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December 22, 2006
Seasonal Snowflakes
Thanks to all our readers and tipsters from the alarm:clock team.
.... Since we do not want to travel up to a glacier for Christmas holidays this year, it looks like this is the only way we'll see snowflakes. (Image: Philips' energy efficient LEDs). See you when the venture news starts flowing again.
Posted at 02:23 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
December 21, 2006
CoComment Raises $1.5M From Netage Capital
CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.
Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.
We think the "success" referred to would have been the IPO of Mixi, a Netage portfolio firm, whose floatation valued it at $1.6B in September. It was the first social networking IPO, we believe. OpenBC's in Germany was the second, and its IPO market cap came out at less than €160M.
Read -Investor beteiligt sich an Start-up-Firma coComment von Swisscom (press rel)
Posted at 03:56 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro Contenders For Peer-to-Peer Video And TV
Technology Review has a feature on P2P video, mentioning a couple of the European enablers and early entrants, such as live P2P broadcasting firm Octoshape (backed by IVS and Nordic Venture Partners), Tribler (a Dutch university project), and CacheLogic (backed by Pentech, Amadeus, 3i ) which sells networking equipment optimized for managing P2P data.
The article leads with news about Bittorrent's acquisiton of μTorrent (microtorrent), a compact Bittorrent client, which actually adds a European angle to Bittorrent's future success as microtorrent belongs to a Swedish computer programmer named Ludvig Strigeus. (That deal also opens up the question that if microtorrent was good enough for Bittorrent to acquire, why didn't the project attract an enterprising VC to it.)
There is no mention of the Skype founder-backed Venice Project, now running a closed beta trial - the closed aspect may explain why it wasn't in there as the reporter only talked about what he could look at.
The Venice Project Blog Led Us To This Screenshot
We'll be keeping an eye on the region's VCs to see if they can actually catalyze (and capitalize) these ventures and some of the others that are emerging to create a market leader.
Read - Technology Review: P2P: From Internet Scourge to Savior (technology review)
Read - P2P Streaming Goes Live (a:c euro)
Read - Variations On Bittorrent From Tribler Peerfactor (a:c euro)
Posted at 10:17 AM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
Update : Google - Endoxon Price Tag €25M -
We reported this week Google's acquisition of parts of Endoxon, a Swiss software company specialized in mapping solutions. Word is that the price was SFr 35M (approx €25M) as reported by business daily Cash - whose source is known to us (and who said it was closer to SFr40M). The Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger also cited the Cash report.
The acquisition was mainly about the people. Some 50 Endoxon employees are expected to move over to the Google Maps and Google Earth product line, bringing their geo-software engineering skills, as well as knowledge of how to negotiate data integration deals in the highly fragmented markets beyond the US.
Read - Google kauft Luzerner Kartenfirma (tages anzeiger)
Posted at 07:59 AM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-Backed Navigon Acquires Software Biz From Navteq
Navigon, a German developer of software for portable navigation, has acquired Navteq's navigtaion software business - to make it easier to develop products for the automotive market in-house. No financial terms were disclosed. The two organizations have been working together for some time now, according to a joint press release.
Navigon is backed by General Atlantic Partners and has been slated for an IPO in Germany. Will this be the last deal before the float?
Posted at 07:04 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 20, 2006
alarm:clock euro Puzzler winner: Kennet's Max Bleyleben
The answer to this week's Puzzler question
Which European VC reportedly courted and funded a fast-growing virtual paperdoll company after a tip from his teenage nieces, who told him it was their favourite site?
is Neil Rimer of Index Ventures
The first reader to get the correct VC name at Index was Max Bleyleben of Kennet Ventures, who noted that he had read the same New York Times article that we did. Max Bleyleben also has a blog that he keeps up to date at Technofile.
There were actually quite a few readers that got the VC firm name right, independant of the NYT piece. We didn't realize that the Startdoll deal was so well-known. The next Puzzler is going to be more challenging.
Posted at 09:12 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 19, 2006
Irish Startup Raises €2.5M For Wireless Health Monitors
BiancaMed, a wireless sensor company that spun out of University College Dublin, secured a €2.5M investment in a deal led by DFJ ePlanet Ventures with participation from existing corporate investor ResMed. The three year old company's core product is a contactless motion sensor that detects heart rate and respiration.
BiancaMed says it combines the sensor with its software to enable gadgets that monitor sleep, diet and exercise routines. It has several prototypes and one product going through FDA approavals. It is not clear to us at the moment if it will license its technology to OEMs or if it is aiming to brand and market and manufacture the gadgets itself.
Read - Press Rel.
Posted at 02:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Burda's VC Arm Buys Into Nightlife Portal
Burda Digital Ventures has acquired a 30 percent stake in Nachtagenten GmbH, a clubbing, events, and photo portal in Germany, for an undisclosed amount. The founders Robert und Alan Solansky retain the rest of the company's shares.
Posted at 01:51 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Baltic e-purchasing Startup Financed For Growth By ex-Skypers
Ambient Sound Investments, the Estonian investment vehicle established by the four of Skype's founding engineers, is having no trouble finding fast growing technology ventures to invest in. Its latest deal is a €2M investment in MarkIT, an Estonian online purchasing application developer, which raised the capital to finance further product development and to expand into five new Central and Eastern European markets over the next year and a half.
MarkIT claims 10,000 large and medium sized companies in the Baltic region. Its turnover this year is on track for €18M, up more than three times last year's sales, the firm said in a statement.
Read - Press Release
Posted at 01:00 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 18, 2006
Google Acquires Swiss Endoxon For Its Mapping Solutions
Google has acquired Endoxon, a Swiss mapping software and solution developer that was founded in 1998 , to "bolster engineering and technical resources for Google" for an undisclosed amount.
Endoxon had six business units, but Google is only buying three, which is probably the reason it took Google so long to make the deal -- we had been hearing rumors about something there for several months now.
The three units of Endoxon acquired are its internet, mapping and data processing business units. The others are spun off into a new operating company called mappuls gmbh. Before the acquisition Endoxon employed 75 -we are not sure how many will join Google.
As far as we know, Endoxon had not raised venture capital. We are checking this and will update, accordingly.
Endoxon's geo-tools are behind several online services such as immo.search.ch and map.search.ch
Read - Endoxon announcement
Read - Google Buys Endoxon (Google blog)
Read - Agilent Acquires Swiss (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:50 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro Puzzler
This week's question:
Which European VC reportedly courted and funded a fast-growing virtual paperdoll company after a tip from his teenage nieces, who told him it was their favourite site?
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 04:34 PM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
Video Projector Startup Adds €1M To Seed Round For Speed
Light Blue Optics, a two year old UK company developing the optical gadgetry and software to enable things like using the mobilephone as a tv projector (image right sourced from company presentation) has tapped 3i for another €1M bringing its seed round to €3.5M. The money is to be used to "acclerate" product development.
The company has also acquired a "key" patent for its product line from Uni Cambridge.
3i does not do a lot of very early stage rounds, so when it does we take a second look. Light Blue Optics has been mentioned in the trade press a bit and Electronics Weekly reports it has seen a demo, saying that the prototype of a full colour projector does what it claims, although laser speckles are still an issue. The article did add that the company is working on the software to alleviate the speckling.
Read - Light Blue Optics Shows Hologram (electronics weekly)
Read - press rel
Posted at 01:48 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Biz Angels Backing German Slide.com Clone Imageloop
Germany's Imageloop, a company that has developed an application for users to create an online moving photo album, or slideshow, for pasting into a website or their desktop, has raised around €1M from a syndicate of investors. A couple of the investors are are business angels that made their money from early Internet activities, such as Andreas Weigend, a former chief scientist at Amazon.com, and the founders of German broadband provider QSC.
Reading the firm's blog, and comparing the two sites, it is clear that the founders and new backers of Imageloop see it as a European contender to rival Slide.com.
Twin Sons Of Different Mothers
It is hard to believe that you can make a floatable business out of what could end up being added as a feature by developers at sites like Myspace, Bebo, or Blogger (owned by Google). But that thought is not daunting the venture's shareholders and they say the freemium model (see link below) is what's called for to create a businesse out of the application:
At present, it is completely free to use imagelooop. A re-structuring of costs through the introduction of premium membership, exclusive third-party products and advertising will take place at a later point.
Read - Imageloop financing press rel.
Read - Freemium (a:c euro)
Posted at 07:56 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
France's Xcalia Raises €2M To Market SOA Platform Abroad
France's Xcalia, developer of enterprise integration software, raised €2M in a round led by its internal investors Innovacom, Iris Capital and I-Source Gestion. Iris and Innovacom are French VCs but both have an international scope, backing companies active in Europe but also in the US.
How Xcalia's VC sees it:
“Xcalia has proven the advantages of using its Intermediation technology over traditional integration methods with 20 large European companies as customers, some handling data volumes scaling to ten million or more transactions per day,” said Curt Gunsenheimer, Partner at Iris Capital, “Following its partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and leading U.S.-based systems integration partners, we anticipate customer deployments to accelerate further.”
REad Xcalia Secures Venture Financing to Expand Business and Market SOA Software Platform (press rel.)
Posted at 07:47 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 17, 2006
Revoo Raises $5M From Eden Ventures
Reevoo, a UK publisher of product and service reviews, has raised $5M from Eden Ventures to increase the number of reviews it has on tap for online retailers.
Online review sites are not new, but Reevoo has a process for sourcing and vetting reviews from consumers that have actually purchased the product or service in question, which it believes makes them more trustworthy.
Here's its pitch
"Reevoo collects customer reviews on behalf of its retail clients and only confirmed purchasers receive a questionnaire giving them the opportunity to review a product.... There is a plethora of sites out there today where it is just too easy for book reviews to be written by the author, hotel reviews by the proprietor or product reviews by the manufacturer. Ultimately consumers will lose trust in these sites and we’ve built Reevoo to help people choose what to buy based on real, genuine, confirmed reviews."
First Capital, the corporate finance boutique that advised Reevoo on its fundraising, adds in its blog that Reevoo is a "trust filter" for the web.
Besides the type of business getting funded, the deal is interesting because the VC is Bath, England-based Eden Ventures
, investing from its first formal fund.
Since it is very rare for limited partners to back a new early stage tech fund in Europe post-bubble, it has to have a lot going for it. In Eden's case, one thing that makes it special is that its partners have been investing for several years and already have a track record as a team - a recent portfolio exit was Cramer Systems, which was acquired by Amdocs for approx. $375M in cash. Another plus is that most of its general partners are former entrerpreneurs.
Eden typically invests in very early stage deals and its focus is software. This deal is on the edge of that style of investment as Reevoo (sounds to us more like it) is a publishing business model and it already has revenues.
Read - Reevoo is a trust filter (first capital's Coffee Shops Of Mayfair Blog )
Read - Reevoo Secures $5mln (Reevoo blog)
Read - Reerun: Reevoo Seeks Financing (a:c euro)
Posted at 02:47 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
December 15, 2006
alarm:clock euro puzzler winner: Joachim Wolff
This week's quiz winner is Joachim H Wolff who was the first to write in with the correct answer to the Puzzler
Name the early-stage Scottish venture firm that just signed on Mike Ramsay, co-founder and former CEO of TiVo as a venture partner?
The answer: Pentech Ventures
Based in Munich, Germany, Joachim Wolff is a European venture capital fund adviser who also does startup management consulting. He has been in the VC business since 1998.
Posted at 08:40 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
December 14, 2006
VC-backed Fuel Cell Startup Pemeas Acquired By BASF
BASF AG's Future Business unit has agreed to acquire German fuel cell startup Pemeas GmbH from its early stage investors as part of its investment program in new business development. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.
Pemeas raised about $26M. Its backers included Conduit Ventures, SAM Private Equity (whose mgmt team just bought itself out with backing from Robeco and changed its name to Emerald Technology Ventures), as well as Danfoss, CDP Capital and industrial investors.
The VCs get an exit, a fast one. They only backed the company for two years. How good a return it was, is open to speculation. Knowing the currenty sentiment on fuel cells among other VC specialized in alt energy, it probably was not a big one.
BASF has set its R&D budget for new markets at €850M for the next two years - perhaps the purchase price came out of that budget -- targeted areas are energy management, raw material change, nanotechnology, plant biotechnology and white biotechnology. BASF is hoping to generate future annual sales of €2 billion to €4 billion from innovations arising from the investment of €850M by 2015.
Posted at 02:33 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Seed Funding For Kimeta And VisuMotion
The High Tech Gründerfonds strikes again. It is supporting seed stage investment in a new job search engine Kimeta.de (along with private investors and BASF) and Jena-based VisuMotion, a computer graphics software firm.
Darmstadt-based Kimeta.de sees Google as its role model for website design. It job engine search jobs from other sites on the Internet and offers a simple interface but supports complex searches. Its founders, two long-time headhunters, brought in Jörg Malang, as a co-founder and manager. He founded the German subsidiary of comparison shopping site Kelkoo (which was acquired by Yahoo), worked in marketing at a popular dating site service provider, and earlier was with Lycos.
VisuMotion.net is a newly formed company developing hardware and software for 3D image display. Apparently there are a lot of different 3D file formats out there, which is an issue for vendors of 3D displays, content developers, and for the end users. Its products are meant to overcome the problem.
Posted at 07:01 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 13, 2006
Passado.com Finds A US VC For A €10M Round
Passado.com, a Myspace and Bebo-type online social network, has raised €10M to expand into UK, Russia and Italy, reports Reuters in London. The new investor is US-based Tudor Ventures, joined by earlier investor DFJ ePlanet.
The Passado business plan has been making the rounds in the VC market for a while we hear. It was initially a kind of Classmates.com or Friends Reunited type site in Germany, but it is now British-owned and offering blogs and other applications. It claims 5M registered users.
It's a bit unusual for Reuters to report a VC investment in a social networking startup, we're not sure what it means, if anything.
Read - Networking site Passado plans to expand (Reuters)
Posted at 02:58 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro Puzzler
This week's question:
Name the early-stage Scottish venture firm that just signed on Mike Ramsay, co-founder and former CEO of TiVo as a venture partner? Hint: Earlier this year, Dutch navigation tech company TomTom acquired one of this software-oriented VC firm's startups.
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 10:17 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
Hasso Plattner Ventures and Strascheg's Extorel Invest €2M In Datango
Hasso Plattner Ventures and Extorel have invested €2M in German online help and navigation tool developer, Datango, to finance its expansion into the US. Early investor, Atlas Venture, also participated.
We interviewed Datango's Berlin-based CEO, Jochen Wiechen, earlier this month when we heard he had closed the financing round. The pedigree of its new investors and the fact that Datango is a bubble survivor make it worth looking at more closely.
Founded and funded in 1999, Datango is on track for €5M in sales this year as its target market recovers and starts to spend again. Datango employs 40 today and has been mainly active in Germany selling into multi-national organizations. It raised the new capital to expand into the US market more aggressively in 2007.
Its software is used to develop training and online support applications, mainly for SAP users, but also Peoplesoft, Oracle and the like. It has features that automate a lot of the tasks for documenting multi-lingual enteprise applications.
How does Datango compare to other online documentation tools? "Datango is the Daimler. The others are Trabants," quipped Wiechen, backing that claim up with customer names like eBay International, MAN Group, Schering, Deutsche Telekom's T-Com and Novartis Vaccines use Datango's software.
Given its new investors' connections and the firm's reference list of existing customers, it looks like Datango has a good basis for a growth story.
Posted at 09:59 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 12, 2006
Two IPOs On Eurolist Create €2.3B Worth Of Dotcom And Alt Energy Cos.
It's not just London that is proving to be a good bet for tech IPOs, Euronext's Eurolist exchange is creating some nicely valued companies too.
In the past couple of weeks, the IPOs of EDF Energies Nouvelles, the wind power company, and Seloger.com, a venture-backed online real-estate site, have created two French companies with a combined valuation of about €2.3B.
EDF Energies Nouvelles, a spinoff of the French utility company EDF, raised €340M in its IPO. It was not a venture-backed company but we include it here because it is an alt energy company. Its market cap was €1.96B last time we looked. And Seloger.com has a market cap of €366M. Its last investment round before its IPO was led by 3i.
That's two examples, and you could add Meetic, the online dating company, as well. Despite a drop in its share price back to its IPO level in recent months, it still boasts a current market cap of €365M on Eurolist.
Now that they have valuable paper and some cash, we might add, we would expect these tech companies to start leading some M&A activity - perhaps giving VCs and founders of innovative startups some exits, in the same way that Cambridge Silicon Radio, for example, has been doing.
Posted at 04:02 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Cegid Acquires VC-backed Comptanoo
Cegid, a French publicly traded ERP solutions company, has acquired French startup Comptanoo, an application service provider (ASP), to boost its SaaS business. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Comptanoo raised capital from private and institutional investors, but a good 60 percent of the firm was retained by its founders and employees, according to its website. It was likely a small sized transaction as Comptanoo did about €600K in revenues (half recurring) and breaking even at operational level only.
Read- Cegid Press Release
Posted at 07:36 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
DJTunes Funded To Acquire New Titles
DJTunes.com GmbH, a Germany-based startup running a legal music download service for club and dance music, raised €500K from the High Tech Gründerfonds to secure further content licenses.
Online for 6 months, the firm says that it has gained popularity with club djs. It differentiates itself from mainstream portals, such as iTunes and Musicload (a German rival run by Deutsche Telekom), through its depth of specialized content and its "friendlier" DRM strategy, it says. The sites search engine is pretty sophisticated and the selection of titles is pretty large, considering its a startup. The founders have ties into the music industry, which probably helped a lot.
Read - DJTUNES.COM GmbH erhält Finanzierung des High-Tech Gründerfonds (press rel.)
Posted at 05:27 AM | Posted to Media | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
December 11, 2006
OpenBC/Xing : The €157M Social Network
In what the investment bankers said was an over-subscribed bookbuilding, OpenBC, the social network for business executives - now called Xing, raised €35.7M in its IPO in Frankfurt late last week.
It's share price has been stable since and its market cap is about €157M. Not bad for a three year old company that generated about €6M in revenues this past year.
It was a partial exit for the firm's venture backers. It raised one round of venture capital about a year ago in a deal led by Wellington Partners, and including early angel investors (total deal value was €5.7M). Wellington's share of that round gave it an 18 percent stake in OpenBC, which translates into about €28M based on the firm's current market cap.
The VC realized about half of its investment in the IPO and retains a 9 percent stake post-IPO. So we can assume Wellington's partners are happy with the outcome so far, especially considering the length of time it took to realize the return.
Read - Angaben Zur Erstnotierung (Deutsche Boerse)
Posted at 10:31 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Rerun: UK Startup Reevoo Seeks Financing
Over at e-consultancy's blog, there is the news that Reevoo, a publisher of product reviews which are used by online electronics retailers is in the process of securing Series-A funding to help it expand internationally and into new "vertical" sectors. Current customers include electronics shops Comet and Jessops. It tapped First Capital, the London-based corp finance boutique to help raise the capital.
We didn't have much time to take a look at Reevoo, but the business idea sounds familiar. Companies like DooYoo and Ciao.com are some examples of existing firms in this area, so the question is what's Reevoo doing different this time?
Stepping away from Reevoo, and looking at the underlying trend behind several new services launched on the Web recently - we are starting to wonder where these "user-generated" review sites, local search, and social shopping sites are going to get their contributors from? Are they expecting European consumers to spend less time consuming and even more time online than they already are -- so that they can write for online forums?
Read - Reevoo Seeks First Round (e-consultancy blog)
Posted at 07:46 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
December 09, 2006
Silicon Valley VC Invests $31M In Famous Scottish Games Dev Team
Your a:c euro reporter just got back from the Scottish Tech Tour (the body is back at least) to hear the news that New Enterprise Associates, a 30 year old Silicon Valley VC giant, has put $31M into Dundee, Scotland-based Realtime Worlds, an independent games development company, whose founding team created the Grand Theft Auto video game. (Disclosure: the a:c euro's accomodation on the tour was sponsored by The European Tech Tour Assoc.)
Realtime Worlds sold an undisclosed amount of equity to NEA in order to invest in its "global centre of excellence" for games development and to staff it up (image right).
The investment in the four year old company comes in advance of the launch of its Crackdown title, to be released in 2007 and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360 platform. Another game, All Points Bulletin, a massively multiplayer online game, will be published for the PC and for Xbox 360 by Korean online games giant Webzen.
This deal is interesting because we just learned that the Grand Theft Auto franchise is one of the examples of Scotland's claim to being a world class tech location. Indeed, according to NEA, the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings games franchises generated some ...
$2.5B in revenues worldwide... Who knew it was a Scottish team behind it - we didn't until Thurday.
But NEA's investment in Realtime is also interesting for another reason, it is yet another example of a trend that sees brand name US VCs investing in European tech companies.
And the fact that NEA invested alone adds one more deal to a list that is blowing the notion that the US VCs are only co-investing in later stage ventures with local partners.
Other US VCs that have completed similar deals include Highland Capital (France's Photoways' Series A round), Sequoia (Austria's JaJah's seed round), GRP Capital (France's Actimagine Series A round) and Baker Capital (Finland's DigiTV Series A round).
Realtime Worlds was founded by CEO and creative director David Jones who was one of the co-founders of DMA Design, the games dev firm that spawned the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
As we learned last week in an intense two and a half days of presentations and meetings with Scottish entrepreneurs and their supporters in castles, chapels, research centers, airplane hangers, Edinburgh's City Hall chambers, and universities, not to mention the stretch Hummers and the whisky distellery, when Scottish investors and economic development execs trot out recent examples of the country's capacity to spawn world-class and high-growth tech, they list the Grand Theft Auto company DMA Design, the cloning of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin BioCentre, eye diagnostics firm Optos, and Wolfson Microelectronics whose market cap is well over a $1B.
The other claims to fame that Scotland has are much older and sexier, the TV, the telephone, the photocopier, hypodermic needles, antiseptics and anaesthetics, and interferon type I (although Amercians may disagree with some of those claims).
Read - Realtime Worlds Receives Financing From New Enterprise Associates (press rel.)
Posted at 05:33 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Amadeus and GIMV Back Philips Display Innovator
Amadeus Capital Partners and GIMV led a €12M Series A round for display technology innovator Liquavista BV, a round that included New Venture Partners who spun the company out of Philips in April this year.
Liquavista's backers are bettting that its electro-wetting displays, which offer good viewing all kinds of lighting conditions - outdoors and indoors but do it with a low power budget, one-tenth, they say, of the power of similar sized LCD screens.
The displays are targeted at watches, mobile phones and digital cameras to ATM screens and large flat panels. The smallest type of screen is the one the firm aims to commercialize first.
Posted at 10:22 AM | Posted to Displays | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Social Media More Relevant Than We Thought
The Mediatech confab this month organized by Library House in London continues to be a topic in industry blogs a week after the event, which surprises us a bit. To be honest, we were sceptical when Library House asked the alarm:clock to be a media partner for its event earlier this year -- thinking that the conference's theme was based on startups and technology enablers overestimating their importance.
Library House Execs At mediatech 2.006
Softening our stance on the relevance of the tech crew was the news in the meantime that Skyrock, a French youth-oriented radio station, has not only made itself more relevant to listeners (and given online advertisers a reason to write Skyrock some cheques) with services such as free blogs, free email, instant messaging and a community thing, but it also created a new international growth opportunity for itself.
And we've seen two German TV stations take stakes in video sharing sites, driving traffic to them with programming and prime-time promotion, giving us a hint that various platforms are not mutually exclusive.
We still don't know if the trend is good news for VC-backed media tech startups in Europe - there's the question of make or buy, for example, but the point is there's a trend and it is stronger than we thought.
We asked Richard Youngman, head of research at Library House (wearing the dark-rimmed specs in the image above) who organized the content for the event for a debriefing. He said with over 300 attendees, the event exceed its targets, pointing out that it was not a given, because there had been a similarly themed event, Digital Hollywood Europe, running on the same day in London. Mediatech is on for next year and Young is looking for input and ideas about what you'd like to see and hear.
On TechCrunch UK
Read - Reflections On Mediatech
Read - The Week London Partied
Read - Notes From Mediatech
And elsewhere
Read - Mediatech 2006 (mobhappy)
Read - mediatech 2.006 - Media and More (Ormigo's Oliver Thylmann blog)
Read - Mediatech Reporters Get A Buzz (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 05:58 AM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
December 05, 2006
IBM Acquires VC-Backed Dutch Security Software Firm
IBM said to today it has agreed to acquire Consul risk management, a VC-backed Delft, Netherlands-based software company to boost its Tivoli software unit. Financial details were not disclosed.
Consul's products monitor and control user activity within an orgainzation's information systems. It has a patent pending methodology called W7, which stands for Who, did What, When, Where, Where from, Where to and on What -- with instant alerts and reporting.
It lists its investors on its website, which include Kennet Partners, Softbank Europe Ventures, DKW, and Nesbic CTEfund.
Read - PRESS RELEASE IBM to Acquire Consul (press release)
Posted at 02:55 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
VC For Nanda Technologies 10X Wafer Inspection Breakthrough
Investors in German chip wafer inspection startup, Nanda Technologies, say that the firm has a new method to check the quality of wafers that is a 10X efficiency improvement on existing systems, and as a result they've invested €1.8M to get a production prototype out of the lab and to fund market entry. Investors include the High-Tech Gründerfonds, Seedfonds Bayern and Ventegis Capital.
The firm's backers also said in a statement that the company's founders hail from Silicon Valley but they decided on Olching, Germany as the headquarters due to the region's 'leading-edge' suppliers of optical components and the nearness to potential customers in Asia, Europe, and the US.
Read- Ventegis Capital AG: Nanda Technologies erhält Finanzierung von Investorenkonsortium (boerse.de)
Posted at 11:26 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Semiconductors | TrackBack | Permalink
What's Your Social Media Biz Worth?
Over on the Equity Kicker blog we've been discussing social media sites and where to learn more about how the successful ones made a business out of it. One of many several sources is Startup Review, a blog sponsored by Sierra Ventures, a US venture firm.
The blog publishes case studies on web companies that meet its criteria for success. The profiles are quite detailed and describe what the service is on offer, how the businesses acquire new customers, generate leads, and earn money. The author also gives his take on how valuations are calculated.
One thing we noted is that the valuation estimates based on sales multiples in the US market look quite rich compared to European tech sector norms. Price to-earnings-ratio is also higher than the European norm for M&A deals, but not as far off as the PS ratio is, as the data from Regent Associates suggests below. It should be noted that Regent tracks tech sector deals in its database, not just Internet-related deals. Its data can include consulting companies and service-heavy IT companies. Its latest figures reflect first half 2006.
Current price to earnings ratio is 17.8 (price paid includes 50% of the expected contingent consideration in deals with earn-outs and apply to historic performance, trailing year's financial figures.)
If any readers have current data based on public and private European online company valuations at exit or last round, we'd be interested in it.
Read - Startup Review Case Study Index
Read - Regent Associates 1H06 Review (regent associates)
Posted at 08:13 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
What Value Do VC's Add? One UK Startup's Answer
VCs always talk about their "value-add", but when you ask what they do in practical terms, it tends to get kind of fuzzy and vague. So we pounced on an article, found in the the Insitute of Engineering Technology's Engineering Management magazine, that describes in rare detail what one early stage VC did to get a semiconductor software startup off to a roaring start -- with the right buisness model and the right customers.
The VC in the spotlight is Pond Ventures and its portfolio company Transitive Corp. The article was a jointly authored investee-VC piece.
This kind of magzine article is very rare and there is really no excuse for that. It is true that based on our experience working freelance for financial and tech publications, there is not a lot of interest from our editors to write about European VC in action, but that is not a major hurdle. VCs have their own websites and can publish there whatever they want and there are pubs, like the one where we found this article, that will publish copy written by people in industry if it's written in an informative way. Check out the quotes we found most illuminating below the jump.
In case you haven't heard of Transitive, it's software is pretty disruptive for the chip market: it enabled Apple’s switch to Intel processors for certain products and it will also enable IBM to sell servers into the LInux/x86 market, while Intel can offer its Xeon and Itanium platforms to users that have been relying on Sun's SPARC products.
There are some good insights into Pond's modus operandi and the paragraphs that describe how it got Transitive it's first deal converts the value-add buzzword into a term we understand -- cashflow -- for the venture:
Irving and his colleagues at Pond had a completely different attitude towards an investment proposition... The other early stage UK venture capitalists said that, while the technology was interesting, he [Transitive's founder] should work to turn it into a fundable proposition, with a business plan, plus the target market and a management team. Then they would think about investing. Rawsthorne [Transitive's founder] had no idea how to do those things and had no idea which market sector would be the right first fit for the technology.
The quote shows what Pond did during due diligence, that is, before it had made a commitment to fund the company - which is certainly one way to help the startup tick another box to get "traction", another pet criteria that VCs typically require:
During the process of due diligence Pond set up a series of meetings with senior executives from all the major players in the microprocessor space and helped Rawsthorne put his pitch together, ensuring it was appropriate for the audience. It was during this process that Pond helped Transitive to secure its first customer with whom it arranged to do a proof of concept demonstrator deal with a significant price tag.
Read - Pick the right VC for you (iee management)
Read - Customer case study Apple (transitive)
Posted at 07:03 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
London's Jobserve Takes Over ComputerJobs
The UK's JobServe.com, an Internet recruitment site, has bought ComputerJobs.com, which claims to be the second largestIT- focused job site in the US after Dice. In May 2006 JobServe purchased USA job boards CareerBoard.com and ComputerWork.com.
Read press release
Posted at 05:08 AM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
December 04, 2006
Money Monday - Founders' Chance To Be Showcased On TechCrunch UK
Over at TechCrunch UK, there's a new feature called Money Mondays that will showcase startups looking for funding. Your a:c euro correspondent only just learned about it, so the first edition deadline is already passed. But we checked with TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher today and he said there is still time to submit for the next editions. They will publish contact details and a short pitch for each startup selected. It is geared for startups that have not received any institutional or formal funding yet.
Here's the criteria and guidelines:
... a web or mobile startup which has yet to secure formal funding. They will have to have either an application of their idea up and running (e.g. a live web site) or a working demo or beta we can look at.Startups can submit a short ‘pitch’ (and we mean short - half an A4 page if you want a guide) to us by the preceding Friday. In particular, we’ll be looking for smart applications of the new wave of web and mobile techniques and strategies.
The goal here is to support the start-up community of entrepreneurs and to make this a pretty informal, accessible way of attracting attention from potential investors, even towards ideas coming out of the ‘back bedroom’.
It doesn’t mean we’ll ‘take the gloves off’ in our critique of companies. It’s not a formal competition, but we hope this will act as a useful shot-in the arm for the startup community.
Please use their Contact form to submit your project.
Read - Money Mondays First Deadline Is Today (techcrunch UK)
Posted at 06:05 PM | Posted to entrepreneurship | TrackBack | Permalink
Quertech Financed To Make Aluminium As Hard As Steel
After testing and showing the robustness of several prototypes, France's Quertech Ingenierie has raised €1M from Ouest Ventures to drum up some customers. The startup has a new metallurgy process that works at low temperatures, which applies a surface coating to aluminium or plastic without changing the properties of the materials coated. The coating measures only a few microns in thickness but gives the new surface the hardness of steel, it claims.
If you understand French spoken at high-speed, then check out the startup's 30 second elevator pitch which explains what the firm intends to do with the capital.
Link Elevator Pitch Quertech (tremplin enterprises)
Read - Quertech Ingénierie trouve 1 million pour s'industrialiser (l'usine nouevelles)
Posted at 01:38 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Alt Energy And Tech Pioneers - Nine From Europe
Since 2000, The World Economic Forum (the Davos confab that brings together the Bill Gates and Bill Clintons of this world) selects a few dozen "technology pioneers" each year - the ones that are going to be "changing the world as we know it", says the WEF.
The a:c euro doesn't know about the "world changing" part, which is probably more applicable to the bioscience companies, but Europe was the source for nine of the alt energy and computing- communications companies, which could end up to be great businesses.
Certainly, Ron Kok's OTB, a Dutch company whose products radically changed some parts of chip manufacturing, and now applies the cost-reducing know-how to solar cells, is already one.
Our impression from past years was that too many of the winners were from the portfolio of a single European venture capital fund or not very disruptive. This time some of the ventures have very original products and a few haven't been VC funded yet, such as Enfucell, a paper battery company, and Flisom, a Swiss solar cell startup. And a couple of others, Truphone and ClimateWell, are privately financed.
Regular readers will recognize a few some names from recent posts (see profiles below the jump), but also some that we have not covered, listed right here with descriptions from the WEF Technology PIoneers website:
A Russian Inventor And A British Entrepreneur Have Some Newfangled Electric Car Batteries (image of 3wheeler above is also from UMC)
UltraMotor Company - UK
UMC has developed an entirely new design concept for electric motors which provides high-end performance in a robust, low-cost solution. Ultra-motors are “permanent magnet DC motors. They consist of a steel stator disk with multiple permanent magnets attached and five U-shaped electro-magnets positioned on the outer rotor.
Dutch Startup IceMobile Delivers Up Sex And Sport Video Content To Mobilephones
IceMobile The Netherlands
IceMobile is a leading publisher of mobile entertainment content. In addition to publishing mobile video content on the portals of 30 European mobile operators, IceMobile launched its VideoCall2TV technology that allow viewers to make a video call from their third-generation (3G) mobile phone to a TV program and participate in the show with live spontaneous performances.
ClimateWell's Solar Powered Air Conditioners
ClimateWell - Sweden
ClimateWell AB is a supplier of highly efficient solar air conditioner equipment with the unique ability to store energy and convert hot water to cooling and heating. ClimateWell’s technology makes it possible to use solar energy for delivering cooling not only when the sun shines but around the clock.
Enfucell Ltd Finland
Enfucell, Ltd. develops thin and flexible power supplies for disposable micro electronic devices, such as smart cards, music playing greeting cards, micro mobile sensors, LED on paper, electronic paper, bi-stable display, and radio frequency identification tags.
Flisom AG Switzerland
Flisom, a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology spin-off, has a high-efficiency copper-indium-gallium-selenide solar cell technology that it plans to put on plastic foil—not glass—potentially opening up new applications like solar for cell phones.
OTB Group The Netherlands
OTB Group is a leading company in the design, engineering, development and manufacturing of tailor made inline production equipment. OTB Group operates through three units: OTB Engineering, OTB Display, and OTB Solar.Alfresco Software Inc UK Company Profile: Alfresco offers true Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging. Alfresco dramatically lowers total cost of ownership through open source distribution, working in the user's native environment, minimizing training and using low cost, loosely coupled hardware.Truphone UK/Germany
The company has developed a software infrastructure that allows mobile phones with Wi-Fi to make calls and send SMS messages using only Wi-Fi and the Internet. Crucially, when a Truphone-enabled mobile handset is out of Wi-Fi range it reconnects to the mobile network, allowing customers to roam between the two networks.DeepStream Technologies designs and manufactures digital sensors for three-dimensional packaging.This time around, over half of the Technology Pioneers 2007 are US-based companies, the UK has six and the Netherlands, India, Israel and Singapore two each; while Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland have one each.
Link - WEF Tech Pioneers 2007
Posted at 10:55 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
Skyblog Beats MySpace In France - Battle For Spain, Germany, UK Next
France's Skyblog, a free blog publishing service created by a youth-oriented radio station Skyrock, is featured in BusinessWeek and the news is that its expanding internationally. Recently acquired by a buyout firm, Skyblog went from offering free blogs to offering more community and communication applications: free e-mail, instant messaging, and cell-phone downloads, a bit like the way Yahoo developed its community features, but in reverse.BusinessWeek writes:
...the success of Skyblog has thrust the company—whose radio market was limited to France—into a whole new realm. Skyblog already has 27% market reach in France, compared to just 5.5% for powerhouse social-networking site MySpace ... Skyblog is holding its ground in France thanks to a raft of innovations. Though it started out with basic blogging, the site has since added free e-mail (SkyMail), instant messaging (Skyrock Messager), and cell-phone downloads (Skymobile). These enhancements have helped Skyrock Chief Executive Officer Pierre Bellanger build a genuine Web community that keeps users on the site. In turn, that increases advertising opportunities and strengthens brand loyalty.On its chances to compete internationally, we turned to Pete Cashmore, a new media consultant with an excellent blog on social networking sites at Mashable.com. In his blog he reviews it and gives some reasons why he thinks Skyblog has what it takes to compete if it opens up linguistically.
We have some links to other BW articles on European tech ventures. It has increasingly been cover Europe, with features on France's answer to YouTube, DailyMotion, and a couple on The Venice Project from the founders of Skype, and now France's Skyblog. BW has a news bureau in Paris so that is likely reason it covers more of the French market than it does other regions in Europe.
Read - Skyrock and Skyblog Acquired by Private Equity Investors (a:c euro)
Read - Can Dailymotion Challenge Youtube (businessweek)
Read - France's Blogging Phenom Goes Global (businessweek)
Read - Skyblog and Skyrock The French MySpace (mashable)Posted at 10:42 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
December 03, 2006
alarm:clock euro puzzler winners: Lonsdale Capital's Amit R Shah and Index's Greg Marsh
This week's puzzler:
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.
The answer is TLcom Capital.
Quite a few readers wrote in with the correct answer, but Amit R. Shah who recently founded corporate finance boutique Lonsdale Capital in London and Index Ventures' Greg Marsh, also in London, sent responses quicker.
Marsh wrote that the clue was the communications specialisation and Lonsdale's Shah knew the answer because he worked with one of TLcom's partners at Bain in San Francisco before they both moved to London. Shah is also an angel investor in some well-known starutps, according to his bio on Lonsdale's website.Posted at 02:38 PM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
December 01, 2006
Red Herring Seeking Europe's Hottest 100
Red Herring's Farley Duvall, vice president EMEA, asked us to remind readers that Red Herring is open for nominations for the Europe 100. They are looking "technology disrupteurs" that are leading the next wave of innovation.
Red Herring will choose from privately owned-European tech sector companies, including bioscience and energy, and the winners will be profiled in a special edition of Red Herring magazine and will be asked to present and/or exhibit at the Venture Market Europe confab in Cannes on March 25 to 27, 2007.
From what we've seen in the past couple of years being in the RH' 100 Europe list can really yank European companies out from under the radar and into the public eye -- and regular readers know that one of our pet theories is that there is a strong correlation between good public relations and good valuations.
Red Herring wants companies to enter their details via its online submission form The nomination period is open until January 12, with the winners announced at the Venture Market Europe Conference, which takes place March 25-27, in Cannes.
For more information about the conference or submission process, you can contact Farley Duvall at :
Link : RedHerring 100 Submission FormPosted at 08:00 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
DealJaeger Founder Eyes Financing For New Twist On Price Comparison
BusinessWeek published an article last week deliving into how price comparison sites rank results, telling readers to be wary that the sites are not necessarily in the business of providing links to items at the best prices. Articles like that will be making Sven Schmidt, co-founder of DealJaeger GmbH, pretty happy.He's just started up a new company called DealJaeger GmbH - in English “bargain-hunter” - which runs a German language site meant to enable users to find the best prices for goods based on user recommendations. The buzzword on this is "social shopping", we believe.
The company is a spinoff of ICS Internet Consumer Services GmbH, which Schmidt co-founded along with Daniel Grözinger. The same team also co-founded GetGo.de, an online ticketing company acquired by CTS Eventim in 2002 where they were employed until leaving to start up ICS. We tried to pry the acquisition price out of Schmidt, but he's not saying.
DealJaeger has some of the elements that have made eBay successful as it enables its power users to make money and it moves online something that has mainly been offline and unorganized (eBay moved flea markets online - DealJager put the preisagenturen concept online).
Schmidt confirmed what BW hints at: "comparison shopping sites only list deals from merchants who pay per click", and he added, "--they mainly list big shops. Hence, the user rarely finds the best deals [or prices] there. What is more, you can only compare prices if you know exactly what you want."
He's currently looking to raise a €2M Series A round for DealJaeger. The plan is that after launching in Germany, it will go international. "Our technology and partners like shopping.com allow for that. We are thinking of taking funding for that roll-out," he said.
We asked him if Dealjaeger.de is a clone. His reponse and his answers to a couple of other questions are below the jump.Is Dealjaeger a clone?
There are other similar social shopping sites but we have four things that combined make it unique.
1. "Steal the Deal". A user posts a great deal, but you know where to get it cheaper? Steal the deal from the user and get all his points
2. "Jaeger des besten Deals". A reverse auction to find the best deal for a given product. Right now we post one deal per day and ask the community to find the best price for the product (winner gets a Dealjaeger.de T-Shirt).
3. "Direct Deal". Plug-ins for the IE and Firefox let users post a deal on Dealjaeger.de with one click
4. "Weltrangliste". Users get points for all activity on Dealjaeger.de. The world ranking is updated every 5 seconds
What is the business model of Dealjaeger.de?
We will monetize the generated click-outs through partnerships with for example shopping.com, direct deals with merchants or affiliate programs. In addition we will monetize the reverse auctions. An example: My mom looks for a washing machine. She has found it herself for €699. But she is not sure whether it´s really the best deal. So she asks the Dealjaeger.de community to find her the best deal. And she promises to pay Dealjaeger.de 30% of the price differentials. We in return will share that 50/50 with the user who finds the best price. If that price is €499, my mom pays Dealjaeger.de €60 ( (699-499) * 0.30 ) and we will pay the winning user €30. And my mom still saves €140 ( 200-60=140).Why would anyone bother to spend time helping other shoppers find bargains?
We will share the money generated through the click-outs with the community. At start we will probably pay the best ten users per month. That number will increase with time and traffic to 50 or 100. And users will directly get money if they win a reverse auction. While building up traffic, revenue sharing probably won´t be sufficient. Right now we are evaluating if we can pay the top Dealjaegers €400 tax-free per month on a mini-job basis. In Germany, so-called mini-jobs are tax exampt up to €400 for the employee, while the employer has so pay social fees of about €100. We think that would be a pretty good starting point.... Students and people looking for some pocket money, as well as those that live in countries where the cost of living is much lower could see this as an income.alarm:clock readers that want to try out the beta can register with username "alarm" and password "clock”
Read - For Shopping Sites, Buyer Be Wary (businessweek)
Posted at 07:58 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
Mediatech Reporters Get A Buzz
The Guardian sent reporter Jemima Kiss to Library House's Mediatech event where she was chilled by the ac in the Imax theatre, but Equity Kicker says the event was "buzzy", anyway.Kiss published her notes on the corporate panel online. We were hoping to hear about hints of big Kelkoo-like acquisitions but no "shopping list" alas, Yahoo and co are looking for partners - to extend their own brands or businesses, which is good news for entrepreneurs, neutral news for VCs.
She also wrote that Yahoo's Jonathan Wolf said that the question of whether or not to invest in a "company with a big audience but no proven revenue model is out of date by three or four years". Yahoo has been saying this at VC events for years now - the difference is that apparently a couple of VCs, Index Ventures, for example, are now providing the echo chamber.
Mmm. Three or four years ago - the advertising bubble that accompanied the dotcom bubble had burst. Startups weren't spending their VC money on buying online ads and the sites that had relied on artificially-inflated-ad spending-by-VC-backed-startups had to find a business model that
