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November 30, 2006

WiredMinds Funded by Creathor

Stuttgart-based WiredMinds, a web analytics software company, has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from Creathor, the Bad Homburg-based VC. Readers might not recognize Creathor. Although it is a farily new name and is in the process of fundraing, it was established by Gert Köhler who has a long track record in German VC. Köhler was a co-founder of Technologieholding in the late eighties, and he stayed on until 2003 after 3i acquired it in 2001. (He was one of the first VCs your a:c euro correspondent interviewed almost 9 years ago.)

Back to the present. WiredMinds, which is located in Stuttgart (HQ image right), has an established business based on it its newfangled pixel-based click tracking technology for portals and ecommerce sites that it sells using the SaaS model or by licensing (so-called source licensing). But the new money is to develop its MindSuite product , which we couldn't find on its website. In a statement, the firm said it is targeted at enterprises running web services and integrated applications (like CRM)

WiredMinds has been through the bubble and back, originally founding in 1997, and appears to have been restructured in 2003 to focus on its click tracking software.

Read - Creathor Venture invests in WiredMinds (creathor press pdf)

Posted at 12:43 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

alarm:clock euro Puzzler

This week's question:

Which London-based communications-oriented VC firm is a veritable Bain & Co. dugout, with a managing partner who was a founding partner of Bain & Company in Italy? Hint: Two of its recently added investment managers were with DFJ ePlanet Ventures before joining.

Click the Contact Us link in the right-hand column and fire off an email to win fame, if not fortune, in the a:c euro puzzler this week.

Posted at 09:18 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink

November 29, 2006

Esprit's Simon Cook Shows The a:c euro The Exit(s)

The other day we wrote that we wanted to hear more about "money out" as opposed to "money in" from the tech sector here.

Well, we got a response from Simon Cook (image right), the CEO of Esprit Capital Partners, the London-based company that was formed in July 2006 from the merger of Prelude Ventures and Cazenove Private Equity.

He sent us his presentation from the Super Investor conference, which delivers what we'd been looking for (we have a link for readers to download it below).

New Media / eCommerce Exits


Chip Sector Exits
The company logos in the images above and below are VC-backed exits, not investments, achieved since the bubble burst. The ones circled in red are billion euro companies now. At the risk of stating the obvious, semiconductors and new media/ecommerce companies are finding the exit and that's why VCs continue to invest with confidence in those areas.

There is a series of slides within the presentation that Simon Cook calls the Countdown - basically a detailed comparison between European and US venture performance since the bubble burst. It's a bit more witty than your usual investor confab presentation and it shows that with the exception of Google, European ventures are not doing too badly on the exit front.

The Message Is That European VCs Are Duking It Out With US VC For Limited Partner Commitments
Link - Celebrating European Venture Capital Success Presentation (pdf file at Esprit)

Posted at 03:32 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

Plazes Network Networks With Google Maps

Over at Plazes blog we read today that it has teamed up with the folks at Google Earth to integrate their users' location data into its maps. We wrote about Plazes a while ago when it attracted some angel investors. We still are trying to figure out what the pain point is that this firm's software solves but we'll let it slide - the techies of this world seem to love it.

Fact is mobilephone companies have tons of data about where users are and they are not doing anything with it - they are not adding services that let you see where your friends or kids are located, or where the next Starbucks is, and they do not seem to be heading in that direction either, so Plazes is jumping in with an alternative solution, at least for Internet users.

This video from Handelsblatt.com, part of series, has an interview with Plazes's mastermind Stefan Kellner. If you understand German, it's good.

Read -Locate Me Startup Gets Funded (the a:c euro)

Posted at 01:14 PM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink

Motorola Tops Up Wimax Startup Sequans' Latest Round

French fabless semiconductor startup, Sequans Communications, specialized in Wimax, has attracted an investment capital from Motorola, Ventures, the strategic VC arm of Moto. The investment is an extension of Sequans' recent $24M round led by Kennet Ventures back in July. It looks like Motorola is seriously interested in Wimax.

Read - Motorola Invests In Sequans (press rel.)
Read - Wimax is hot - Wimax is not (a:c euro)

Posted at 10:06 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

French VCs Back Fishy Dotcom

Pecheur.com, a French ecommerce company focused on hunting and fishing gear, has raised €1M from Sofimac, OTC Asset Management and BP Creation. The Gannat-based firm sells gear for the hobby gamesman. The new capital will be used to add more merchandise in related areas, such as pets and camping gear.

Everything You Need To Smoke Today's Catch

The company was founded in 2000 but really started to develop in 2004 with the addition of a new executive to the team. Sales in 2004 were €380K, growing to €900K in 2005 and on track for €1.5M in 2006. Prices, depth of product range, and its distribution have contributed to sales growth, the firm said in a statement.
Read - SOFIMAC Partners participe à la levée de fonds de Pecheur (press rel.)

Posted at 05:28 AM | Posted to News And Updates | eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink

November 28, 2006

Pagebull Launches - Visual Search Results

Christopher Muenchhoff, one of the two founding team members of Pagebull.com, wrote in to tell us his firm has launched its new search site that instead of a page of text links, delivers up screenshots of hits in response to a search query - if the websites have been produced using standard web formatting (Flash pages are an issue, for example).

Search For the alarm clock And You Can Learn A Lot Before You Click Thru
Icons in the lower left corner of each "hit" describes the site's contents and a Zoom icon provides a larger view of the page. It's a search engine that you would use when looking for a particular website, or a company, or a product's homepage, not necessarily when researching a topic or looking for tickets to the next U2 concert.

This is Muenchhoff's third venture. He co-founded Dealpilot.com in Germany back in the nineties, and subsequently sold a stake to Bertelsmann. Over the years it changed hands several times, finally ending up as eBay's Dealtime service. After that he founded a solar cell startup, but he closed it down in 2003 as he learned that a subsidies-driven business was not for him. He is also an angel investor in several German startups.

We asked a couple of our regular readers to take a look at the beta yesterday. (More below the jump)

The reactions were diverse. It takes about a minute to understand the search concept, especially if you have not been exposed to things like Ask.com's Binoculars feature. A minute or two can be perceived as a long time, we learned.

Another said it's great for finding out about a company - delivering an instant visual overview, displaying corporate blog, photos in Flickr, and the homepage, all in one page. But it is also clear that a broadband connection is required. A reader tried to access from China and had a slow response. And since he's a VC, he wonders how unique the underlying tech is and if a business can be built on the back of it without that differentiation.

We think it is a click reducing concept for the end user, and that it could also put a crimp in the traffic flow to sites that are set up to take advantage of people clicking through to them by accident. For the a:c that would not be a bad thing, actually - to lose some of the traffic from people looking for a "talking digital alarm clock" or a "rolling alarm clock".

As for the business behind such a tool, Muenchoff who is in the process of moving the venture and his family from Germany to Edinburgh, Scotland, says that he wants to see what kind of uptake it has, and then he can implement a traditional search biz model, such as sponsored links. The company is angel financed.

Posted at 12:51 PM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink

FAST Acquires Platefood's Contextual Search Biz For €8.1M

Norway's FAST Search & Transfer has bought out its strategic co-investors in Platefood, a British contextual search advertising software and related service provider that offers content and directories publishers an alternative to search advertising solutions from the Internet giants.

Platefood was originally set up as a joint investment in 2005 by Schibsted SØK AS, Sensis Pty and FAST. FAST acquired Schibsted's 20 percent and Sensis's 61 percent for € 8.1M in cash. FAST owned 19 percent prior to this transaction. The deal closed November 27, 2006, and FAST expects that all Platefood employees will be kept on.

Platefood Might Be Good With Search Ad Tech But Its Flash Website Is Retina Wrecking
Read - FAST Acquires Platefood (press rel.)

Posted at 12:29 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink

Sweden's Tilgin To IPO

Swedish supplier of set-top boxes and gateways for broadband consumers to access so-called triple-play service (Interactive TV/Internet/Voice) is currently in the runup to float on the Stockholm Stock Exchange on December 15. It's a small IPO, aiming to raise about €11.5M, and from what we could see in its prospectus, which is only published in Swedish, there are no venture firms backing it.

Earlier in the year we covered Tilgin's quick growth mode. It sales were SEK 283mn (US$ 39.83mn EUR 31.06mn) during the first three quarters in 2006. The firm expects to be profitable in the second half of 2006.

Tilgin's French rival, Netcentrex, a much larger venture-backed operation, was acquired by Comverse last month for $170M including earnout.

Read - Read - Tilgin's Hockey Stick Growth (the a:c euro)

Posted at 09:38 AM | Posted to Interactive TV | TrackBack | Permalink

Whiskey-brand Has Scottish Startup's Display Tech On Tap

We picked up the news today that Glasgow-based Design LED Products has won its first commercial rollout with Scottish whiskey-maker The Famous Grouse, which will be installing point-of-sale displays in pubs in the UK exploiting the firm's innovative display technology.

We're reporting it because that kind of news usually presages a first round of financing.

One Display Has Many Ways To Animate That Logo

So far, the very-early-stage investor Braveheart Investment has been backing Design LED, which has patented the technology to make displays that enable mobilephone designers, indoor advertising display-makers, and even TV set manufacturers to add additional screen real estate to their hardware. It fits curved and 3D surfaces, something enabled by its getting rid of the rigid printed circuit board typically found in displays.

It also has a "secret-until-lit" feature that lets viewers see only parts of the display, which is nice for animated logos, but really interesting when developing user interfaces for appliances or other types of consumer electronics, enabling icons only being backlit when appropriate to the programming sequence

Back in July, Braveheart invested about $400K in Design LED. It was a second tranche of capital for the almost two year old firm, according to an article in The Scotsman. Braveheart, which has nice digs in Perth, (image right) has a good track record in backing early stage electronics sector firms: it backed Wolfson MicroElectronics (one of the 10X venture capital exits in the European market since the bubble burst) as well as AIM listed MicroEmissive Displays.

Read - Lighting up the Grouse brand at the point of sale (press rel.)
Read - Design LED is Braveheart's Alpha investment (The Scotsman)

Posted at 07:58 AM | Posted to Displays | Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink

The Devil Wore Malware And WiFi Worms On Planes

Selling software to secure computer data and online services is kind of a dull business, unless of course someone like F-Secure's Mikko Hyponnen is doing the talking, and then it sounds like the trailer for an upcoming Hollywood thriller.

Our fllippancy here is only a pose, we actually believe that a few more tech executives Europe could be learning about public relations from Hyponnen. F-Secure's stock performance over the past five years would be one reason we've formed that opinion.

The security software company's chief research officer is interviewed by Bruno Giussani, a journalist and conference producer, over at the Lunch Over IP blog. It is an entertaining piece that describes the latest scary security threats: WiFi worms and professional bands of malware software developers whose intent is to separate PC users from their savings.

F-Secure was ahead of the curve in identifying wireless security threats and Hyponnen recalls that the first mobile phone virus was found in 2004 and since then 335 mobile phone viruses have hit the airwaves. Then he talks about what's next:

Wi-Fi worms, jumping from one Windows laptop to another, reaching organizations' internal network as people physically carry the infection in, bypassing corporate firewalls.

The Wi-Fi worm threat sounds a bit Like Snakes On A Plane, but we've little doubt that F-Secure has the right call on this one.

Hyponnen also talked about the evolution of viruses and their creators too.

In place of widespread malware assaults, 2006 has been characterized by targeted attacks which generally do not make the headlines and which have typically one single motivation: money. . . practically all new Windows viruses are written to make money. We're no longer fighting teenagers and hobbyists. We're fighting criminals. We're fighting professionals. We're fighting organized activity.

Read - Mikko Hypponen on the next data-security threat: beware the wi-fi worms( Lunch Over IP blog)

Posted at 06:30 AM | Posted to Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink

November 27, 2006

VOIP Startup Vertico Raises €2M From firstVentury

Vertico Software, a one year old Karlruhe-based company specialized in developing VOIP products and services for small&medium sized businesses, said today it raised €2M from firstVentury, a Heidelberg-based VC.

The startup already employs a team of 22 and has developed a softswitch PBX, which it sells as a package, or pre-installed in a server appliance under the brandname Starface (image right). It supports the kind of features businesses requires, like caller ID, call deflecting, conference calls, call routing, and connectivity for external employees. The middleware framework is Asterisk, according to the firm's website - if we read it correctly. Support for things like hotlines, virtual call centers, and integration into apps like CRM is also built in. We didn't see anything about Outlook Express integration, though.

What probably attracted the VCs the most was its managed services offering, where it hosts the soft PBX for customers, which nicely positions Vertico for growth, internationally.

Starface's user interface is browser-based and looks pretty easy to use.

Read - firstVentury equity GmbH Invests

Posted at 06:17 PM | Posted to News And Updates | VoIP | TrackBack | Permalink

The Wattson Says What's On From Do-It -Yourself Kyoto

Tech that makes consumers a lot more careful with energy is on our minds at the a:c euro this morning.

It's The Nabaztag For The Energy-Saving Set - The Wattson Monitors Household Energy Consumption

Last week the media frenzy over the mysterious death of a former Russian spy in London overshadowed the news coming out of a Russo-EU summit in Finland that the European Union failed to establish a new agreement with Russia for the supply of gas and oil - the terms of agreement for a new charter meant to replace one that will expire next year are not in place.

That failure could very well result in higher oil and gas prices for the region in the coming years. Meanwhile, the Swiss press is reporting the hottest November here in 500 years (how they get the stats for the year 1506 we don't know - but we'll let that query slide).

Rising energy costs and temperatures, means that the market is ripe for the kind of gadgetry from companies like DIY Kyoto, which sells the Wattson. The wireless sensor device displays the amount of energy used in watts or in pounds sterling (it's only available for the UK market at the moment). It also communicates the info via colour. When the sensor is blue, energy consumption is low and if it's red, it's high - so even young children can understand what's going on. PC connectivity is also supported.

It is off to a great start, but there could be a lot more products and services targeting consumers to help reduce energy consumption and to improve energy efficiency across the board.

Read - DIY Kyoto proifle (NESTA)
Read - Russia, EU Meet as Trade Talks Stall on Polish Row (Bloomberg)
Read -
Meat-Imports Ban Dampens EU-Putin Talks (AHN Finland)
Read - EU-Russia summit yields little fruit (people.com.cn)

Posted at 06:57 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | Being European | Cleantech | TrackBack | Permalink

Rounding Up Euro VC Dotcom Investments

How much money has gone into consumer Internet and media companies in Europe this year? That is the question that Paul Fisher, a corporate finance advisor at First Capital in London, is trying to answer. He is publishing his findings in his Coffee Shops Of Mayfair blog. The idea is to list 2006 Internet and media investments by the end of the year.

So far his research shows that the investment in the sector has increased, something he had predicted earlier in the year, as firms like Accel wake up to the sector, and US VCs put money into European firms in this category (part of a general interest in Europe by US VCs, the alarm:clock euro might add).

Fisher writes:

The type of companies are fascinating too: Far more online-offline models such as Moo and Spreadshirt, some of the filter technologies that excite me so much like Netvibes, PageFlakes and Last.fm, and also a new breed of online media properties like the wonderfully named DailyMotion.

Posted at 06:28 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink

November 24, 2006

Tornado Insider Confirms Venture Capital Concentration

Tornado Insider confirms the trend in the market here that sees larger amounts of capital going into fewer companes that we reported on earlier this quarter. For the past four years about €4B a year has been invested in European and Israel (includes biotech/life science) based companies, says Tornado Insider. This year, the average deal size climbed to €5.8 million - compared to €4.5 million in 2005, €4.3 million in 2004 and €3.8 million in 2003.

To date in 2006 some 706 companies shared a pot of €4.1B, which is down from the 868 companies that shared a similar amount last year.

If we assume that VCs are backing the companies that they believe are winners and are providing them with the cash they need to compete with venture-backed companies from around the globe, then the trend is a positive one.

This is all very well and good. But whenever people talk about money in it sets off a craving for statistics and news about money out. As one of our old editor-in-chiefs used to say, any fool can invest a €100 million, or in this case €4B. If you have exit news and statistics, please send it to over - we will publish it.
Read - Funding The Burn (a:c euro)
Read - The Magic 4 Billion Mark (tornado insider)

Posted at 10:51 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Hot Betas - NAVX, Visuarios, WAYN

Image source: The Warning Sign Generator
We noticed that you like the alarm:clock euro's "fresh betas" posts, our super-short briefs on startups. The criteria to be in the list is pretty subjective. Either we've tried the product and liked it, or it's getting some coverage in the press and blogs, or investors are talking about it.

NAVX = One year old Navx, a French company that develops software and services that can be integrated into navigation devices, got some international press coverage this week for its contribution to a new mobile messaging service that monitors 120 parking garages in Paris and lists where the empty parking spot are on the cellphone or GPS display in auto. It is not a dotcom in beta, but we're briefing it here anyway. NAVX lets users change the voice of their GPS system or find out where the speed radars are located, among other things. NAVX's founders, Jean Cherbonnier and Florent Boutellier, previously co-founded ringtone and cellphone-wallpaper startup K-Mobile/Kiwee in 1999, which was acquired by AG Interactive in 2004
Read - Forget park and ride, try dial and park Wireless (IHT)

WAYN Where Are You Now = The blogs say WAYN is backed by UK-based Esprit Captial Partners. Our moles say that the founders are ex-Accenture guys, that WAYN has 6M members, and a premium membership that is used by about 3 percent of those folks. The user number is high - but with all of these community or social media sites - user numbers don't mean a lot. It's common for people to make multiple accounts within one community or even in rivalling communities and then leave them dormant. What really counts is how much these dotcoms are selling via subscriptions, or affiliate marketing schemes, and other money-making partnerships. And so far, that info for WAYN is not being whispered, at least not to us.
Read - What do you think of wayn (Brad Feld blog)
Read - Cool Startup Where Are You Now (pindrop blog)

Visuarios = Via the Museum of Modern Beta's Hot 100 list we discovered that Visuarios is generating some bookmarking activity (that's how you get into the Hot 100). It is a video sharing site that lets people show off what they can do (tutorials, "wetten das.." type stunts, and cooking how-to). It's from a multi-culti team based in Barcelona, Spain and launched a month ago in beta. The twisting ankles Yoga demo gave us the creeps - human joints are not meant to do that, are they?
Read - MOMB Hot 100 (Museum of modern betas - hot 100)

Posted at 06:22 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink

November 23, 2006

AdLink Pays €35M For Another Piece of Sedo's Domain Name Biz

AdLink, the online advertising and digital marketing subsidiary of Germany's United Internet, said this week it borrowed €35M to boost its stake in Sedo, which provides domain-name services. AdLink bought an additional 24 percent of Sedo - it already owned 52 percent -- and now owns 76 percent of the company, according to press announcements it made this week.

The AdLink deal implies a valuation for Sedo of about €140M. It had sales of close to €30M in the first 9 months of 2006. We could confirm with AdLink that Sedo is profitable, but the figures were not provided.

Sedo will retain its founders who also still have a stake in the venture. Sedo is active in the US and Europe and is specialized in Domain-Parking, Domain-Name Marketing, Domain-Valutation, Domain-Transfers and Domain-auctions. The latter activity has become lucrative again - it recently sold gays.com for €500K - we are not informed if it acted as an intermediary, or actually owned the domain itself.

AdLink's Biz Model Include Display Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, And "Domain Marketing"
Read - Adlink 3Q06 (9 month) Report

Posted at 05:14 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Seed-Funded WiVOIP Startup To Seek Financing

Earlier this month Add Partners announced a seed investment in a Luxembourg-based wireless VoIP (WiVoIP) start-up, called Wireless Technology Partners. We followed up for a couple of reasons. It was Add Partners first very early stage investment for several years, and two, the announcement brought attention to WTP before it even had a website - if you wanted to know more you couldn't just link through.

So we asked Niko von Huetz, an investment director at UK-based Add Partners, why the early announcement? After telling us about the "rare and unique" opportunity to assemble a team of this quality with "perfect market timing", he explained why.

"By announcing the seed round, it is a way to signal the firm will be raising its first round of VC soon. The startup aims to raise €3M in VC early in the new year," he said.

The deal is also part of the firm's “warehousing program” for its next fund, and it signals that the fund, AddTwo, will be launched shortly.

von Huetz gave a bit of insight into how Add Partners works the early stage. "We tend to go in very early when adding new firms to the portfolio. The founder, David Parsons [an American living in Paris] is an IP [internet protocol] and wireless voice expert, but it is also his first time as CEO and you don't want to have a badly groomed venture when it comes to Series A round," said von Huetz.

Using Skype and other VOIP services on WiFi isn't as seamless, secure, and user-friendly as it could be. WTP hopes to change that with solutions for carriers, handset-makers, and service providers.(Pictured left: the Skype Netgear phone).

Just in case readers missed the press release, the company is developing VoIP solutions for handsets equipped to handle wireless LAN communications. The solutions, it claims, will solve some known integration and quality problems with IP telephony on mobile Wifi handsets, as well as considering security, and cost of implementation. The firm's business model is based on licensing its solutions.

von Huetz says that the WTP team has the directly relevant experience required and they're "the only team" developing this particular set of technologies for WiVOIP.

"The press announcement provides enough information to draw the attention of potential customers, including handset makers, network operators, and resellers," responded von Huetz. There is more information available but only under non-disclosure agreement, he added. The a:c euro doesn't do NDAs, so we'll just have to wait and see what WTP will deliver.

Read - Wireless Technology Partners Secures seed funding from Add Partners (press rel.)

Posted at 06:30 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Top 10 Things Missing From Mobilephones

TechDigest.tv, a UK and Europe-oriented blog about gadgetry, is where we turn for a break from busting our noggins trying to understand VC mumbo jumbo about IRRs and "incentivizing" founders, online advertising business models, and electronics trends that require deep knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of silicon-on-insulator lattices.

Their Top 10 gadgets that HAVEN'T converged with mobile phones yet post is an example of what we're talking about.

Top 10 gadgets that HAVEN'T converged with mobile phones yet
Your phone's a camera. It's an iPod. It's a GPS satnav system. It's a games console. It plays porn. It can do everything. Well, not quite everything. There are still a select few gadgets that haven't been rolled into a phone yet. Here's ten of 'em. Get to it, Nokia pointyheads...
1. Tin opener
2. Metal detector
3. Gun
4. Pacemaker
5. Egg whisk
....

TechDigest.tv suggests Nokia is the closest to converged everything, but we think that Victorinox, the company behind the Swiss Army Knife brand, could emerge as the dark horse in this mad race. (Image: s.beat MP3 Digital Audio Player; Victorinox.ch)

Read - Top 10 Gadgets That Haven't Converged With Mobile Phones Yet (techdigest.tv)

Posted at 01:39 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink

Open Source In Mobile - What You Need To Know

The a:c euro didn't make it to the Informa Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam in early November but Andreas Constantinou of mobile industry consulting firm Vision Mobile did, so we asked him if he heard anything that might affect a:c euro's readers.

He put together a short report in reply that highlights recent open source developments and a quick analysis. Constantinou concludes there is a huge opportunity but one that comes with double-edged risk.

Read on below the jump.

Open Source in Mobile gathered over 100 industry attendees. Presentations were given by the who's who of execs active in open source for mobile phones: Panasonic's Yukio Yagi (General Manager), Vodafone's Phil Carter (Head of Terminal Platforms), Motorola's Christy Wyatt (Head of Ecosystem Dev), A la Mobile's Pauline Alker (CEO), Trolltech's Adam Lawson (PM, Qtopia), Nokia's Ari Jaaksi (Head of Open Source Software Operations), OSDL's Bill Weinberg, ARM's Philippe Robin (PM Linux) and Black Duck's Doug Levin.

The event's mystery speaker was Sean Moss-Pulz, the visionary father of FIC's OpenMoko, who chose to break the news on the open-source platform at the event.

Open source has the potential to disrupt conventional ways of doing business in mobile, by engaging external communities to reduce total cost of platform ownership, reduce time to market, and speed up innovation in creating new mobile phones, which is why is it currently a hot space for VC activity.

However, as any open source veteran will point out, using open source
- is not free,
- does not guarantee hordes of external developers contributing code to your product
- most often needs seed funding (most successful O/S projects have commercial backers)
- requires extra care in defining the business plan, and working your way around licensing issues.

The flurry of activity in open source is evident in the many recent announcements in the area:
- Nokia's Maemo project is continuing to grow and Ari Jaaksi announced the Sardine device which would follow the 770 Internet tablet, both based on Maemo.
- In July Motorola pledged that more than half of the manufacturer's mobile phones will use Linux within 18 to 24 months. (Image above is the Motorola Linux Model e680 and here a screenshot).
- Motorola has further open sourced their implementation of MIDP3, i.e. next-gen Java for phones. At the open source conference, Christy Wyatt also said that sales of Motorola's Ming have reached 1% of total phone sales in China, an impressive feat.
- Last week Sun announced details of how it is going to open source J2ME and J2SE implementations, marking a major twist in Sun's Java saga.
- Earlier in November Adobe announced it has open sourced ActionScript 3, a core part of Flash, which is now hosted by Mozilla and will find its place into future Firefox browsers.
- Handset manufacturer FIC announced OpenMoko, the first fully open source Linux phone software platform, that competes with Purple Labs (owned by ODM Vitelcom), MontaVista's MobiLinux, WindRiver, Trolltech's Qtopia and Applix's BTO service.
- In late October Access Linux Platform announced it is open sourcing its application framework, a critical part of the phone software stack.

- Linux tools vendor Open Plug announced it had secured a $15m Round B funding in early October
- A la Mobile was started in June by entrepreneur-in-residence Pauline Alker with $3.5m seed funding and is believed to be looking to secure another $10m to fulfil its promise of 'the Red Hat of mobile'.
- In October, private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital announced it had acquired a controlling stake in a privately held U.S. company Celunite , reportedly for $30 million. Celunite is a Sunnyvale, California-based provider of Linux-based open-source technology, which is still in stealth mode.

In this flurry of open source activity around mobile handsets, what are the opportunities for VCs?

Open source has the potential to be as disruptive for mobile handset software, as Google has been is for mobile operator 'closed garden' strategies. In other words, if you bank on the right player, the potential for returns are huge, as Linux and open-source software are garnering industry backing and market share.

However, the potential for failure in open source projects should not be understated. A la Mobile and Open Plug for example are very ambitious and high risk propositions. Investors and VCs looking at open source need to have both a very good understanding of handset technologies and the risks associated with open source licensing.

Read - VisionMobile (Andreas Constantinou blog)

Posted at 10:46 AM | Posted to Open Source Software | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

Marketing Ammo For Euro VCs

Here's an event for venture capital firms on the fundraising trail. According to Guy Fraser Samson, a former institutional investment, specialized in VC, and investment book author, the alarm:clock euro's venture capitalist readers could get some marketing material if they go to a two day workshop put on by Incisive Media on December 4th and 5th in London.

It will be based to a large part on the tenets from his book entitled Multi-Asset Class Investment Strategy. Fraser Sampson writes that it's "the marketing weapon they have been waiting for. It is basically a worked example of why everyone should be putting at least 20% into private equity."

He's just back from the SuperInvestor event in Paris where 33 participants attended his workshop, almost all from a private equity background but with a handy showing of family offices too.

Read - Incisive Media Multi Asset Class Event Broschure

Posted at 10:29 AM | Posted to Events | TrackBack | Permalink

Codasystem's Metadata Tatoos For Fotos Funded

French startup Codasystems has raised €2M from OTC Asset Management, according to Neteco. This was the firm's second round. Its first was raised in 2004 with Cap Decisif.

Exactly Where The Shot Was Snapped

Codasystem sells a solution used by businesses to document and legally certify images. For example, a construction firm wants to document daily the work completed on a new roof for a building to make sure there's no quibbling about contracts and deadlines.

According to the firm, its software enables image to be "tattooed" (using steganography) with the environmental information captured at the precise instant the picture was taken, including the author, the location (using GPS), time and date (certified), altitude, temperature or any other kind of numerical information. The solution also supports the data file transfer, encryption, archiving, and storage of image files. Reference customers seem to be from the retail, construction, and security sectors of the economy.
The new capital is meant to startup international sales and geographic expansion.
Read - Codasystem leve 2 million (neteco)

Posted at 10:11 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 21, 2006

Checkpoint Offers $586M For Swedish Data Protection Company

It looks like virus protection software firm Check Point Software Technologies figures the increasing number of news items about executives losing their laptops stuffed full of customer data and credit card numbers is an opportunity to grow its business, as it has made a $586M offer to acquire publicly-traded Protect Data the Swedish company behind Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a US registered company specialized in providing security solutions for cellphones, PDA, and Notebook PCs. The deal is subject to approval by shareholders and regulatory authorities.

Ovum, the UK market research firm, sees this as a defensive move by Checkpoint to keep up with rivals Symantec and Mcafee, and that it will have to make some buys to complete the suite. Pointsec uses encryption technology it licensed from F-Secure. Correction Nov. 23/06: F-Secure is a not a Swedish company, as we originally wrote here, it is a public Finnish company listed on the Scandinavian OMX exchange.

Read- CheckPoint announces acquisition of Pointsec Mobile Technologies (ovum)

Posted at 02:58 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Spain's Properazzi Got VC And Gets Some Buzz

Reading BusinessWeek today we learned that Mangrove Capital is backing Properazzi, a Spanish-based real estate listings site that just launched (in beta) earlier this month - it's a site that tries to cover Europe-wide properties for rent and for sale.

If we are not mistaken, Gil Penchina, a former eBay International exec-turned-wiki-entrepreneur- is an angel investor too, according to an interview we eyeballed on Lukasz Gadowski's Gründerszene blog. Penchina is also invested in mobile games company Boonty and local search startup Qype, two other European startups.

The BW article is worth reading because it's based on a rare interview with Mangrove Capital. As for Properazzi, it's early days to start making a judgement but it seems there's plenty of competition with local real estate listings.

Sure, there are few pan-european search sites for property, but then again how many people seek an apartment or home with a Pan European scope - local search makes sense for this application. We can only imagine a tiny niche market that would require such an online service - such as professional relocators or those wealthy enough to own multiple homes or apartments.

Read - Searching For An Encore To Skype (businessweek)
View Interview With Gil Penchina (Gründerszene)

Posted at 09:47 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Sybase Buys iFoundry - The Latest Of Several Wireless s/w Acquisitions

Sybase is becoming a consolidator in the mobile and wireless software market. Its latest acquisition is Singapore-based iFoundry, a specialist in embedded wireless - Bluetooth and IrDa - solutions. The deal was announced Monday. There was no disclosure on the price paid.

iFoundry had been the Singaporean operation of Extended Systems before its management bought it out back in 2002. Sybase bought Extended Systems in 2005.

The Singapore deal is the most recent of several acquisitons the US firm is making to build up its product lines and subsidiary businesses that not only now target mobilephone manufacturers and network operators, but also the business - or enterprise - mobility market.

This activity should be getting the attention of European VCs as Sybase paid a healthy $400M for Mobile 365, a mobile software company that resulted from the merger of Mobileway, which had been backed by European VCs, and Inphomatch, backed by US investors. It also acquired in June a Germany company called Solonde whose business intelligence software business was added to Sybase's Unwired Enterprise business activities.

Read- Sybase Acquires iFoundry Systems (press rel.)
Read - Sybase Acquires Solonde (a:c euro)

Posted at 08:07 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

VC + DVD Player + Remote = Sofatronic Casual Gaming

Germany's Neuhaus Partners just let us know that it has invested an undisclosed amount in Sofatronic, a Hamburg-based developer of casual games that can be played on standard DVD players. It's an original idea and fits with casual gaming trends that see browser games and light-weight mobilephone games catching on.

The tech is enabled by Adobe Flash and there's is no need for a new remote control or embedded software in the DVD hardware.

Sofatronic was founded early this year by a team that previously founded mobilephone games studio Elkware, which was acquired by Infospace for $26M at the end of 2004. The firm's MD is Nils Hammerich and its CTO is Rouven Malecki, along with Elkware co-founder, René Baisch who is in charge of business development.

Neuhaus says this is a very early stage investment and that the startup has potential for international growth, but the German market is first to be targeted. The company is looking to hire some wizards in Flash, testing, and gaming graphics, by the way.

Posted at 06:32 AM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 20, 2006

Yahoo Acquires Sweden's Kenet Works For Its Mobilephone Software

GigaOm is reporting that Yahoo has acquired Swedish startup Kenet Works for about €16.6M. The deal closed a few months ago, it said. Not much info on Kenet Works's website. However its software is sold to operators and it requires users to download a client to their phone to manage email, messaging, and other applications. No details on whether or not it is smartphone targeted or a mass market Javaphone product.
Read - Yahoo is on a spending spree (gigaom)

Posted at 03:46 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Nugg.ad Funded

Nugg.ad, a German online ads tech startup has raised an undisclosed amount of cash by selling bmp AG (a publicly traded VC vehicle) 17.5% of its equity. The six month old Berlin-based company shows it knows the that most online ad campaigns are a waste of money:

More than 99% of the advertising found on the internet is not clicked on, and nearly as much of it is quickly forgotten. What a waste of screen space, mind space and advertising money!

We'll be trying to dig a bit deeper into Nugg to find out about its technologies -it website says it combines a few things, such as cookie tracking and measurement, user surveys, and ad server software it has developed. A quick read on its blog suggests it has an edge on the cookie thing - people delete them, dontcha know - as one of its shareholders is Spring Gmbh, which is an 11 year old software firm specialized in web analytics and measurement, ie. cookies - among other things. It originally spun out of the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Read - bmp beteiligt sich in Nugg.ad (boerse.de)

Posted at 03:22 PM | Posted to Advertising | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

French Online Real Estate Ads To IPO

An IPO is imminent for Seloger.com Groupe (formerly Poliris), the Paris-based company behind online real estate ads sites Seloger.com and Immostreet.com. The float will be on Euronext and it's slated for December 1. The company hopes to sell around €197M worth of shares, a little less than half of which will be new shares.The mid-bookbuilding share price gives it an implied valuation of around €390M.

About half the company's share will be in free float. If successful, it will mean a realization, at least on paper as it was not disclosed who is selling shares in the offering, for some of its VC backers, such as 3i, which acquired 34 percent of company for €60M a year ago.

Seloger.com Has Added Some Web 2.0ish Price Comparison Features This Year
Read - Castles of France.com (the alarm:clock)

Posted at 10:43 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink

TranSIC Gets Startup Funding For High Performance Transistors

Swedish university spinoff, TranSiC AB has raised €440K from Volvo Technology Transfer Corp (VTT) and Midroc New Technology, according to Semiconductor Today. The startup is working on silicon carbide transistors that it hopes will make it into new hybrid vehicles (like the Prius), power converters to reduce the size, and ac/dc motor control. The early adopters of such chips are companies that make light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for auto headlights, dashboards and other lighting applications.
Read - TranSiC raises €0.44m in first-round financing

Posted at 07:57 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 19, 2006

alarm:clock euro puzzler winners: Hitflip's Jan Miczaika and Neuhaus Partners's Jozefak

We have two winners for this week's alarm:clock euro puzzler because timing was close we called it a tie.

The question :
Which early stage German venture fund counts SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira as an investor and supporter?

The answer: Firstventury Equity

Out of Heidelberg, Firstventury, is one of the few VC funds in Europe that is founded by entrepreneurs and financed by wealthier entrepreneurs, as opposed to pension fund managers and institutional investors. It's a model that seems so obvious and yet is still relatively rare in the venture market here.

Both Jan Miczaika, founder of online digital media trading exchange Hitflip - that is him (far right) in the photo on the right - and Paul Jozefak, a Neuhaus Partners' managing partner (before joining Neuhaus, Jozefak was at SAP Ventures, leading the European direct investements as well as its LP activities), wrote in with the correct answer.

Posted at 09:14 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink

November 17, 2006

Just Your Average German Gamer

Researchers in Germany surveyed 3,000 over-fourteen year olds to find out who the average gamer is and found that the clichés are not very accurate, except for the fact that the most frequent players are male.

This is your average frequent gamer. He's 44 years old and the PC is the platform.

This is his fridge,

And his living room.
Gaming in Germany generates more sales that cinema. The full report (which was sponsored by Electronic Arts, German gaming magazine GEE, and Jung Von Matt, a corp comms company) can be downloaded if you provide your personal details.
Read - Spielplatz Deutschland

Posted at 04:22 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink

VC Money For Air

Air Semiconductor, a fabless chipmaker developing RF silicon for mobilephones, has raised seed funding from Pond Ventures, reports EETIMES.

Not much info is available yet. Except that one of the founders, David Tester, is a chip engineer and was an exec at Dialog Semiconductor and the other Stephen Graham, was at Renesas Technology. The company is based in Swindon.

Pond has an eye for promising chip design teams and it is sticking to its very early stage style of investing - so this will probably end up being one to watch.

Read - Chip startup formed to address mobile phone problem (eetimes)

Posted at 03:19 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Cleantech VC Leads Round For Austrian RFID Company

Austria's Identec Solutions has rasied €10M in a round led by SAM Private Equity, a Swiss cleantech investor. Other investors include Sustainable Performance Group, RFID Invest, gcp gamma capital partners. The company announced it wanted to raise $15M back in June. Since the PR says this was a first closing it means it's probably looking to raise $5M more.

It's a bit of a stretch trying to understand how SAM Private Equity could see this as fitting its cleantech style - maybe its looking at the potential RFID tracking and tracing solutions have to reduce CO2 emissions because containers are not zooming around the world half empty, or transport and logitstics companies being more efficient on the road and in the air. We're not sure.

Identec has some big name reference customers, such as Boeing and Volkswagen. And the capital is meant to enable the company to expand geographically plus invest in development of new products.
Read - Austrian RFID Firm Raising (a:c euro)

Posted at 02:55 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 16, 2006

alarm:clock euro Puzzler

We changed the name of the a:c euro venture market quiz to "puzzler" so that we are in line with sister-site alarm:clock, in case you're wondering about the title. This week's question:

Which early stage German venture fund counts SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira as an investor and supporter?

Click the Contact Us link in the righ-thand column and fire off an email to win fame, if not fortune, in the a:c euro puzzler this week.

By the way, not a single reader was able to answer last week's puzzler: Name the two venture capital firms based in Germany that recently dropped "Techno" from their firm names.

The answer was Neuhaus Partners, which dropped the Techno Nord from its name, and TVM Capital, which used to be known as Techno Venture Management.

Posted at 09:20 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink

Austria's TTTech Raises €20M To Support Growth

Germany's Firstventury has invested €20M in TTTech Computertechnik, a nine year old Austrian electronics company, that is specialized in developing ultra-reliable control systems and x-by-wire protocols for the aviation and transport sector. Austria's Wirtschafftsblatt got the scoop earlier this month.

The firm employs 150 and this is its first round of institutional investment. It is an unusual deal for Firstventury as it typically enters a portfolio firm's equity at the very early stage, but Niall Davis, a partner at Firstventury, told the a:c euro that it was an opportunity too good to pass on. Several of its LPs co-invested with Firstventury to boost the size of the round.

TTTech, founded in 1997, is doing about €13M a year in sales, he said, and was originally a spinoff of the University of Vienna. The new capital is meant to enable the company to meet its production and support requirments on the back of getting some design-in wins with big name transportation industry customers. It will also invest in developing new markets for its technologies.

TTTech Licenses To Chip Manufacturers, Makes Its Own Systems, And Sells Supporting Software

Its founder is a pioneer in communications protocols for the x-by-wire category, a tech that is meant to make automobiles, airplanes, tractors, and other vehicles lighter by getting rid of some of the hardware required for steering and braking, for example. The company has several business units targeting other related applications.

The car manufacturer Audi also acquired a minority stake in the company. Audi was a reference customer signed on back in 2001.
Read - Audi und firstVentury beteiligen sich an TTTech (wirtschafftsblatt)

Posted at 08:06 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Upcoming Event: Mediatech

Library House, a tech business research and database publisher, is putting on a one day confab in London called Mediatech 2006 on November 30, meant to bring together startups, corporates, and investor types.

For a:c euro readers, it could be a chance to get closer to people from Intel, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - if that is important to your biz. Intel Capital and Intel will have a contingent there led by managing director Ashish Patel, and Microsoft too, headed by Matthew Bishop, (both companies are sponsoring the event).

The Microsoft people will be the ones that are looking for partnerships with young technology companies who want to exploit Microsoft's software or services in new products. (The Redmond-based giant sheds some light on what it is doing in Europe in its startup blog platform and there are also details on its appetite for acquisitions and startups. E.g. it has made 21 acquisitions this year, three of them were in Europe - none were blockbuster-sized though).

Speakers are Bob Young, the CEO of lulu.com and a co-founder of Red Hat, Jonathan Wolf who is Yahoo's director of corporate development in Europe, and Anil Hansjee who has a similar title at Google, which means you might be able to meet them before and after their talks.

And if a financing round is on agenda, there are quite a few VCs signed on to attend, such as 3i, Acacia Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Amadeus Capital, Benchmark Capital, Celtic House Ventures, Esprit Capital Partners, as well as Partech International, TLcom Capital Partners, and TTP Venture Managers, will be on hand. Most of these invest across Europe, as well as the UK. The BBC, Sky, and Guardian are participating from the media side.
Read - Microsoft EMEA - Investors in Innovation (David Rowe's blog)
Read - Microsoft Ready To Deal (alwayson)
Read - Library House Web 2.0 Conference (the equity kicker)
Read - Mediatech 2006 Who Is Walking The Walk (UK TechCrunch)

Posted at 07:02 AM | Posted to Events | TrackBack | Permalink

November 15, 2006

InovisCoat Raises €2.3M

Inoviscoat, a Leverkusen-based startup that has a multicoatings technology that it says can make the production of photographic film and paper cheaper, has raised €2.3M from Leonardo Venture in exchange for 41 percent of its equity.

The startup's coatings are measured in micronmeters and it works with SolGels.
Read - => Nachrichten | Leonardo Venture investiert in das Leverkusener Technologieunternehmen InovisCoat GmbH (finanznachrichten)

Posted at 03:21 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

4G Systems Taps T-Mobile To Speed Market Dev

4G Systems GmbH in Hamburg has raised an undisclosed amount of financing in a round led by T-Mobile Venture Fund (one of Deutsche Telekom's VC vehicles), earlier investors Brockhaus Private Equity and Adinvest also joined. The new capital is develop 4G's iternational activites at speed. 4G makes a box that supports a higher speed data service (HSDPA), that the likes of T-Mobile and other cellular operators would like to see gain some uptake among households and business.
Read - alarm:clock euro: Hamburg startup = Broadband Internet + Alphabet Soup – Wires Archives (the alarm:clock)
Read - 4G Systems GmbH / T-Mobile Venture Fund beteiligt .(FAZ/ots)

Posted at 03:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

London Company Starts Up NanoWars

Tim Harper from Cientifica, whose firm does a lot of consulting on nanotech commercialization, wrote in to say that his firm is advising Playgen on its new NanoWars video game. The idea is that the game should be based on fact as it's meant to be an educational tool to make learning about nanoscience interesting for 12 to 18 year olds.

Here's how they describe it:

The game's plot is to save the world from destruction by Dr.Nevil and his army of nano-machines and nano-materials, whilst the player stealthily learns about real world nanotechnology. The game hero (player) supported by Dr. Goodlove and his assistants use nano-imaging and quantum theory, create nano-machines, develop nano-materials, and utilise an extraordinary shrinking machine to shrink the player to nanoscale to stop Dr. Nevil and save the world.

It seems like a good idea but we think Playgen should consider making it Dr Nevilla and her army of nano machines versus Dr Goodlove and her army of assistants - that way female gamers might be attracted too.

Posted at 09:20 AM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink

Nordic VC Backs Polar Rose's Visual Search Innovation

Malmö, Sweden-based Polar Rose has raised a nice sized Series A round of $5.1 m (€4 m, SEK 37 m) from Nordic Venture Partners to make a business out of its facial recognition technology applied to searching and identifying images on the Web.

Details on the firm's commercial service are sketchy. But knowing Nordic Venture Partners from interviews over the years and recent conversations with its partners, the company is meant to make money and it is being built for a global market.

What we know so far is that it's software can do some three-dimensional processing of images (3D extrusion) and applies cutting-edge facial recognition algorithms. This combined with labeling and input from users - to sort and add context to images -- is the basis of the service.

Here's what Polar Rose tells potential users:

Polar Rose works with any public photo. No matter if you're using flickr, 23, Kodak gallery, or any other website, Polar Rose lets you discover people in pictures. Learn who people are, and help improve results by tagging pictures together with other users.

Read - Euro Rivals For Riya (a:c euro)

Posted at 06:29 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | Specialized Software | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

November 14, 2006

Agilent Acquires Swiss Acqiris

Agilent Technologies is to acquire Acqiris SA, a privately held Swiss company that develops and sells digitizers and analyzer hardware used in a wide range of applications from medical imaging (positron elecro tomography) to radars used by defence and aerospace manufacturers. Financial details were not disclosed.

Founded in 1998, Acqiris is based in Geneva. All 60 Acqiris employees are expected to join Agilent. The company is not venture-backed.

This is about the sixth acquisition of a Swiss computing firm by a big name US player in the past year or so - only some of them were VC-backed.
- HP bought Silverwire, a Zug-based VC-backed photo processing startup
- IBM acquired Geneva-based remote access software firm Rembo
- Microsoft bought VC-backed VOIP software developer media-streams in Zurich
- Synopsys acquired ISE a chip design tool developer
- Semtech acquired VC-backed wireless semiconductor manufacturer Xemics in Neuchatel

Read - Agilent Acquires Acqiris SA (press rel)
Read - US Giants Buying Swiss Startups Like Watches (swissventures)

Posted at 01:35 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Renzoo Launches Voicemail, Email, Messaging Freemium Services

Getting email and other popular Internet applications onto cellphones is high on the agenda at handset manufacturers like Motorola, which just paid half a billion for Good Technology's push email tech, and Nokia, which acquired Intellisync, last year for similar reasons. It looks like the cellphone-makers have their eye on the service revenues that email messaging can bring them on top of selling the hardware.

A London-based startup, Renzoo, also has its eye on mobilephone messaging services but ones that are not yet being offered by the big names.

Renzoo is all about keeping up with what's in multiple email and voicemail accounts.

Renzoo was founded in London in 2005 and is a spinoff of a Croatian company called Alterbox, which develops messaging solutions for telco customers. According to Renzoo founder, main shareholder, and CEO, Denis Kotlar, Alterbox has more than 150,000 subscribers using its telco based messaging solutions.

That market know-how and experience, Koslar is applying to Renzoo, his third startup but first consumer-oriented venture.

Prior to founding Renzoo and Atlerbox, Kotlar founded Envox Group, a voice solutions developer for VOIP and the Web software developers, where he was CTO. Envox raised over $8 million in VC, including an investment from Intel Capital and has more then 90 employees, operating in Boston, Sausalito, London, Stockholm, and Zagreb, said Kotlar.

Renzoo supports email but is best suited to those that only want some of their email coming through to the handset - not power mobile emailers that cannot live without their Blackberry. It supports users with multiple email accounts and multiple voicemail accounts - putting fixed line, Skype, and mobile voicemail all in one place. The company says that users can also open attachments, such as PDF, audio, MSOffice, and video files on their phones.

We didn't have time to try it to see how easily it is to open, play, and store files once received.

Renzoo is based in the UK, where it is having its initial launch, while its software development division in Croatia.

The service is free to start with and comes with 200 credits (£2 worth) when users sign up. Its Premium package costs £6 per month, comes with 5GB of storage and 1000 credits, which is the equivalent of receiving 100 mobile alerts, it says.

The plan is to sell directly to end users, as well as through ISP’s, alternative telcos and system integrators. A WAP (wireless access protocol)-enabled phone is required to be able to use Renzoo, which is pretty standard nowadays and the advantage to that is that no client download to the phone is required.

Zagreb Is Located Inland From Croatia's Attractive Adriatic Coastline
(Image Sources: Croatialifeproperty.com

Read - Under The Radar Profile : Renzoo
Read - Renzoo Features
Read - Renzoo Launches (press rel.)

Posted at 01:34 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

Vpod.tv Launch Overwhelming

Paris and Madrid-based vpod.tv launched this week. The venture backed video publishing startup had the enviable issue of too many visitors and users wishing to sign up. The site performance was strained despite having its own content distribution network, according to its blog. Update: vpod.tv's CEO corrected our impression about the CDN - they have a deal with a CDN provider that they will announce soon.

It's available in 8 languages and offers video sharing at the moment, but we know the founders have more in store, that is if the demo we saw a couple of months back in Paris makes it into production.

There are already 1200 or so videos uploaded for public consumption and if you click the Entrepreneur tag in the cloud on the right, you'll find many of the people we've been writing about here at the a:c euro.
Read - France's vpod.tv taps varsavsky (a:c euro)

Posted at 12:58 PM | Posted to Media | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink

Biz Plan Competition With A $20M Result For Netronome

It looks like making a pitch at a MobileMonday event in London, hosted by 3i, paid off for Netronome Systems, a network processing board developer. It just raised a $20m Series C round led by 3i's venture capital unit, and added new investor, Tudor Investments.

Existing backers Top Technology Ventures, Spinner Global Technology Fund and a group of business angels including FORE Systems founders Robert Sansom and Eric Cooper, also participated in the round.

We rarely hear of companies getting a direct result from making their pitch at the various industry events, so when it happens we note it. 3i's spokeswoman told us that her firm's investment team first became involved with Netronome at a MobileMonday event it hosted earlier this year.

Netronome was founded in 2003. Its hardware can be used by network appliance vendors or by switch manufacturers developing network security gear, but also for application optimization (Netronome's tech analyzes content - deep packet inspection - and delivers it faster or slower depending on whether or not it is voice video data etc.) It supports network virtualization.

Read - 3i leads $20m funding of Netronome to accelerate virtualization vision with its Open Appliance Platform (press rel.)

Posted at 08:40 AM | Posted to Hardware | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

EVE Online's Icelandic Creators Enfold White Wolf

Iceland's CCP, which operates the online platform for role playing games known as EVE Online, said it completed a merger with White Wolf, a US-based publisher of role playing games [Via paidcontent.org].

Both are privately-owned so there was no disclosure on the value of the deal, but it sounds more like an acquisition than a merger to us: White Wolf is going to operate as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of CCP. And Hilmar Petursson, CEO of CCP, will be CEO of the combined company, while Mike Tinney, president of White Wolf, will continue as president of the independent subsidiary.

EVE Online claimed 100K subscribers back in February. If they're each paying $20 a month to play, that means the company is doing about $20M this year in turnover from gaming alone. It also sells merchandise around its games. The addition of White Wolf should boost both the gaming, by adding new titles, and the merchandising sales figures, according to the statement.

Read - Gaming Firms CCP and White Wolf Merge (paidcontent)
Read - Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Innovator, CCP Announces Completion of Merger (press rel.)

Posted at 08:01 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 13, 2006

Cleantech VCs In Europe Having Trouble Closing Funds

It looks like being European is still a tough sell for VCs trying to raise new funds. Researchers at the Cleantech Venture Network (CVN) said today that over the past two years cleantech investment in Europe has exhibited a "choppy" investment trend, compared to the 9 consecutive quarters of growth in the US market.

It is something that CVN attributes to "capital constraints in Europe, where institutional (e.g. pension fund) participation in the European cleantech private equity space is less than their North American counterparts."

In other words, cleantech investors in Europe are still having a hard time closing funds and are not able to invest as steadily and quickly as they could be.

Some more data:
The year-to-date venture investment in European cleantech is at $533 million (€682 million) compared to $652 million (€835 million) at the end of Q3 2005. It is an 18% decrease year on year.

European Q3 venture capital investing in the cleantech category was $144 million (€184 million) versus the $268 million (€343 million) the previous quarter.

The energy segment led the way with $77 million (€99 million) followed by $35 million (€45 million) invested in the clean manufacturing and industrial segment and $16 million (€20 million) in clean Agriculture & Nutrition companies.
Read - European Cleantech Q3 Investment Dips (press release)

Posted at 03:38 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink

EDF's Alt Energy Unit Planning IPO

It's a good time to be floating alt energy companies in Europe- check out the graphic from New Energy Finance (below) and EDF, the French utility which owns a large chunk of the "green" power company, EDF Energies Nouvelles, has noticed it too apparently.

The French press is reporting that EDF Energies Novelles will announce the details of an IPO planned for later this month that could raise up to €550M to build up the firm's wind, biofuel, hydroelectric and solar plants. The company filed its papers with the AMF, the French equivalent of the SEC, in late September.

Read . EDF Energies Nouvelles : les modalités d'IPO connues dès demain (voila.fr)
Read - Alt Energy Big Swinging (a:c euro)

Posted at 07:22 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | IPO | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Le Web 3 And Someone Asks What is Web 2.0?

Several readers have asked if the a:c euro is going to cover the Paris-based confab called Le Web3, the third edition of a the get-together originally call Les Blogs. It is going to be huge -- so far a little over 500 people have signed up - top limit is 900, double the number that attended last year.

We looked at the list of participants, which is a nice feature to offer attendees, as is the breakout of the countries they come from. France, UK, and Germany top that ranking. There are a lot of folks going that are regular a:c euro readers. (Link to list of people that have registered) so it would be good to make it.

Le Web3 is in Paris but the entire event will be in English. The panels have some amusings titles like Life 2.0 and The World 2.0. Their is an opportunity for startups to make their pitch to participants too, and four venture capitalists will take on the question: Will there be a Web 2.0 bubble? The date of the event is December 11 and 12.

Maybe someone should take on answering "What Is Web 2.0" like John Cook, a journalist, who covers technology and ventures for a Seattle-based paper, who wrote a heard-on-the-street style post asking just that question. The answers are enlightening.
Link: Le Web3
Read: Heard on the street: What is Web 2.0?

Posted at 05:57 AM | Posted to Events | TrackBack | Permalink

CEO Of Arieso Wins Outstanding Woman In Tech Award

Over on Morten Lund's blog, we learned why he has the username Sexism. The Danish biz angel and entrepreneur wrote a post about it - he's worried about his daughters' opportunities in the future due to the scarcity of women in the top ranks of the tech sector.

It's a theme that comes up from time to time and it's not limited to Europe (see Under The Radar link below). So when we saw the news that Shirin Dehghan (image right), the CEO of Arieso, a venture-backed telco network optimisation and planning solutions startup, we thought it was worth noting.

Dehgan received the BlackBerry Outstanding Woman in Technology Award for 2006, as well as the Best Woman in Technology Award in the small and medium sized business category. Arieso was founded in 2002 and is backed by Add Partners and Top Technology Ventures, both based in the UK.
Read - Arieso CEO Shirin Dehghan Named Outstanding Woman in Technology 2006 (press rel.)
Read - Sexism (It's All About Luck blog)
Read - Where Are All The Smart Women Speakers (Under The Radar blog)

Posted at 05:55 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Euro Rivals For Riya -> Pixsta and Polar Rose

Updated with Comment from Alexander Straub, who is a co-founder of Pixsta and an investor in Truphone, see end of this post.

At the a:c euro we like visual search, image search, anything to do with computer graphics, actually. Startups in these categories have the goods - like smart algorithms and brainy founders (in other words: Intellectual Property/High Barriers To Entry), and there just might be some new markets and applications emerging for these technologies.

We came across Pixsta this morning via Paul Jozefak's blog, which led us to Polar Rose. Pixsta is based in London, and Polar Rose, out of Malmo, Sweden. Both are developing image search products.

Pixsta, which has a demo site, is looking to apply its technology to online shopping, similar to the idea behind Like.com (an application launched this week from US-based Riya). Polar Rose, which is soon to launch in beta, is about finding photos of people and its commercial plans are not public.

These technologies can be applied to a number of businesses areas, online retailing as suggested above, but we guess they could also be used in search tools for developers of logos and corporate identity art, and possibly in search engines for stock photo and graphic art vendors.

Pixsta Helps Shoppers Find Similar Items

On Pixsta's demo site, Chez Imelda, we decided to look for some orange sandals and found a selection without having to enter a single search word. It delivered up the results without a click through, showing where to buy the new footwear.

Here's how pixsta describes its software.

"Pixsta software reaches beyond the current text-based approach to search by automatically extracting visual content from images. we can organise large image collections into hyperlinked networks of visual similarity, so that users can browse the network to find images that come close to what they want, and also spark off new searches."

Our only criticism is the name of the company - maybe we're suffering from startup overload, but we find it hard to remember and the spelling tripped us up in our search for info on the company.

Polar Rose's commercial intentions are not public. Right now it is aiming to find out what people do with the application when it launches in a beta pilot. We couldn't try it but got some screenshots. Its search engine plugs into your browser, finds the faces in a photo, asks the user to confirm, or select the face to be matched, and then seeks similar faces on the web or locally.

Polar Rose Finds The Faces

Asks You To Select And Label The Image To Search For


And Serves Up The Resuls With Some Information From Other Users

Alexander Straub of Straub Ventures and a co-founder of Pixsta writes in:

Just to point out you can click from the image on www.chezImelda.com to the retailers site. When above the button with a mouse two little logo’s appear, one to drag and drop the image into a depository (just if you like it) or click to the retailers landing page.

Example of ChezImelda: You are looking for Crocs (the one Brad Pit wears – click on the orange sandal, you get an orange crocs, click on the crocs and half of the page is filled with the crocs in different shapes and colours. We basically offer 89 x 10 to the power of 10 = 89 trillion ways of shopping for 89,000 shoes. We need 89 trillion calculations to come off with the relative matrix of shoes all linked together by visual clues.

Update: VentureBeat has a thoughtful review of Like.com, and mentions Pixsta too.
Read - Visual Search Good For Shopping (venturebeat)
Read - Do I Really Like It (Paul Jozefak blog)
Read - Science Fiction News (Technovelgy)
Pixsta - visual browsing (Heiko's Blog)
Read - Suchmaschine erkennt Gesichter (DiePresse)
Read - Like.com Image Search Enging Launched (e-consultancy)

Posted at 04:40 AM | Posted to Digital imaging | Early stage | Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink

November 11, 2006

OpenBC Prepares For IPO

Three year old Open Business Club AG, the company behind an online social networking site for professionals called OpenBC (soon to be renamed Xing) has mandated two investment banks, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers International, to prepare for an IPO, it said in a statement issued this week.

The company, which is venture-backed, has had a quick path to get to the IPO stage. Its annual sales of close to €6M would suggest an Entry Standard listing, but OpenBC said it plans to list on the Prime Standard, the main German exchange, which has more stringent regulatory and reporting requirements.

The social networking company wants to raise capital for international expansion, which may include some acquisitions, it said. Growing the membership roster is the main goal - it currently has about 1.45M.

The more people in the network the more value the service provides to its members - goes the thinking of the firm's co-founder Lars Hinrichs, reflected in the same statement. In the fiscal year ending June, OpenBC had sales of close to €6M. First quarter sales were €2.8M. OpenBC also said it had reached breakeven.

The company plans to establish a marketplace for services, contracts, and jobs, according to Die Welt. CEO Hinrichs is quoted as saying the platform will directly compete with jobs search sites.

Read - OpenBC geht an die Börse (Die Welt)

Posted at 04:51 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

VC-Backed Asknet Raises €21.6M In Float

It's a couple of days after the fact, but it is worth noting that Karslruhe-based Asknet, which runs an online software distribution platform for software companies and its own portal, successfully floated last Wednesday on the lightly regulated Entry Standard exchange in German, raising €21.6M in new capital.

Its market cap based on its IPO price was €41.67M.

The company, which is a spinoff of the Univesity of Karlsruhe, had a turnover of €35.3M in 2005 but it's losing money. To get itself into the black Asknet needs to grow the number of customers using its platform to sell their software. The new capital is meant to finance that growth in both the US and East Asian markets.

Its venture backer, AdAstra, which owned a little over 32 percent of the company pre-IPO, remains a shareholder post-IPO with a good 16 percent of the company. Softbank is also a major shareholder with 7.1 percent of the company post-IPO. It sold about 3 percent of its holding in the float.

It says a lot for the Entry Standard that companies like Asknet - money-losing - can raise the cash they need to grow their businesses. It just might emerge as an alternative to going out and raising a round of venture capital.

Read - Asknet Fakten

Posted at 03:06 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 09, 2006

France's Cellcast Interactif Acquired By Silverback Media plc

Consolidation in the mobile marketing category continues, as France's CellCast Interactif is acquired by Silverback Media plc, reports Neteco. There was no disclosure on the terms of the acquisition, but we think it must have been a fairly small deal as Silverback said regulatory filing it raised about £2M capital on PLUS market, which is an exchange we hadn't heard of until now, meant to pay for the acquisition, after expenses.

Neteco points out that this is the fourth such deal in France, after 123multimedia, Haiku and K-Mobile. From what we hear, mobile marketing is not a hugely profitable business, at least not yet.

Read - SilverBack Media rachète CellCast Interactif (neteco)
Read - Cellcast interactif se rapproche de Silverback Media (press release)
Read - silverback media lists on PLUS (plus markets)

Posted at 05:28 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

One More Euro VC That Blogs

Paul Jozefak, who is a partner at Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners has a blog now and it is called Babbling VC, Random thoughts of a Slovak-American VC in Germany. It is new, but there are some good posts in there for entrepreneurs and the venture community to dig into.

He joins the slow growing list of European VCs that are already at it, listed below.

The Equity Kicker (Nic Brisbourne, Esprit)
Fred Destin (Atlas Venture)
Technofile By Max Bleyleben (Kennet)
Christian Leybold (BV Capital)
Techbytes by Jason Ball (London Seed Capital)
If we missed anyone, drop us an email.

Posted at 09:31 AM | Posted to Being European | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

November 08, 2006

Baracoda Raise €6.7M To Grow Consumer Bluetooth Biz

France’s Baracoda SA raised €6.7M from existing investors, according to Neteco. Its French backers are Seventure (formerly Spef Venture), Siparex, Crédit Agricole Private Equity, and iXcore SAF, a privately owned investment company. Based in Marly-Le-Roi, with offices in New York, Baracoda, makes Bluetooth modules for its own line of bar code scanners. The new capital, however, is to finance the growth of ComOne, a consumer oriented Bluetooth peripheral maker, it acquired in 2005.

Its business is a lot like Parrot SA, which was VC-backed and floated this year and in fact, Baracoda recently recruited one of its top execs to manage its North American biz units.

ComOne has hit a good vibe developing Bluetooth USB sticks and keyboards, but also things like a Bluetooth enabled streaming audio gear, which it sells through mobile network operators.

Founded in 2001 by two freshly minted PhDs, Baracoda emerged from an incubator at the l'Ecole Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.
Read - Baracoa leve 6.7M Supplementaires (neteco)

Posted at 04:23 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

Ready For Hacking - Taiwan's FIC With Open Source Cellphone

Interesting news coming out of an Open Source for mobile conference in Amsterdam this week. FIC, a Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturer, says it will ship early next year a new Linux cellphone, one that is meant to be hacked.

The Linux-flavoured platform the FIC phone uses was developed as an open source project, dubbed OpenMoko.

A presentation by OpenMoko's project leader at the conference said that the software supports multiplexing, which means that you can take a call even if you are browsing the Internet. That combined with the open-ness is the basis of a good sales pitch and one that will likely find resonance with cellphone users looking for an alternative to carrying both a Blackberry and handy due to issues like that.

The FIC phone comes with push email syncing from Fonambol, an open source startup whose Italian founder shifted to the US.

Linux as an alternative OS for mobilephones has been talked about for a while, but so far a market leader has yet to emerge. European software company, Trolltech has been investing in developing that part of its business, since it went public, and several independant startups in the US are also active, adding their platforms to those from Symbian, Qualcomm, Motorola (TTP Com), Microsoft and the Java environment for cellphones, to name a few.

We were talking to Andreas Constantinou, an industry consultant at Vision Mobile, last week about this topic. Afterwards he sent along a report he published with ArcChart (sponsored by Trolltech) that analysed the market (He also has a good blog about mobile trends - see link below.)

Constantinou writes:

" We believe that 2006 marks a turning point in the history of Linux as a mobile phone platform, not only due to Motorola’s recent commitment, but also the wealth of products and support services from a growing commercial community. Longer term, we believe Linux-based platforms will prevail over many of today’s credible contestants, as will Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

Read - Andreas Constantinou blog
Read FIC to sell cheap, hacker-friendly Linux (Linux Devices)
Read - Italian Fonambol Founder On Five Things (a:c euro)
Read Collax moves to us (a:c euro)

Posted at 10:11 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

Skype Millionaires Invest In Baltic Startups

Ambient Sound Investments, an investment vehicle created by four early Skype employees, has just completed its sixth deal this year, with 1.5M Estonian Krone (about €96K) in Evikon, an industrial sensor company based in Tartu.

We can add Ambient to the growing list of Euro entrepreneurs-turned-private-company-investors.

Toivo Annus, co-founder of Ambient, told the a:c euro that Evikon designs and produces temperature and pressure sensors, as well as humidity measurement and gas-presence-detection equipment that run the industry-standard ModBus protocol. It's an established company, with years of product development and sales, he added.

"Chances are, if you are sitting on a made-in-Estonia stool and drinking local sour milk - both of them were produced using Evikon sensors in process," writes Annus.

Ambient was originally set up to hold the shares held by four Skype engineers working at its Estonian R&D center since the early days. eBay acquired their stake last December when it made the Skype acquisition, and the holding company continues on as a private venture investment vehicle.

Although not set in stone, the general plan is to invest in the range of €100K and €1M in early stage technology companies, roughly aiming for €10M worth of investments by end of 2007.

This is smart money for Baltic startups and Ambient just might provide European VCs looking to invest in Eastern Europe with some co-investment opportunities.

As we said, the firm has five other investments.

Clifton Semiconductor - Ambient made a €1.6M investment in this gallium arsenide (GaAs) power diode manufacturer. Clifton has solved the technical hurdles with a unique liquid epitaxy process, says Ambient.

Oskando - develops technology for remote monitoring, management and tracking of cars, boats, industrial devices, and other moving objects. Oskando works closely with Connecty, another Ambient portfolio company, and has integration partners and resellers for enterprise and consumer markets.

Modesat Communications - radio synchronization software which keeps power consumption low, improves signal-to-noise ratio and expands reach. Works with satellite and radio links, WiFi, Wimax and TETRA radio networks. Targets OEMs.

Connecty- a Lithuanian-based company that delivers boxes used to remotely read water and utility meters, as well as control devices remotely, such as enabling the rebooting of a PC via SMS.

Guardtime- seed stage investment in a digital timestamping innovator that Ambient says is pioneering an infrastructure to enable content owners to "prove the integrity and creation time of digital documents in a legally binding manner".
Read - Evikon Financing Announcement (press rel.)

Posted at 07:00 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 07, 2006

Iris Capital Takes A €3M Stake In Clear2Pay

Mechelen, Belgium-based Clear2Pay, a payment solutions software vendor, added €2M in financing from new investor Iris Capital. It is not clear from the press release if this is a top up to the €15.7M the firm raised in June of this year - which came from VCs that typically invest in later stage ventures as well as existing investors.

Iris Capital also said in the same announcement that it acquired additional shares valued at €1M from an existing investor.

Clear2Pay was founded in 2001 and its two co-founders, Michel Akkermans (CEO) and Jurgen Ingels (CFO) still lead the company.

Through Acquisitons and Organic Growth Clear2Pay Has Gone Global

Posted at 04:44 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Austria's JoWood Buys VC-Backed DreamCatcher

Austria's JoWooD Productions Software AG said it will acquire video games company DreamCatcher, which is backed by Canadian venture capital firms, to gain access to the North American market. The two have already been working together and have licensing agreements in place.

The size of the deal was not announced but JoWooD is paying for the company by issuing existing authorized shares, which will give shareholders of Dreamcatcher a 23% stake in the share capital of JoWooD after closing of the transaction. The deal is subject to audits and regulatory approvals.

JoWood's current market cap is about €30M.

Read - JoWooD to acquire Video Game Publisher DreamCatcher Inc (press rel.)

Posted at 04:00 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

DropSend Up For Sale

Who wants to buy a web app? asks e-Consultancy in a news item posted on the consulting company's blog (which we read regularly). It reports that Ryan Carson- who launched the DropSend web app about a year ago - is looking to move on and he's offering the large file email service to potential buyers.

DropSend was built for less than £30,000 over an eight-month period and is profitable with turnover of about $9K a month.
Read - Web Startup Dropsend Offers Itself For Sale (e-consultancy news blog)

Posted at 11:47 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

Former SUSE/Novel Chief On Board At Max21, An Open Source Investment Co.

Richard Seibt, former CEO of SUSE Linux and European chief at Novell, has been appointed to the board of Max21 to help the open source investment company expand its business across Europe.

Seibt is also on the board of two open source startups, Collax and OpenXchange, as well as Germany's multi-billion euro United Internet.

Founded in 2004 in Darmstadt, MAX21 Management und Beteiligungen AG was set up to offer open source companies a set of services, marketing admin support, human resources and recruitment, as well as capital. In its portfolio are 14 open source companies, six where it owns 49% and seven where it owns 10% and one where the holding is undisclosed. Some examples follow.

Pawisda - Print Management, Post Logistics

MediaGlobe - Voice and Data Networks Support, Systems, And Hardware

LSE - IT Security Apps and Service
It is an interesting concept - it provides the benefits of being within a larger organization, and for the financing side of things, it might well suit a good number of open source developers better than venture capital - due to things like the size of the market they can address with their code and business model, but also due to the mismatch between VC requirements and the mindset of many open source founders.
Read - Ex-SUSE-Chef Seibt wird Aufsichtsrat der MAX21 AG

Posted at 11:41 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Why We Turned Off Comments At The alarm:clock

Some readers may have noticed we turned off the Comment feature for our news blogs. It was a tough decision because we enjoyed the feedback - criticism, additions, and corrections. The problem was that we were receiving hundreds of spam comments a day, sometimes by the hour.

The task of finding authentic comments amidst the deluge was starting to take more and more of our time, plus the content of some of that spam was nasty - you would not believe what some websites are offering.

We tried to put an approval on it - which is provided by MovableType -- but that only ended up clogging our inboxes and our Eudora email program was putting up the three chilli pepper (for offensive content) warning on a lot of it. Until we find a solution we have to discontinue it, but that does not mean we don't want to hear from you.

You can still write in to us at .
If it's for the a:c euro, just say so near the top of the message.

Posted at 08:03 AM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink

November 06, 2006

Netsize Raise €13.2M In Fourth Round

Paris-based Netsize, a premium content mobile billing company (serving things like premium SMS and multimedia content), said today it raised a €13.2M fourth round of financing. Existing Netsize investors GRP Partners, Partech International, GemVentures ( the Gemplus Group VC) , Rothschild Gestion, Aldea (the founders' holding company) were joined by new investor, 123 Venture.

The company also reported that its sales in 2005 reached €108M. It said it still sees growth ahead as this is the initial market phase. It did not mention if it was profitable.

Stanislas Chesnais, Chairman & CEO, Netsize Group said that Netsize will use the capital to further expand in its consumer oriented market, Mobile Entertainment Services, and to expand into more business oriented applications where market demand. It lists examples: Wireless Telematics, Field Service Automation, M2M, Logistics and Supply Chain management Solutions.

Read - Netsize expands further with €13.2 million (press rel.)

Posted at 10:13 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

SevenLoad's New Backer Is Not NU2M (Updated)

This story originally had the title that NU2M was a new backer of SevenLoad based on a call we had with Sven Jan Arndt this morning.
What Arndt wanted to communicate and what we should have written is this : Dirk Ströer bought a stake in Sevenload with his Venture Capital Company "New Media Ventures". He is former owner of the Nu2m - New Media Management Holding whcih is now owned by Johannes Erlemann. Both companies work close together.

Posted at 09:42 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Blyk Raises Capital For Ad-Supported Free Mobile Services

Last week the International Herald Tribune reported the news that Paris-based Sofinnova Partners is backing Blyk, an ad-supported MVNO that will offer free mobilephone services to the youth market. (We missed the IHT scoop and have now added the IHT to our RSS reader).

Blyk has been in development since January and was co-founded by Pekka Ala-Pietila, who was with Noka for 20 years. Most recently he had the title president of Nokia Corporation (1999-2005) and before that president of Nokia Mobile Phones (1992-1998). We expect to update this story if we get some more details from the investors and the founders.

Read - Coming to (free) mobile phones for youths: Ads (IHT)

Posted at 09:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

Former Wanadoo Chief Joins Sofinnova Partners

Europe's venture firms are bulking up with new additions from industry. Accel Partners and Fidelity Ventures have been expanding, and now Sofinnova Partners has announced that Olivier Sichel, the former Chairman and CEO of Wanadoo (France Telecom group) has been named as partner.

Interestingly, Sichel said he made the move from industry to venture because he believes that the venture capital sector is about to undergo a new round of restructuring similar to what telecoms went through ten years ago.

Sichel said he joined Sofinnova Partners because of the "quality of its teams, its broad field of activity and its European leadership .... When I joined the telecom industry ten years ago, it was about to undergo a major restructuring. I’m convinced today that venture capital will undergo a similar transformation over the next decade.”

On Sofinnova's side, Olivier Protard, Managing Partner said:
“[Sichel's] nomination confirms our strategy of putting senior partners with solid operational experience at the service of the companies we invest in.”

The 39 year old built up an an ecommerce business unit within France Telecom back in the late nineties, and then left to become chairman of publicly traded Wanadoo where he restructured the directories and Interent services company.

When it merged with with France Telecom in a mixed public offer in April 2004, the company’s operating profit had quadrupled and its value increased to €13 billion from about €6.5B when he joined.

Posted at 07:39 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

November 03, 2006

Flickr Tells VCs Who's Talking To Who

Paul Fisher, a London-based corporate finance adviser who blogs, points out at the end of a post on user generated content that VCs don't have to ask founders "who else are you talking to", they just have to go to Flickr.

We checked to see if he's right and ran a couple of searches in Flickr for BV Capital, Atlas Venture, Esprit, 3i, and Accel, some of the VCs that are into Internet investing at the moment and therefore more likely to use or appear in an online photo sharing site.

Sure enough, you can get a pretty good idea of who's been talking to who. A bit of digging is required though to find out the context and which startups are involved. We doubt that anyone is that relentless in their search for the information edge to do the digging. But it is an interesting development.

Besides, visiting a VC's office doesn't mean a lot - they are always boasting about dealflow, meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs a year for every one deal they close. One told me last week his team of four looks at 500 companies a year. That's a lot - we get dizzy when the number of companies gets anywhere near that level and we're just covering the news, not considering making an investment.
Read - Islandoos and don'ts for sucessful social software (Paul Fisher's blog)

Posted at 03:23 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

SevenLoad Taps Strategic Investor And Eyes Raising VC

This story has been updated as there is an error in the reporting. Stroer is not the new investor in SevenLoad as written below. See updated story here.

The Financial Times Deutschland is reporting that Germany's SevenLoad, which runs a video platform (also sells it as a white label service) has tapped Stroer, an outdoor advertising firm, to finance its expansion. The amount was undisclosed, but the FTD's reporter said that the company now has a valuation of €130M, according to "industry insiders".

France and the UK are on the roadmap for expansion of the business. And that the founder plans to raise VC, as opposed to strategic investors, in the next round of financing. The firm has been self-financed until now.

Although its video and photo site is more feature-rich and sophisticated than YouTube's, SevenLoad is a small player in comparison. The business paper, says it had 10M page views in October, compared to the US firms 10 time greater amount of traffic. Correction: Actually FTD wrote that the US firm has 10 times the traffic in one day. Thanks to Markus from hacker.de for the correction.

Back in August, Gruenderszene blog published an in-depth interview with SevenLoad's founder, Ibrahim (Ibo) Evsan, where he talks about lessons learned, revenues, and the business model.

Read - Werbe-Größe Ströer investiert in Web 2.0 (ftd)
Read - Interview Sevenload (gruenderszene)

Posted at 11:38 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

November 02, 2006

alarm:clock euro Venture Quiz Question

Here's this week's quiz question. It's about the German VC market again...

Name the two venture capital firms based in Germany that recently dropped "Techno" from their firm names.

Click the Contact Us link and fire off an email to win fame, if not fortune, in the a:c euro venture quiz question this week.

Posted at 04:07 PM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink

UK Supercomputing Startup Raises Capital

Concurrent Thinking (formerly known as Streamline Computing) has raised £1.7M from Oxford Capital Partners, Forward Group, and Midven. The new capital will be used to push product into the enterprise market and to bring some new ones from the lab to market.

Founded in 2000, it has some pretty tough competition from vendors such as IBM, HP, Sun, and Cray, but Concurrent says it has already delivered over 250 high performance computing clusters in the UK, Europe and the Middle East. Seven of its systems have appeared in the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computers. The a:c euro notes that it's a list very much dominated by IBM.

It has both a hardware and a software/services division (Allinea Software). Customers include Rolls Royce, Corus, Schlumberger, Chevron Texaco, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Read - Concurrent Thinking Ltd announces £1.7M investment alongside record sales (press rel.)

Posted at 01:17 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink

TomTom Founders Take Home €455M

A year and a half after its IPO, a couple of TomTom execs and some founders -- the ones that created a billion euro company without the aid of venture capitalists -- cashed in some shares to the tune of €455M this week.

TomTom Has Some Amusing TV Ads For The British Market

It will be interesting to see if their new wealth makes its way into the startup economy, following in the footsteps of entrepreneurial angel investors like the Samwer brothers, the SAP co-founders, early employees and early investors in Skype, Martin Varsavsky, and Spreadshirt's Lukasz Gadowski, to name a few.

Posted at 10:29 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink

Quintura Clouds The Search Market

Quintura, out of Russia, aims to make search more visual, exploiting a click reducing feature : users mouseover the "cloud" of words tossed out by the index to create new combinations with the refined search results showing quickly in the window below.

It is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, an early investor in Skype, and it just launched the English beta version of its application. Update: Quintura has two other VC-backers ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston.

We have not had a lot of time to review the search engine but we did have time for a QandA with the founder, Yakov Sadchikov, an entrpreneur and former advisor to private equity investors that recently sold his RussiaDeal venture capital database business to Euromoney for $500K.

Where is the company based?

Quintura is a U.S. corporation with U.S. offices in Alexandria, Virginia and software development operations in the Moscow region of Russia.

What can you tell us about the Mangrove investment?

I confirm that we raised a significant amount from Mangrove. This is the first ever Western VC investment made into an Internet company out of Russia.

Please describe your application?

Quintura launches its visual Find Engine, giving users the control to find what they are really looking for by using advanced Neural Networking techniques. While viewing the Quintura Cloud, users can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently. Visualization becomes the centre of the user experience, replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings. Users can save and share
their find results, making Quintura the first company to effectively turn the effort of finding into something that can be shared and used by others.

In the near future, Quintura plans to launch several specific search clouds where various user communities will be able to visually find relevant information on the Web more easily. Quintura plans to offer blog and web-site publishers the option to create and display the Quintura clouds for their web-sites and related search themes.

What kind of algorithms / tech is being used?

The Quintura technology uses the advanced algorithms of active semantic neural networks. The technology enables Quintura to provide users with a powerful find engine that is much closer to the human natural way of searching and finding information than any of the convenient search engines is.

What is the business model for the company?

We currently formalize our business model since we have just launched our web service. The model is going to be partly based on selling contextual advertisements. We are going to utilize the power of our visual cloud and plan to launch a variety of free and subscription-based web services to user communities and affiliates. It should help them take a full advantage of visual capabilities of Quintura.

Who are the founders?

The founders of Quintura are Yakov Sadchikov (President & Chief Executive Officer), Alexander Ershov (Chief Technology Officer) and Rustam Gafurov (Chief Software Architect). The founders have background in both software development and Internet business.

How does your service stand out compared to competitors (e.g. Google, FAST,
or the others)?

The current web search experience is often very frustrating. It has become virtually impossible for a user to search through a massive amount of search results and easily find relevant information. Quintura brings a whole new perspective to web search by delivering an easy and intuitive approach to find information. It provides users with a visual way to see and refine their searches. Quintura has a unique user interface displaying an
interactive visual cloud of related keywords in addition to a traditional list of search results. While the user refines the search, the results are dynamically updated to match a new search query. Therefore, the Quintura user is able to find the relevant information easier and faster.

Posted at 08:07 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

November 01, 2006

Cellity With Some Savvy Names

We keep up with what Spreadshirt founder, Lukasz Gadowski, publishes on his Gruenderszene blog and so should those interested in the startup scene in his part of Germany.

He's been doing a series of video interviews, the latest of which is Cellity. We think it might be the beginning of something interesting, mainly because of where the people come from that are behind it, but also because of the size of the market it can tap.

Cellity aims to reduce mobilephone bills using a software-based least-cost router that has to be loaded onto the phone and then runs in the background.

It works best with Symbian phones but it can also run on Javaphones, according to the interview with CEO and co-founder Sarik Weber. That is him with the megaphone above. He was formerly an exec at social networking startup OpenBC and at eProfessional, which was recently acquired by online ad tech startup Zanox.

Besides Weber, there is Nils Weitemeyer (who sold his last venture Elkware to Infospace in 2004 ) and Cellity just recruited the head of German operations for Skype, Tim von Toerne (picture right).

The founders have funded an R&D team of 10 since founding in June of this year and expect to launch mid-month.

Video - (Gruenderszene)
Read - Cellity Bekommt Prominente (Cellity Blog)

Posted at 06:29 PM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink

Irish Startup With Way To Pay Before You Buy Online To Save

Atlas and Benchmark have teamed up to back a €20M expansion round for 3V Transactions, an Irish startup that's developed a prepaid card scheme for consumers.

3V was founded in Dublin in 2004 to target what it says is a €500B European prepaid market and was until recently majority owned by Alphyra, the Irish payment processing company. Update: And its tech is patented, according to Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures (blog link below).

Why a startup has an opportunity to do this kind of thing and not an established credit card, or traveller's cheque company, or even a wily mobilephone company, just shows how complacent these industries have become.

Yes, Visa is working with 3V on this one, but as we see it, Visa will not be getting the lion's share of the opportunity. It will be the startup, an Irish bank (permanent tsb), as well as Alphyra.

Note that Alphyra, is also in the Benchmark portfolio. The venture firm financed an MBO back in 2003. (Benchmark may have become famous for an early stage investment in eBay but in Europe, the firm does a lot of growth, late stage, and buyout investing. )

So Benchmark benefits twice from incumbents not connecting with a ball that has been in their court for over six years when online shopping started to grow and Europe's online payment startups were ailing and failing.

We can see this being popular for buying cheap flight tickets online. We've been flying Easyjet lately - the alarm:clock network is a thrifty organization. Since Easyjet breaks out the amount of the fees charged you can clearly see who's gouging.

For a ticket from Basel to Paris return, we pay an additonal 20 percent of the ticket price - due to a minimum transaction fee and an additional percentage of the purchase price - just for the privilege and convenience of using MasterCard. Debit cards are the cheapest option with Easyjet but it doesn't have many signed on yet.

We definitely think there's opportunities to undercut the fees that credit card companies charge, but the alternatives have to be easy, transparent, and widely accepted.

Read - 3V secures E20m in funding for expansion (Business World)
Read - 3V Newest From (Fred Destin blog Atlas Ventures)

Posted at 04:39 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

Ekahau's Location-Enabled Wireless Play Raises $16M

Finland's Ekahau has raised $16M to expand its wireless sensor network solutions business from strategic and VC investors. The company was founded in 2000, and has developed a range of software and hardware to support tracking and finding of items inside a WiFi network.

From what we can see, it has made some headway in the healthcare market. We figure it helps emergency room personnel answer the question: where did the morning crew leave the darned defibrillator?
Read - Ekahau Secures $16 Million in Additional Funding (press rel.)

Posted at 09:44 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink

Funding The Burn : Heavily Capitalized European Startups

Now there's a headline we haven't been able to write for a good five years. That is because during the bubble European VCs heavily funded some incredibly weak cash-burning startups and then reacted in subsequent years by doing what has come to be called drip-feeding the venture. (They also did that pre-bubble but for a different reason, lack of capital.)

But things are changing for the better, and without going into the reasons for that, let'slook at what corporate finance boutique Go4Venture has to say this morning in its monthly newsletter.
Go4Venture Shows That This Year VC Investment Is Above 2005 and 2004 Levels.

Go4Venture's analysts provide deal profiles for InsideContactless, Rebtel, Operax, concluding that they are heavily capitalized now. Some quotes:

With this round, Inside Contactless has raised in excess of EUR 50 million, making it part of the fairly small league of heavily capitalised European VC-based companies. ...

And this:

Since its start in 2000, Operax has been through a number of financing rounds raising a total of EUR 30 million, which makes it a substantial investment by European standards. ...

And that:

By amassing $20 million in a Series A within 9 months of starting, Rebtel Networks must be establishing a new record for a European startup – or pretty close. But then again it demonstrates that in internet and mobile services VCs value momentum, particularly for companies set up by successful entrepreneurs.

Go4Venture didn't mention them because it was only looking at September but you could also put Icera Semiconductor ($60M+) and Sulake Labs (which is at $137M and counting) in the list too.

The biggest difference between then and now, is that it's not the "A" round (Rebtel excepted) that gets the big money, it's the B and C rounds, where there is revenue growth, evidence of penetration of a global market, and management is strong.

Posted at 09:42 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink

Mobilephone Software Firm Picsel Nabs £25M

The UK's Picsel Technologies, a software company that develops a suite of products to create, publish, and display content on mobilephones, has just raised £25M from undisclosed investors, we learned today reading Library House' weekly free newsletter, which also said Picsel's sales are up to £13M now.

According to its website, Picsel secured first round funding in 2001 totalling $11m from SOFTBANK Europe Ventures and BancBoston Capital. It raised a second round a year later of $6m from a consortium of Japanese investors, including Yasuda Enterprise, CSK Ventures, Mizuho Bank and the Morito family.

More recently, the firms says, Picsel secured a large scale non-equity loan agreement with Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad (MDV), the finance arm of the Malaysian Government.

It was co-founded and is led today by Imran Khand in 1998 after he founded two other undisclosed ventures. Before that he was involved in economic development activities with the Scottish government.

Read LibraryHouse Newsletter Issue 33

Posted at 09:14 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink