Free Mobile
Posted at 06:32 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Why Wintel And Dell Might Be Shopping Soon, And Where
Red Herring has a meaty report comparing the downsizing Wintel (Dell, Microsoft, Intel) juggernaut to companies that are growing in the current cycle, namely Texas Instruments, the chipmaker that sells to Danger for its smartphones and Nokia), Red Hat (Linux), and Apple (iMac).
It is a long article but worth reading for startups and corporate finance types to understand the pressures facing the giants, Wintel plus Dell, in the PC, Web TV, games console, and smartphone markets. And to get some ideas of where they might be prepared to pay good money for acquisitions
Red Herring says that not all business units at the Intel and Microsof are slowing in growth and that they've made some big bets on new areas to drive their next wave of growth - but overall sales growth is slowing, to the point that some institutional investors see their shares as "value" stocks, as opposed to growth stocks.
The End of Wintel?(red herring)
Posted at 06:24 AM | Posted to Hardware | TrackBack | Permalink
August 12, 2006
a:c euro's Most Read Posts This Week
Here's the list of the stories posted last week that generated the most views by your fellow a:c euro readers:
Most Popular Posts Last 7 Days
Avid Acquires VC-Backed Sibelius
London M&A Powerhouse MergerMarket Covers Its Own Acquisition
Business 2.0 Maps Web 2.0 Worldwide
Ex-Hedgie Sees Money In Tech For Disease Diagnostics
Tracking The French Online Video Market
Upcoming Events In The Euro Venture Market
UKs Si-Light Raises Seed For Light Emission Tech
Posted at 11:24 AM | Posted to Top 7 In Last 7 | TrackBack | Permalink