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May 31, 2007
i5's Looking For Some Good Tech Teams To Back
Austria's getting a boost from its newly wealthy tech founders eager to invest in their money in illiquid early stage ventures instead of something more liquid like champagne. Startups recently launched by experienced founders include Red Monitor, Nanoident, and Fatfoogoo, while the founders of iNode who cashed out to UPC Telekabel are turning their hands to investing.
Now Tornado Insider is reporting that Markus Wagner (pictured nearby), who founded Xidris back in 1999, merged it with 3united, and sold it to Versign for €55M last year, has started up an incubator called i5invest.
The i5 website says its looking for "great business ideas".
We'd be more excited about the news if the focus was wider - at the moment i5 is looking for B2C and Weberific teams, and so are a lot of other moneymen and women, from media types to angels to VCs.
We are craving some TLAs, some high-tech wizardry, some geeks solving nasty technical problems. Enough of that. Back to the news, with a quote from Tornado Insider's report:
. i5 stands for "innovate, inspire, incubate, invest, internationalize" and the firm will invest mainly in European business-to-consumer Web 2.0 projects and aims to bring them from concept to maturity on an international level.
i5invest has already announced its first investment in the Austrian company Avaloop, which has developed a 3D online game world for multifaceted communication and social networking called Papermint.
Read - Austrian Funding Avalanche (tornado insider weekly)
Posted at 06:12 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Spain's Panoramio Bought By Google For Map/Photo Mashup
Alicante, Spain-based Panoramio, a website that connects millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken, has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. Incidentaly, the company has its other key office in Germany.
Panoramio users can search and browse Panoramio photos and edit the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites. For example Everytrail.com made use of the API for their GPS Travel Community. Panoramio has had a default layer within Google Earth since January 2007. The founders acknowledge in their blog announcement that they knew they were headed down the path toward Google buy-out when they did the Google Earth layer.
The site has 330K registered users and 1.1M geolocated photos.
Flickr has a similar service here.
The company was founded by Joaquín Cuenca Abela. Previously, Abela founded Loquo, a Spanish clone of Craigslist, from the end of 2004 until Loquo was sold to eBay in 2005. He co-founded Panoramio in the summer of 2005 with a co-worker from Loquoa, Eduardo Manchón.
In addition to Panoramio, Abela and Manchón have 2 other projects, Cursoo a pre-launch e-learning platform and Revoluz a real estate mash-up with Google Maps.
View - announcement
Posted at 08:20 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Spanish Startup Atalum's Wireless Wizardry
We just discovered a Zigbee startup, Atalum Wireless, out of Spain. The company, which sells network commissioning, design tools, and embedded software to support wireless sensing networks, seems to be getting product to market at a rapid clip. We noticed it because it's offering its protocol stack for free.
It's managed to get a few OEM contracts from what we can see and looks to be making a go of it without having tapped VCs yet. Whether that's by choice or not - we don't know. Wireless sensor networking is one of the a:c euro’s favourite categories, but it's being pretty much neglected by the VCs in the region. We've reported on only a handful of early stage investments since January 2006.
Atalum was co founded by Sandra Lucia Wear (CEO), Ken Nickersonexecutive from iBinary Corp., a private technology research and investment firm, and Dr. José Manuel Páez Borrallo of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which has a first rate research center on intelligent networking technologies (they call it smart homes, smart buildings, etc.).
This is not Lucia Wear's first venture. She founded DocSpace (acquired by CriticalPath in 2003) and built up its European business, according to her Atalum bio, did some startup consulting, finally staying put at Atalum in 2003.
View: Atalum
Posted at 07:00 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro Zeitgeist: The Art Of The Web 2.0 Clone
Why be original when you can be clever, might seem to be the thinking behind a lot of the new Web wonders - the social networks, the news aggregating/ranking sites, the digital media sharing/storage/ sites, and p2p money lending exchanges - well OK not that one.
(Image source: A partial view of several Web 2.0 logo collections published and annotated by Stabilo Boss in Flickr)
There's a good reason for that, the copycat or cloning phenomenon has a long tradition as this 7 year old press clipping, a retrospective on Germany's Internet hotshots of the time, on Earlybird Venture's website shows. We have the link below with comments from our mad annotator using a free tool from Fleck out of the Netherlands. 
What's changed since this article was written besides company logos being more bouncy and colorful than back then? Broadband penetration is on the up, the region's now wealthy Internet entrepreneurs are investing as angels and in some cases, like Wunderloop, competing with VCs; old media companies in Germany, France, and Netherlands are acquiring fledgling Web wonders, and many copycats are better technically, more feature rich, and user friendly than the US ones (whether the investment in quality will pay off is still not clear yet).
What hasn't changed? You tell us.
Read : Europe is awash in new money and new companies. A visit to the world formerly known as old.
Posted at 06:21 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
May 30, 2007
Torino's Electro Power Raises €5M For Hydrogen Fuel Cell
Electro Power Systems out of a Torino, Italy has developed a clean energy solution based on fuel cell technology. It has now raised about €5M in VC funding from 360° Capital Partners. The fuel supply for the system appears to be hydrogen.
View - site
Posted at 04:15 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
LastFM Sold To CBS For $280M
Paying $280M (£140m) for London-based Last.fm, which raised VC from Index Ventures and some well-known angels just one year ago, is a much bigger deal than its Wallstrip, video blog purchase earlier this month. But the idea behind the deals are the same, CBS wants to get up to speed on what makes online properties hot.
Founded in 2003, LastFM monitors the music that each user listens to and accordingly recommends music that the user might enjoy. The site also allows music fans with similar tastes to communicate and share their playlists.
The site also provides an ad-supported stream of the music from the hundreds of independent labels it has deals with. It tends to get great user reviews.
The deal brings together again old friends - Quincy Smith who runs CBS' Interactive group and Index Ventures' Danny Rimmer.
Recent rumors were that Viacom would pay $450M for LastFm. And many comentors are wondering why the valuation seems low, why there was not a bidding up battle and why LastFM didn't hold out for a higher bid. Our speculation would be that bidders might be concerned about potential law suits from music owners - suits they might well win but that would cost a lot to fight.
Read - CNNMoney report
Posted at 01:58 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
The Dilution Specialists
Skype's angels and founders equity story is pretty amazing, as this graphic suggests. We snagged it from Equity Fingerprint a UK-based consulting company. Its site is worth a visit, even if it is just to ponder the many ways that the control of a tech company can go (as the thumbnails below suggest).
We have not met the people behind Equity Fingerprint but Robert Scoble's video interview with the firm's founder and principle, Philip Baddeley, suggests that startups get advice on managing equity in exchange for giving him a chance to invest, or in exchange for some shares, which seems fair. The sexy graphics it produces are more of a calling card than a product, it seems.
We like Baddeley's focus on equity. His pitch is that it might seem obvious and unecessary to make such a big fuss about a founding team's stake in the company - but talking about it and thinking about it will reveal a lot about how your business could evolve and what kind of entrepreneur you are - he calls it lifestyle vs tycoon.
Getting the equity thing right is often neglected. We've met enough demotivated founders, pissed off angels, and VC-haters over the years to vouch for that notion.
View Equity Fingerprint
Posted at 06:08 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
May 29, 2007
Show Us Your TLAs
We have a list today comparing three letter acronyms from 1997 and 2007, it was a concession to one of our correspondents who is getting all nostalgic on a decade of covering European startups.
A look at a couple of articles our reporter published back in 1997, the year that Amazon.com went public in the US and EASDAQ (a wannabe NASDAQ for Europe) and the Neuer Markt in Germany emerged, turned up the following TLAs.
1997 - SOI, GSM, SIM cards, TTS, RAD, EDI/XML
A similar quick search over the past 12 months gave us a list for 2007.
2007 – SOA, UGC, AJAX, ETL , PPV, OLED
Some of the acronyms defined
TTS – text to speech -a buzzwords that Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) rode to bubblicious proportions
SOI – silicon on insulator put chip company SOITEC on the map and is the foundation for its €1.34B market cap today
GSM – the standard for digital cellphones reached a 100 million subscriber milestone in 1997 started to take off (it’s up to 2.5B now)
SIM – smartcards for the GSM market made Gemplus’ first fortune
PPV – photovoltaics not pay per view
UGC – user generated content
ETL – extract, transform, load
SOA – software oriented architecture – a big bucket of a TLA that stands for giving old applications a new life - it's not tied tightly to just any single industry standard or to any one company.
Posted at 05:57 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
Money Trickles To Web 2.0 Enterprise Startups
Belgium’s Babelgom, not to be confused with Italy’s Babelgum, the WebTV startup, has raised some outside capital for its SaaS venture [via Web 2.0 in Belgium ], while over in Austria Onepoint Software raised an undisclosed amount from a Swiss investor.
View Babelgom
Onepoint, which sells two version of a project management software package, a free one and a full feature one that includes costs, time, planning, and conflict alerting. The company says it's fast to set up and since it's web based, there is no client software to manage.
Onepoint’s founder and CEO Gerald Mesaric, as well as a couple of members of the founding team hail from Hyperwave, a company we know well from Web 1.0. It’s software is used for managing projects. The application has its roots in the open source Timmon distribution.
View Onepoint
These two are the latest enterprise-oriented software developers raising small amounts of capital. The trend is software that improves or expands the functionality of web-based apps and business process, and SaaS.
Exhibited by companies like Xcalia and Talend in France, and Comactivity in Sweden, which we’ve covered over the past few months.
alarm:clock euro reports
Talend
Xcalia
Comactivity
Posted at 05:15 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 28, 2007
UK's Telepartner Raises $7M and Acquires TSI Division
Telepartner, a mobile business solutions provider in the UK has raised $7M from New Venture Partners, a fund that is specialized in corporate spinoffs. The deal includes the acquisition of the mobile asset management division of US-based Telecommunications Systems Inc.
View Telepartner
Posted at 03:48 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Lastminute Founders Return And Raise £5M for MyDeco.com
Lastminute founders Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox have co-founded a new business and have raised close to $10M in funding for the venture. Pre-launch, UK-based Mydeco.com aims to provide advise on home decoratation their homes. The site will have a social networking angle where members will be encouraged to critique decoration decisions.
Hoberman and Lane Fox
Backers include Tom Teichman of New Media Spark and Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance, both early investors in Lastminute.
Lastminute was the UK's biggest travel website and made the founders very wealthy when it floated stock in 2000. Lastminute was bought out by Travelocity for $1.07B. The takeover made Hoberman about £26M and Lane Fox £13.5M. We were not aware that Lane Fox survived a near fatal auto accident. She is in demand as she is on the boards of Marks and Spencer and Channel 4.
Read - Times Online
Posted at 03:32 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
Paris Wifi Operator Ozone Acquired By Neuf Cegetel
Ozone, which pioneered a broadband Wi-Fi service that subscribers could access from home and anywhere in Paris covered by the startup, has been acquired by Neuf Cegetel [via Altaide blog]. The French press does not have info on the price paid for Ozone, which was launched in 2003 and now counts about 3,000 monthly subscribers out of its 5,000 users.
Ozone was founded by Rafi Haladjian, who is also the founder of Violet, the French company that makes the WiFi Bunny.
Read - What it takes to sell Wifi : Bunnies and Social Routers
Posted at 02:14 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Ex-Skypers Kickoff Frenzoo Funding - 3D World For Hong Kong Teens
Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) sent us the news today that they are leading an ongoing Series A funding round for a 3D social network called Frenzoo (beta mode) that is targeting teenagers and young adults. Local blogs are calling it a Second Life for Hong Kong teen girls. It will be making money by allowing brands to get virtual product placements.
Just in case you are not a regular reader, Ambient is an investment vehicle set up by some early Skype employees to invest in startups. It typically does tech deals, ten so far. This is its first soc networking investment but its second that taps the Chinese-speaking market.
View Frenzoo
Posted at 08:40 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Tunz Of Ways To Make Money With A Blog
Person-to-person mobile payments startup Tunz just launched a widget that we’re betting will be popular with bloggers – at least bloggers in Belgium [via Web 2.0 In Belgium].
It is an SMS payment button that enables readers to send money to the bloggeur.
Tunz also offers services for web merchants and content publishers. It isn’t the first to offer a mobile micropayments service but it’s the simplest one we’ve seen. For blogs Tunz charges a flat fee of 10 euro cents per transaction. You can accept donations/payments under your own name or an alias.
We don't want to sound like an ad for Tunz, but we note that registration is fast. No client downloads, its operator independant (but it's limited to Belgian networks), and it works on antique handys like the one shown here.
Just one text message is enough to send the instruction to make a payment, the amount of money to send, to whom, and your security PIN code. For example, the following text messagae sends 5 euros to phone number 0475123456 with a message saying "merci" and the last four digits are the PIN code.
PAY 5 0475123456 merci 1234
Tunz was founded by two entrepreneurs now on their third venture together. Jean Zurstrassen and Grégoire de Streel founded an online trading platform in 1998 and then got a banking license. The two sold Keytrade Bank to Crédit Agricole last year. Before that, the two founded and sold Skynet, a Belgian ISP.
We thought at first that this is a competitor for Swiss startup Zong which is already international, but Zong is about making money with SMS traffic, the person to person feature is missing, and registration is more baroque.
We’re not sure about the international potential for Tunz. Cellphone manufacturers Nokia and Motorola are rumored to be entering the mobile payments market but that rumor has been around for a long time, and Paypal is already offering a mobile payments scheme in the US. It may decide to internationalize it, which would mean serious competition.
But we note that even with Paypal present in the market, according to a CNN/Money article about mobile commerce 2.0, a couple of US startups targeting micropayment niches have nevertheless launched in recent months.
View Tunz
Posted at 07:00 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
May 27, 2007
Happy Euro IPO Market
It's like one of those nights where you party in one town and wake up in another. In the case of IPOs, the market went out in New York and crawled out of bed an ocean away. At least that's the impression we get from this chart we snagged from a presentation (pdf)by Philippe Claude.
It is called How Exits Changed over Time: What it means for young technology companies in Europe and its from a talk that Claude gave at a Swiss event this month.
US IPOs losing ground to M&A and to other IPO markets, writes Claude, who has been a Senior Principal at Atlas Venture and seeded Business Objects, which was once the poster child for Euro startups to float on NASDAQ poster.
His comments on it are as follows:
• Europe and US IPO markets of equivalent size and liquidity
• Bankers, Analysts and Institutionals hareholders are now less regional
• Less need for European companie sto move to the US for IPO reasons (but there may be other reasons )
•Asia catching up quickly
Posted at 08:37 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
May 25, 2007
Two-Way TV Bought By Investor For £5.34M
British investor Ingenious Media has bought a controlling stake in interactive TV content developer Two-Way TV for £5.34M. Two-Way TV creates interactive quiz show, wagering and SMS products for British reality TV shows. The company plans to take its business to the US.
Two-way TV last week announced a deal with Virgin Media to power iTV for its interactive gaming channels, The Winner Channel and The Roulette Channel. In a parallel deal, Virgin Media has acquired – for an undisclosed sum -Two Way TV’s Ark Technology for the UK and Ireland.
Founded in 1992, Two Way TV is led by Canadian Jean de Fougerolles who was head of distribution at MTV Europe. Ingenius Media is an interesting investment house that we are just getting to know. It has 100 industry players in the group. It recently invested in Crystal Entertainment and plans to invest £50M in multiplayer games startups.
Posted at 03:23 PM | Posted to Interactive TV | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobistar Buys 3 year old Voxmobile for €80m
Voxmobile, a Luxembourg mobile operator and service provider, announced that Mobistar is paying €80M for the 3 year old venture. The company's private equity backers (not VCs) owned about 75 percent and the rest was controlled by the founders. Mobistar acquired a 90 percent stake.
VOXmobile is a complete operator offering fixed and mobile telephony services, ADSL and WLan in Luxembourg and exploits hosted services, such as the Microsoft Hosted Exchange platform and IPCentrex One. VOXmobile is the holder of GSM 900/1800 licenses (EDGE) and UMTS and operates its own network. VOXmobile launched its commercial activities in May 2004 and in only two years aquired 20% of market share, it says on its website.
Read - Rumor (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:20 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 24, 2007
Puzzler Winner - Joyrides
This week's quiz winner is Gayathri Radhakrishnan, the only female associate on the tech team at Earlybird Ventures, the German VC that just recently invested in lending platform Smava.
She was the first to write in with the correct answer to the Puzzler question:
Which Austrian tech and automotive investor races one of these (picture of rally race car) and actually wins?
The answer: Christian 'Toto' Wolff
Radhakrishnan, as we said, is an associate at Earlybird. She hails from SozoTek, a mobilephone camera startup, and before that she was involved with the broadband components biz at Corning. She's is an India-educated engineer that did an MBA at Insead in France, after getting a Masters in E Engineering at Ohio State.
We think that Wolff who runs march.sixteen puts a whole new spin on the term investment vehicle. Check out this photo that fatfoogoo co-founder, Martin Herdina, sent us after reading our posts mentioning his startup.
Wolff's previous vehicle, march.fifteen, backed Jowood, the publicly traded video games company, and ucp morgen, part of which was acquired by Amdoc for a couple of hundred million euros after it merged with Qpass.
The supplementary question about which tech trendsetters drive James Bond's brand: Aston Martin, flopped.
Not one reader wrote in to mention names of owners like Klaus Hommels, a business angel and venture partner at Benchmark and Brendan Hyland (the Irish co-founder of Scotland's Kymata and several other high tech startups).
We were inspired to ask because a recent poll on French entrepreneur Michel de Guilhermier's blog says its the status brand today among his readers. He's a big fan of the British label but we don't know if he's driving one yet.
Posted at 04:46 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
Wallix Open Source Security Raises Capital
Wallix, the commercial name of IFResearch, a French startup whose focus is using open source to develop security and IT monitoring applications, has raised half a million euros from access2net, Sopromec, and three business angels.
Founded in 2003 by Jean-Noël de Galzain and Amaury Rosset, Wallix is big in France with customers like Total, Natexis, Arianespace and the Ministère des Finances. It's doing €1.3M in annual sales and hopes to do almost €2M this year.
Read - Access2Net investit dans la société Wallix (boursorama)
View Wallix
Posted at 04:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2007
Autonomy Spin-off In Video Search - Blinkx - Enjoys AIM IPO
Video search startup Blinkx on Tuesday had a memorable debut IPO London’s AIM, jumping 40% in opening day trading.
The San Francisco- and London-based startup raised £25M. Shares of Blinkx climbed in oversubscribed bidding by the close of the first day of trading giving it a market cap of roughly £180M (or $355M).
Blinkx was spun out of Cambridge, UK-based enterprise search company Autonomy as its consumer play. Major shareholders include Fidelity, Autonomy, Dr. Michael Lynch, Capital Research and Management, F&C, Standard Life, Baillie Gifford, Oppenheimer Funds, and BlackRock. The startup was founded in 2004 by CEO Suranga Chandratillake. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, a former Cambridge academic, holds on to 8.7% of Blinkx shares, with Autonomy holding 10%.
Blinkx has plenty of competition include Google Video, AOL’s TruVeo, Dabble, Divvio, CastTV nd several others. Given that Blinkx is not one of the top video search engine, such a reception may have others thinking about IPOs and readjusting their valuations upward.
View - site
Posted at 06:31 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
Delft Video Portal .Org Tribler Raises 6M Euros From Gov't
Netherlands-based Tribler caught the attention of the Net today with the launch of v4. Tribler, which is a joint research project from Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam, is a video aggregator that pulls in YouTube videos, Torrent downloads and other video file formats. Tribler layers on some personalization to help users find niche content in the sea of Net videos.
The non-profit group has caught the eye of several researchers, broadcasters, and the Dutch government, enticing twenty scientists working on Tribler and 6M Euros in Dutch government funding.
Read - Tribler Combines YouTube, BitTorrent, and Last.fm (NewTeeVee)
View - site
Posted at 04:51 PM | Posted to Interactive TV | TrackBack | Permalink
Streamezzo Brings Its A Game. Qualcomm Closes Investment In French Mobile Media Startup
Qualcomm Ventures says that Streamezzo is its first direct equity investment in Europe. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. The Paris-based mobile media startup develops TV-on-mobile applications, as well as music applications, portals and user interfaces for enhanced mobile browsing ergonomics.
This closes the investment round announced in April 2006. QUALCOMM joins existing investors: AXA Private Equity, T Source, France Telecom Technologies Investissements and GET Valorisation, as well as new investors Sofinnova Partners and Sofinnova Ventures.
View - site
Posted at 04:48 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Zanox Sold For €214.9M - Berlin's Hot
Affiliate marketing startup Zanox, has been acquired by Swiss PubliGroupe and German media company Axel Springer for €214.9M plus an additional undisclosed performance related payment. It took less than a year for Zanox, which grew into a hundred million a year company within six years and without the aid of VC, although it did raise an undisclosed single digit million euro amount from unnamed Asian private investor in 2005, to be acquired after making sure the business press knew it was looking for a buyer.
It is a good time to be an online advertising sector wonderteam. Thomas Hessler, Heiko Rauch, Jens Hewald
Springer will own 60 percent and 40 percent if the deal is approved by regulatory authorities.
Zanox Quick Facts
Founded: 2000
Based in: Berlin
Annual Sales: 2006 €107 million up from €59 million in 2005 (EBITDA up from €4M to €8M).
Employees: 250
Business: Affiliate marketing ( performance based marketing)
Smart Ideas: the Zanox Academy to wine, dine, and make happy premium partners
Recent acquisitions: FreeNetwork out of Sweden and Hamburg-based eProfessional, FirstCoffee in France
We note that Berlin startups are hot acquisitions targets - others include StudiVZ, TwonkyVision, Gate5, and Jamba.
But How Do Tech Teams Get Any Work Done with So Many Cool Places to Chill At(image source:Bangaluu)
Read: Zanox up for sale? (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 04:45 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2007
eMap Pays £44M For GroundSure
Emap says it will acquire GroundSure, a Brighton, UK-based provider of environmental due diligence from shareholders like Metropolitan Venture Partners. The deal is valued at up to £44M, including an initial £30M cash payment plus up to £14M in earn-outs over the next two years.
View - site
Posted at 04:44 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
Bubble 2007 Metrics
Frontrunner, the Dutch blog from Het Financieel Dagblad, gave us the scoop on the Fluxxion deal and we also like this post it did considering the question of whether or not Internet hype is getting all bubblicious.
Click image to see the full view on Frontrunner
On the left: Red Herring's 628 page June 2000 issue, lies on the December 1999 issue of Wired, weighing in at just over 400 pages, writes Bert van Dijk in Frontrunner. On the right: the 160 page Feb issue of Wired, on top of the 40 page March issue of Red Herring.
Posted at 06:16 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Fluxxion Flush With New Cash
FluXXion, the Eindhoven, Netherlands based micro filtration company is benefitting from the Cleantech hype, writes a staff blogger at Het Financieele Dagblad in a report about its new round of VC.
Several cleantech-specialzed venture capital firms have decided to invest €6.4M in the company's latest round. We note, as no doubt the reporter at Dagblad did, that the startup's PR suggests that beer-making equipment companies rather than clean water systems are its target market, at least initially.
The startup develops micro-filtration products. Its filters are manufactured using semiconductor and micro-electronics techniques. The basic technology comes out of Royal Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, and had been part of a failed digital storage product.
Investing in the round are Switzerland's Emerald Technology Ventures, which used to be the private equity arm of Zurich's Sustainable Asset Management, the Capricorn Cleantech Fund, a local investor, and WHEB Ventures out of the UK.
Read - Fluxxion profiteert van cleantech-hype (frontrunner blog)
Posted at 05:54 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Russia's Playfon Looking For CEO with IPO Know-how
Playfon, a mobilephone entertainment and services provider, says it's looking for a Russian CEO with IPO experience. The company's current CEO and owner, Muslim Shortanov, is apparently vacating the position.
For better or worse a new CEO will need to work with Playfon's mobile adult group Hotfon.
Playfon, which is based in Moscow, distributes ringtones, runs a WAP portal, and sells Java games, as well as several supporting mobile services such as a payments platform. Its customers are mobile network operators and service providers (MVNOs).
According to estimates from CNews Analytics, which publishes research on the Russian market, Playfon’s revenue last year was $14M, up by 11% over 2005. The company employs over 150 people working in Sweden, Russia and Ukraine.
It serves operators in South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States.
View: Playfon corporate site
Posted at 05:23 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
May 21, 2007
Nordic VC Firm Nexit Sells Ownership Of Hantro To On2
VC firm Nexit Ventures has been on a roll with its 4th mobile exit in the past 14th months. Today it sold its share of Hantro Products to On2 Technologies (AMEX:ONT). Helskinki-based Hantro develops compression technologies for wireless video. Hantro says its technology has been implemented on more than 200M devices on mobile phones produced by 5 of the world’s top 6 handset manufacturers.
The stock deal is valued at $8M. Nexit Ventures owns approximately one third of Hantro shares. Other investors include Capman and Atine as well as the company's founders and key personnel. Nexit has been a co-lead investor in Hantro since 2000.
View - Hantro site
Posted at 10:38 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
VCs Back DigiCompanion's Digital Prizes And Promotions
Paris-based Digicompanion has raised €1.7M from Alven Capital and Ile de France Developpement, reports the Altaide blog. The company has a platform and services to enable companies to offer free digital downloads as part of a marketing campaign. Altaide's Jacques Froissant, who sees a lot of startups in his daily work as a human resources executive, says it's a high potential and timely technology business.
Read - Digicompanion, le cadeau Bonux du web et du mobile, lève 1,7 Millions d'euros. (altaide)
Posted at 06:45 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Vectrix: US Electric Scooter Maker With Italian Stylings To IPO On AIM
US-based electric scooter maker Vectrix said it plans to raise £37.44M through an IPO of about 259.36M shares. The company will have a market capitalization of about £135M. Trading is expected to begin on May 24.
While Vectrix was founded way back in 1996, it is only just now selling its first mass-produced vehicle, the MAXI Scooter, primarily in Italian cities, and in other European cities in Spain, the UK, Greece, France and Switzerland, as well as markets in the US and Australia.
There are some definite issues with the scooter, most notably its steep price. However, for some this is a dream vehicle, especially for greens. It has zero emissions. it is very quick. The MAXI is comparable to a 400cc scooter with the torque of a Ducati 900. Top speed comes in a 62mph. A standard three-pin plug is all that is required for a charge. And a two-hour charge will give you around 68 miles of riding. So this is a sweet ride for tooling around Milan but not the vehicle for people who want to Easy Rider it across the US.
Prior to the IPO, Vectrix raised significant funding from industrial giant Parker Hannifin. In March 2003, Parker acquired a 50% interest in Vectrix’s fuel cell hybrid patent. Other investors include Morgan Stanley and GH Venture. The company's COO is Carlo Di Biagio who was CEO and CFO of Ducati Motors.
View - site
Posted at 06:22 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
Minoto Buys Picserver And Announces New Backer
Dutch startup Minoto Entertainment, the company behind Online Game Challenger (OGC), which runs multiplayer gaming contests where players bet on their skills or play for cash prizes, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Rotterdam-based Lunatech Ventures, an investor that's not afraid to back pre-revenue companies. (It recently exited backupagent.com to expansion stage VC Solid Ventures).
The new capital enabled OGC to acquire Picserver, a photo sharing site to add some new features to its gaming site. Picserver has about 75K users, founder Eric Paul Scholten told the a:c euro in a Skype chat last week.
The alarm:clock euro profiled OGC back in March.
View OnlineGameChallenger
Posted at 05:15 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro Puzzler - Joyrides
We have a puzzler today about the wheels of the wheels that turn the early stage euro tech sector. We are looking for the first reader to email in with the correct answer to :
Which Austrian tech and automotive investor races one of these and actually wins?
You can win fame, if not fortune, on these pages if you get it.
And as a bonus, we'll give some coverage too to readers that have an answer to this one (you do not have to give an example for each category, just one, either a founder or an investor):
Name a tech company founder or an early stage investor that drives this brand of speedy sports car.
Send in your answer to
Posted at 04:49 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
German Media Giants Invest in Blog.de and myphotobook
myphotobook.de, a German online photo album publisher, has sold a majority stake to Holtzbrinck Ventures, according to Deutsche Startups blog. The Berlin-based startup was founded in 2004 with backing from Marek Bärlein (mirablau) and the Samwer brothers' European Founders Fund. The founders are staying on board and continue to be investors in the company.
From the same source, we learned that blog.de, a weblog hoster, has tapped Burda Ventures for an undisclosed amount.
Read - Holtzbrinck Ventures steigt bei myphotobook ein :: deutsche-startups.de
Read - “In dieser Konstellation fühlen wir uns wohl” - Vasco Sommer-Nunes von blog.de im Interview :: deutsche-startups.de
Posted at 04:17 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 20, 2007
FatFooGoo Virtual Goods Platform Seed-funded And Aims For €10M First Round
FatFooGoo, an online marketplace for virtual goods from a couple of Austrian serial entrepreneurs, is to launch this summer on the back of a seed funding round, according to the Austrian press this weekend. Plans are afoot to raise €10M in venture capital to establish an international reach.
What's next a spot market in Gpotatos (flyff), Inter Stellar Kredits (EVE Online), and Linden dollars (second life)?
We don't know but we translated and summarized the reports about FatFooGoo below.
The baroquely named FatFoogoo is a timely idea.
There's no doubt that gamers, virtual world visitors, and chatters are willing to pay real money for pixel-based hats, daggers, guns, and sofas.
Even underage kids are into buying this stuff. Since PayPal requires account holders to be over 18, moms that have PayPal are now more popular than moms with a 7-seater minivan at 6am on a Saturday soccer morning.
Whether or not the games publishers and virtual world operators will support an independent online exchange is another question.
It is something that the startup is counting on, according to the Austrian press. FatFoogoo says it will work with games operators and payment platforms like Paypal to manage payments, audit it, and expedite transactions in exchange for a 15 percent fee. It is also going to offer editing tools for users to create their characters and accessories, which is smart.
The founders, Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri, have weathered the hype and the reality of the European mobile messaging, coming out the other side with the a desire to do something new.
The two were executives at ucp morgen, founded back in 1999 by Christian Lutz. It was an Austrian/Swiss mobile payments and messaging startup (sms.at, uboot.com) that readers who were here during the last venture cycle will remember.
For those that don't - the company raised three rounds of VC totalling €42M, grew to more than 200 employees. It shrunk when it had to live on cashflow and subsequently sold its consumer portals to two different buyers and then merged its billing and backend software biz with Qpass in 2005 - the combined company was acquired by Amdoc for $275M last year.
Current backers include ucp co-founder Christian Lutz, Christian 'Toto' Wolff (the Austrian rally race car driver whose investment firm march.fifteen backed ucp and Jowood, the games publisher), as well Michael Krammer, the former eplus and tele.ring executive.
The amount raised to seed the venture was "more than one million euros", say the reports. Fatfoogoo (we feel silly writing that name) plans to raise a whopping €10M in its first VC round and will target US investors that can help them get into deals with large Internet companies, the press reports say.
The exit is already planned: a trade sale a la ucp.
Read - Das reale Geschäft mit virtuellen Gütern: Digitale Gegenstände um echtes Geld kaufen (networld.at)
Read - "eBay" für virtuelle Güter (kurier.at)
Posted at 09:54 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
US Investor Leads Mitrionics VC Round - Supercomputing FPGAs
Mitrionics AB, a Swedish developer of FPGA software that turns the chips into supercomputers, has raised $6M, from Grande Ventures, a VC fund based in Columbia that was founded by entrerpreneurs from Ciena/Broadwing and Corvis. Its early investors Creandum and Teknoinvest, also participated in the round. The deal was announced last week but we just saw it today.
The company claims a 20x improvement in processing power over traditional CPU processors, and executes with only a fraction of the power that clusters require.
We don't know if the startup tried to raise capital in Europe first, or if it went directly to US investors in order to tap its contact networks and establish themselves in the US.
Either way, this one looks to have the potential to do some disrupting in the cost and flexibility of bioinformatics, weather forecasting, and oil and gas exploration computing platforms.
View Mitrionics
Read - Mitrionics Secures $6M in VC Funding to Expand International Operations and Product Development
Posted at 04:58 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Dutch Publisher Buys Schoolbank.nl and Parent Co
Ilse Media has acquired Amsterdam-based Rosetta, the company behind Schoolbank.nl and a website software development house that was doing about €3M in annual turnover. No disclosure on the size of the deal.
Similar to Friends Reunited in the UK which was also acquired recently, Schoolbank was apparently number one in its category in The Netherlands. Its purpose is to help users find old friends and classmates.
It was launched in 2002, and one of the most popular activites was to find embarrassing shots of Dutch celebrities during their childhood by searching inside photo tags. The firm said that there are hundreds of sports stars, actors, tv personalities, politicians in its galleries.
Ilse media is part of Sanoma Uitgevers, which publishes consumer magazines and well over 125 websites. Its turnover is about half a billion euros a year, making it one of the largest multi media publisher in the Netherlands.
Read - Ilse Media Acquires (pr)
Posted at 04:31 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 19, 2007
Vlogging Fever Catches Euro Digerati
Three of Europe's digital trendsetters, Lukasz Gadowski (the German founder of Spreadshirt) Loic Le Meur (France's No. 1 blogger, biz angel, and web conference organizer) and Morten Lund (the Danish co-founder of Lund Kenner, the venture capital firm-without-the-capital that helped companies like Skype take off) have become video bloggers, interviewing some of the region's top founders and investors, in recent weeks.
Loic Le Meur Interviews Pierre Kosciusko Morizet, head of Price-Minister.com - one of the top 5 ecommerce sites in France and one of the most stylish startup HQs in Europe, we'd say!LLM's blog
The three we mention here are early adopters. Paris-based Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz was way ahead of the pack with vlogging and interviewing Europe's digerati. He subsequently founded vpod.tv to provide the technology to help vloggers publish, edit, and produce video blogs. You can view him telling the story below.
What is good about having, Gadowski, Lund, and Le Meur doing the interviews themseleves is that they have superb contacts in the startup scene in Europe.
And we posit that because they are the peers of their interviewees, in terms of power and/or wealth, they keep the interviewees from lapsing into safe, politically correct, or PR-approved statements, which can happen when it's a journalist on the other side of the table (as we well know from the old days of writing for mainstream financial publications) .
In other words- they don't waste time talking about things the alarm:clock readers are too busy to listen too. We're looking forward to more of this.
Posted at 07:41 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
May 18, 2007
VC-backed Datango Acquires Unit from Sweden's Enlight
VC-backed Datango, whose software is used to support learning how to use new SAP apps and software guided tours, has acquired a software training and testing solution business from Swedish publicly traded Enlight.
The unit it bought does about € 3.6M in annual sales. There were no numbers released about the size of the deal.
Datango was founded in 1999 and counts Altas Ventures as an original backer. In December Datango raised €2M in venture capital from two Germany-based VC investors.
Read - Hasso Plattner Ventures and Strascheg's Extorel Invest €2M In Datango (a:c euro)
View: Datango
Posted at 07:17 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Dublin's Redmere Raises Another $5M
Redmere Technology, a fabless semiconductor startup, has raised an additional US$5M to top up the US$13.5M it raised six months ago.
The new investor is Edgestone Capital Partners out of Canada, and Celtic House Venture Partners, added more to its earlier commitment (Celtic was co-founded by Terry Matthews Canadian/British tech entrepreneur Terry Matthews -- we like this VC's tagline: "luck's got nothing to do with it" )
RedMere chips support connectivity of HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) devices, such as flat panel TV, sound systems, and media centre gear.
Read - Ireland's Redmere Taps (a:c euro)
Read - RedMere attracts US$5m investment (silicon republic)
Posted at 05:05 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 17, 2007
Former Tradedoublers Create Spotify
We've got the scoop today on Spotify, a new digital music venture from Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon whose track record in online affiliate marketing offers up a couple of hundred million reasons to be dubbed famous founders in our book. 
Ek (pictured left) was founder and CEO of Swedish startup Advertigo, a contextual online advertising startup, which was acquired TradeDoubler, in 2006 (AOL recently tried to buy Tradedoubler for $900M in cash- the Swedish company's mkt cap is about €600M at the moment).
He also stepped into roles recently at Stardoll and Tradera (acquired by eBay in 2006), while Lorentzon (pictured right) was a co-founder of TradeDoubler. He also worked at Cell Ventures, AltaVista and Telia in the past.
We pursued the founders after hearing about Spotify and reading some early reviews by pre-beta launch users because it’s P2P, like Kazaa was, but it’s legal, aiming to pay its way with advertising.
Lorentzon told us via an email interview that Spotify is a streaming service with a client that delivers social and recommendation features.
It is not a competitor to iTunes, it’s “more about providing a compelling alternative to piracy”, he said.
The development work began in August 2006 and the two launched a private beta last month. Spotify is based in Luxembourg, the tax-friendly home of a growing number of European businesses, but most of its employees are in Sweden, the UK and Romania. “We plan on opening two additional offices in Europe this year,” said Lorentzon.
Spotify's R&D team in action -and the amazing coding gloves.
We wanted some skinny on the tech: compression algorithms, protocol wizardry, as well as features of the client software users are required to download (size, functions, OS compatibility etc), but Lorentzon would only say that the startup has developed a “number of proprietary technologies specifically focusing on making the streaming process cheaper, better and more secure”.
We also asked if Spotify sees attracting enough users as its biggest challenge, and Lorentzon’s response almost made us spill a cup of coffee: he said the biggest challenge his firm has is achieving its “goal of indexing all of the world's music”.
That's a towering ambition and we will keep an eye on it. In the meantime what about getting users: “We're confident that a well thought through product, with compelling user benefits will always reach high numbers of users - particularly as music has such wide appeal. We're actively sourcing content for the player.”
The date for a commercial launch is still open. “We would like to launch later this year, but have not yet set a firm date,” Lorentzon said.
The company is financed by the two founders. “We're not in a position where we need another round of financing as it is viable for us to continue to self-fund the company,” he said. But he is not rejecting outside investors totally. “Obviously though we're looking carefully at the market conditions and having relevant conversations where appropriate.”
We always ask entrepreneurs we interview about other startups they think are interesting. Lorentzon answered: “I'm 100% focused on Spotify right now. I'm really interested in the software and renewable energy sectors but have yet to find anything that catches my eye.”
That means that he’s joining the ranks of folks like the Samwer brothers (European Founders Fund) and the other famous founders we cover that invest at least some of their wealth in startups and tech. With venture capital fundraising in Europe occurring at a relatively low rate, that’s a bit of good news for founders in the region.
Posted at 07:40 AM | Posted to Online services | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Founder-driven Invision to IPO In Germany
There's been a dearth of tech IPOs lately so we're clapping our hands here for Germany's InVision, an independent workforce management software company, that announced plans to float on the Prime Standard at the end of June.
It is a venture that has managed to avoid debt and VCs. With annual sales of €10.7M and an 18 percent EBIT margin, the startup will raise new capital.
The founders Peter Bollenbeck, Matthias Schroer and Armand Zohari own 51% directly and another 23.8 percent indirectly through InVision Holding GmbH do not plan to sell their shares in the float. Employees own 1.2%. No further details on the size and valuation are available yet.
InVision, which was founded in 1995, has a long list of German and Swiss banks, call centers, telcos, and service orgs as customers. It supports timekeeping, scheduling, and controlling personnel, which is no small feat what with flex-time and part time workers becoming more popular.
It employs 128 people in the US and Europe.
Read - Invision strebt (dow jones)
Read - InVision Software Plant (der aktionaer)
Posted at 07:36 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 16, 2007
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
The a:c euro has investigated the French Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up.
Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation 4) User uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz). (ed. We turned on the Comments below for this one so you can have your say too.)
Helping us with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and VC Ouriel Ohayon who describes the French Web scene like this:
"Startups are being funded at a faster pace lately and some projects are really interesting with global ambitions and presence but there is still a huge gap with other countries and the USA. There is in particular a lack of light investment structure like YCombinator or CRV quickstart or even experienced business angels to support projects at very early stage before they arrive in VC hands."
Looking at France, Web 2.0 sees a thriving blog market, 10M bloggers as of January, and a lot of video platform projects. Other Web trends: a mature ecommerce market. The private sale of brand name discounted goods has taken hold. Social networks are not as popular among entrerpeneurs in France, but the mobile/web hybrid is.
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
Boonty
HQ: Officially its NYC, but the company came out of France
Funding: $10M
Business type: Casual gaming
Made the cut: Casual games are hot and Boonty is one of the best funded ($10M) and fastest growing. The company is making a smart entry into China with its buy-out of Beijing-based Gamehub. It has both a private label business and a destination site so it wins both ways. It recently signed up to French online retailers to sell its games through their popular shopping sites.
Read more
Criteo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: It raised €3M in seed capital from Paris-based investors, AGF Private Equity and ELAIA.
Business type: Recommendation engine
Made the cut: Criteo recently released a widget called Autoroll, which allows blogs and websites to display which sites visitors have been to before and after stopping by your site, the idea being to recommend sites your visitors might find useful or interesting. Criteo's tech is flexible and the founders have tweaked it to provide recommendations for YouTube and for Netflix, although neither of these bigger players have picked up on it. We figure one or the other video content-related site could use it and one of them might buy Criteo to own the tech.
Read more and here.
DailyMotion
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised capital from Atlas and Partech
Business type: European YouTube
Made the cut: The site is one of the biggest video clip sites in Europe. The buyout of YouTube by Google stamps a huge valuation on DailyMotion. As of November 2006, the site was getting about 9,000 new videos posted daily, and page views in excess of 16M per day.
Read - more
Eyeka
HQ: Paris
Funding: Eyeka raised €4.2M from Ventech.
Business type: White label platform for talent to upload, sell and distribute video/photos
Made the cut: Management is proven for sure. The co-founder is French entrepreneur Gilles Babinet who sold his last venture to Openwave for $121M. The other founder is Franck Perrier and CEO, led 200 employees at Corbis, managed the photographers and helped it enter the mobile market. The site design shows that some real pros are behind it.
Read - more
MXP4
HQ: Paris
Funding: $6.5M from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech.
Business type: Digital music technology that auto remixes songs.
Made the cut: We can't wait to get our hands on the tech. Music recommendation has seen great consumer uptake but MXP4 is a new twist. Management is topped by one of the top startup guys in France.
Read - more
NetVibes
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In August 2006, Index Ventures and Accel have invested €12M in Netvibes
Business type: Personal portal.
Made The cut: This one is easy. NetVibes is probably the most globally known of the new Internet brands. Sure the space is competitive but the ownership over home pages for millions is invaluable. Management and investors are heavy hitters.
Read - more
Skyblog
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bought by a buy-out firm
Business type: European Myspace
Made the cut: Skyblog may be little known outside of France but it dominates the French blogging scene, currently hosting over 9M blogs. From a marketing perspective, the company has a great tie in to Skyrock, France's most popular radio station. Not only is the platform popular, but reviewers like Mashable give it great reviewers compared to other blog tools.
Read - more
Wikio
HQ: Technically Wikio is Luxembourg-based - think tax haven. The CTO, CEO and others are French.
Funding: Wikio raised a series A round of €4M ($5.3M ) led by Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Wikio is a personalized blog and news aggregator and search tool with user voting.
Made the cut: Many Web 2.0 reviewers put down Wikio because its not innovative - nothing special about knocking off Digg. But it does track news sources that Google News (for example) does not. Digg and Google tend to be gringo sites while Wikio is taking this proven model to Europe, and it seems to be working.
Read - more
Yoono
HQ: Paris, France
Business type: Social networks empowering contextual search
Funding: AGF Private Equity invested €1.7M in January 2007
Made the cut: Yoono announced this week that it has 600K users. It also announced the private beta of its social Web clipping tool as an extension for its popular community. This makes it similar to StumbleUpon. Unlike many other Web 2.0 companies, Yoono's CEO Pascal Josselin has actually run a large company.
Read - more
Zlio
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eShop building tool
Made the cut: We like bootstrapped startups that create buzz because of the quality or ease of use of their service and products. It's not as easy as it looks.
Read - more
Runners-up
Vente-privee.com
HQ: Saint Denis
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eCommerce
Claims €240M in turnover last year. Founded in 2001 pioneering the private sale model. We note that it gets more traffic than buyvip.com and 24h00.
Achatvip
HQ: Paris
Funding: AchatVIP raised €3.5M from Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners and OTC Asset Management.
Business type: eCommerce
Read - more
24h00.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: 6M euros
Business type: eCommerce private sale
Read more
Looneo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: Backed Groupe Marc de Lacharrière, a major shareholder in the French holding company Fimalac.
Business Type: Social shopping
Read - more
e-Box.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: E-BOX has raised €1.7M
Business type: Self service postal facilities
Neteven
HQ: Paris
Funding: Neteven that raised 1M euros in March 2007
Business type: eCommerce platform
Read - more
Fotolia
Business Type: Platform for stock photo talent
Funding: Private non-VC
Well-designed and attractive web-hosted stock photo platform. Number two to iStock photo's pole position in terms of number of photos. Headquarters moved from France to New York in anticipation of winning market share in the US.
Mobease
HQ: Bordeaux.
Business type: Widgets
Funding: Now a subsidiary of angel-backed Webwag
Mobease was acquired in March 2007 by Webwag, a personal portal provider like Netvibes. Mobease makes mobile widgets and a mobile search engine. Its software supports Symbian phones and enables things like a scrolling news feed. Webwag was founded in France but moved its HQ to Palo Alto. Webwag is funded by its founder who was an executive with Google France.
Read - more
Kewego
HQ: Paris
Funding: Banexi Ventures has backing a low-budget rollup of interactive video and TV startups by the founders of Pulsevision, now called Kewego. The startup raised €5M in a second round from Banexi Ventures. It acquired Pooxi.com, a French video sharing and aggregator.
Business type: Interactive TV
Read - more
Glowria
HQ: Paris
Funding: Venture-backed
Business type: Video on demand
A founder executing on a vision of a European consumer video powerhouse.
Read - more
Vpod.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from Innovacom. Angel Martin Varsavsky has invested an undisclosed amount in June 2006.
Business type: Video publishing platform
Read - more
Miyowa
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In September 2006, it raised €3M from Techfund and Sophia Europlab
Business type: Mobile instant messenger
Read - more
Navx
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from AGF private equity
Business type: software and services that can be integrated into navigation devices
Read - more
UbicMedia
HQ: Lyon.
Funding: The has team raised €320K round of seed finance.
Business type: Video distribution platform
UbicMedia is set to launch in May a new video and film platform called PUMit, which at the time of this post is still under wraps but is signing up beta reviewers. The company has several patents on enabling a combination of Video on Demand and P2P streaming of films and videos.
Read - more
Splitgames
HQ: Paris
Funding: It raised €2M from Credit Agricole Private Equity in October 2006
Business Type: Game swapping
Read - more
Atafoto
HQ: Gif-sur-Yvette
Funding: Bootsrapped by Founder and CEO Thierry Verrecchia who was founder/CTO of KeeBoo.
Business Type: Online shared photo site
JobMeeters
HQ: Paris
Funding: The startup says it has raised a few hundred thousand euros in a first round from Unaya.
Business type: Recruitment social network
Read - more
Trace.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Universal Music Group has made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount.
Business type: Urban music programing
Read - more
Contrarian picks
Sarenza
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised about €5M from Galileo Partners and business angels.
Business Type: Online shoe shop
The VCs recently swapped out the founding team and replaced the CEO with a former AOL executive.
Read - more
Exalead
HQ: Paris
Funding: In January 2007, it raised $15.6M (12 million euros) led by Qualis SCA.
Business type: Search
Read - more
Posted at 11:03 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Vienna's TTTech Raises €4M, Mulls IPO
Austria's TT Tech, which develops highly reliable data comms protocols and the hardware to handle it, has sold some €4M worth of shares to Athena Wien, an investment company. Wirtsschaftsblatt says that the new investor is meant to expand the shareholder base (Audi is the largest shareholder with about 25 percent) in preparation for an IPO.
Drive by wire is the operative buzz-term here
The startup recently raised €20M from a syndicate, including firstventury, a German VC.
Read - TTTech erhält Geldspritze und denkt mittelfristig an einen Börsegang
Posted at 09:57 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
NottaClone.de or Web 2.0 Originals out of Germany
Who knew that the original source for software for managing content of Wikipedia's massively popular onlilne encyclopedia was German? We didn't (University of Cologne was the source, the story goes). It's something we learned after following up the comments to a post by German blogger and entrepreneur-in-residence at Hasso Plattner Ventures, Gregor Hochmuth, on TechCrunch.
Hochmuth's analysis of the region's Web "copy and paste" phenomenon shook a few original Web 2.0 startups out of obscurity and onto our radar.
We take a look at the non-clones below. (Hochmuth also takes beautiful photographs, like the Berlin shot below, via his webpage Dotgrex )
The copycat phenomenon sees German entrepreneurs take a successful concept from another market and hone it for their own. A couple of examples of Internet ventures that serve got their start serving the German market and that are now €100M companies include Xing, Tipp24, and Interhyp. A lot of people think that with 14M broadband users it has a good sized market ... to make your first fortune on.
MyTv.de - a "TV Guide" for the Internet video couch potato - Original and with a very well designed user interface. We like this one a lot and it deserves a longer analysis than what we can do this morning. MyTV.de provides good information and details on the plethora of video blogs and video clips that are uploaded each day. The UI supports bookmarking, forwarding, chat, and the ability to vote on the content. And it claims some serious tech: a crawler that processes 100,000 new pieces of content a day. About 500 of which get vetted by the sites crew of 35 to 40 freelance editors, mainly students. This is something that they can fairly easily internationalize and we can imagine a few ways to make money with this one.
Partnr.de A web to SMS platform for lovers. It is not a Twitter clone. Express your desires in a post and they're sent to you partner (both register to use partnr.de) by SMS for free. It's a private project from a Lycos Europe executive. It's not a twitter clone says the founder, but getting called one by a couple of bloggers has give partnr.de a whole lot of free PR.
dealjaeger.de Original ecommerce platform from savvy founders. (we profiled them back in December)
jogmap.de - a website for runners from Germany that launched before the Nike plus website, serving Germany’s biggest running community. Its fans say that not using buzzphrases, like Beta, may have kept it below the web 2.0 radar.
Plazes - Location application popular with techies. We've got some posts about plazes
YouMix - Youmix is not a MySpace clone. The site was down when we tried to view this morning, but the folks that supplied its content management system describe it like this: a Web 2.0 social networking site for musicians and fans, featuring user profiles, friends, mp3s, photos, groups and forums. Youmix builds relationships by connecting artists and listeners. Using the embedded Flash player, site visitors can listen to music and watch videos uploaded by bands and can add songs to their personal playlist.
JoinR - is not a MySpace clone says a Techcrunch commenter. It looks like one to us. But then again what do we know, we still think pillow-talk with a "partnr" is more sexy than sending an SMS. JoinR does have a fine UI with some handy mouseover info features and a map search feature to find JoinR's in your neighbourhood. It makes myspace's UI look a like a prototype.
Read Web 2 in Germany Copy Paste Innovation or More
Posted at 05:29 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
May 15, 2007
France's Orchestra Networks Raises €1.5M
Orchestra Networks has raised €1.5M from Elaia Partners in Paris for its SOA software platform market development. Founded in 2000, the startup develops Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. That is a buzz-term we're not very familiar with but we can say that the startup has an OEM agreement with Software AG and relationships with several integration partners. The proceeds from the financing are to be used to seal the business in France, bolster its R&D and support structures and expand its business.
View Orchestra Networks
Posted at 06:35 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Online HR Platform CWarehouse Raises €1M First Round
Belgium-based CWarehouse has raised €1M from Big Bang Ventures. CWarehouse has been running an online recruitment platform since 2005. It raised €1M to complete the second release of its site and to extend its channels in Europe. Its platform acts as a bridge between candidates and recruiters who file their CVs with CWarehouse. The recruiters pay to use it.
CVWarehouse NV came out of the Antwerp based recruitment and selection agency Executive Research.
View Cwarehouse
Posted at 06:31 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobiluck Raising Big Round
French mobile social networking startup Mobiluck, whose founder we met in Paris not long ago, has raised seed funding from Big Bang. He told us back then that he was looking for capital to finance a move into other wireless technologies beyond the Bluetooth basis product. The startup, which has several patents for its technology, looks like it's on his way to getting the capital it requires.
The Big Bang PR said the seed round is to tide the company over while it raises a large sized Series A in the second half of the year.
Olivier Chouraki, CEO and founder of Mobiluck said in a statement:
“We are proud to have Big Bang Ventures join us in our effort to launch an exciting new service, which will free us from the limitations of the current Bluetooth-based offering. Together, we are looking forward to lock down several new milestones for the company over the summer.”
Mobiluck says its Bluetooth client has been downloaded a million times. The software enables users to send messages for free and meet people via the Bluetooth channel. It detects nearby Bluetooth devices. The user's cell phone rings or vibrates when it finds one. It notifies if you've received a Bluetooth message and you can send a reply to the sender. Support for photos too. It is adding a whole slew of features, including gaming and shopping.
Posted at 06:12 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile e-tickering : bCODE Makes Inroads With Tiny Amount of VC
bCODE, an Australian startup, has managed within three short years to create a complete mobilephone e-ticketing solution and win some big name customers in different geographies and it did it on the back of a modest $5M in VC investment.
It caught our eye because its recent trade press PR focuses on its ability to eliminate lineups. We love what e-ticketing has done for lineups at the airports but we have weathered much hype from mobilephone startups who have tried to do this before with only limited regional success.
Since bCODE has managed to get customers in the US and in Australia, recent customer wins include CEBIT Australia, the CommonWealth games, and Atlanta-based Real Hip Hop, it must be doing something right.
bCODE seems to have found a smart way to avoid the giant hurdles that phone manufacturers and cellular service providers typically present, it uses old-fashioned SMS or text messaging, its own software and developed nice-looking terminals.
Founder and CEO Michael Mak is on his second venture. Back in 1997 he founded a web messaging company that he partially exited to Looksmart in 1999 for about $8M Aussie dollars.
View bCODE
Posted at 04:35 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Webraska Quietly Exits Startup Scene
French mobile navigation startup, Webraska has been acquired by Sanef, a French toll highway operator and telematics service provider, for an undisclosed amount. This is a little whimper of an exit for a company that raised more than $90M since founding in 1998, generated mass buzz (Red Herring Top 100 etc) and collected many industry awards over the years. In fact it was so quietly made that the deal almost slipped our news trawling net, but for a sharp-eyed alarm:clcok reader.
Webraska was one of the pioneers of mobile phone navigation, but even with strategic investors like Infineon, Philips, and Openwave, and VCs like Apax (which no longer does this kind of early stage investment, by the way), it didn't achieve an exit that had its backers issuing their own press releases and offering interviews to journos.
We've said it before, getting software or innovative services into mobilephones is a devil of a business. This is the second VC-backed mobilephone navigation startup to be acquired in recent months. In September, Berlin-based Gate5 was acquired by Nokia.
Read - Sanef Acquires Webraska
Posted at 03:57 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 14, 2007
SAP Buys VC-backed Finnish IP Telephony Startup
SAP has acquired Wicom Communications, a VC-backed and Finnish IP telephony software company that serves about 200 call centers, as well as businesses. The size of the deal was not disclosed. Wicom raised three rounds of venture capital and counted Stratos Ventures, Accenture Technology Ventures, and 3i as its backers.
Posted at 05:12 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile Wagering Biz Cometa Raises £1M
Sheffield, UK-based Cometa has raised £1M at a £2M post money valuation. The principal investor is Mfusion, mobile phone gaming company. Other investors include a consortium of business angels led by Dr Tony Marchington former founder and CEO of Oxford Molecular Group.
Cometa sells a white label mobile gaming package to companies like Bet.com. Cometa is projecting revenues rising from £250K in 2007 to £6.8M by 2011.
View - site
Posted at 04:50 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Smava Tops Angels With Earlybird Money
Earlybird, the German VC, wrote in to say that it has led a €4M financing round for smava, the Zopa clone for the German market. We wrote about smava and its business back in March (see below).
The smava founders' sofa matches their logo
Other investors include Internet entrepreneurs Lukasz Gadowski (founder of Spreadshirt), Stefan Glaenzer (a blog entrepreneur and also with Last.fm), Oliver Jung (Adinvest), Peter Schuepbach (Swiss entrepreneur and backer of Plazes, StudiVZ among others ) and Tim Schwenke (getmobile).
smava has found itself some pretty savvy angels and with Earlybird, a VC that has recently taken two Internet ventures public at healthy valuations - post-bubble, proving that the German market can support good sized and fast growing online businesses.
The startup says it has already done a hundred thousand in loans and it will use the money for product development, risk management and marketing.
Read - More Zopa Clones For Germany
Posted at 04:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
London's Digital Photoraphy Review Bought By Amazon
Amazon has bought London-based Digital Photography Review for an undisclosed price. This is an interesting deal as it seems Amazon is looking to acquire blog readers. Of course, Amazon already has its own reviews of digital cameras so it is really buying traffic. Dpreview.com has plenty of that as it claims 7M unique visitors (over 22M sessions) who read over 120M pages. Plus it says that while it doesn't track its forums traffic, it believes that the numbers there would double its site traffic stats. The company was founded as a hobby in 1998 by Phil Askey.
View - site
Posted at 04:33 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
Wavestorm Wins Starbucks, Meccano, What's Next?
There are not many wireless software startups in Europe that can count both Starbucks and Meccano as customers. But that is the case with Wavestorm, a French startup founded by Alexander Casassovici.
We've been aware of Wavestorm for a while and are impressed with how its founder is quietly getting his firm's patent-pending wireless software into new markets that have high volume potential.
First Wavestorm developed a solution to make offering Wifi hotspots cheaper and more manageable, winning big name customers like Starbucks in France.
Soon after that, Casassovici realized that "the next big thing won't be computers connecting to the Internet", but rather it is that "billions of things become wireless".
So then Wavestorm got its software into Spyke, the new spyrobot erector set from Meccano.
Now the startup, which recently raised a business angel round of financing, is developing Ki'i, a new wireless digital photo framer that runs on Wifi and an online service to support it.
It's at the proof of concept phase.
Philips was the pioneer of the wired digital photo framer, according to Casasovici who has one of the units on his desk in the office, but WaveStorm's innvovation is making it wireless, open, and offering the hosted online service to support it .
The whole thing is at a fairly early stage right now, but the founder has a clear view of why the alarm:clock's Mom would like this new consumer oriented gadget:
With this device, I could offer it to my mother and on a regular basis update personal pictures that are on my flickr, the ones that I would like her to see. The updated pictures are retrieved live by the Ki'i frame.
The business model is to license IP, both hardware and software. And to offer professionnal services to help our clients to integrate it to their products, Casassovici told the a:c euro in an email interview this weekend. "We see ki'i frame as a way to help digital imaging go mass-market," he added.
He's currently negotiating with brands to produce and distribute the Ki'i frame either on their own frame version, or on a TV-plugin version.
How the service works:
Users can choose from video, widgets, photos, and audio formats to play out in their digital photo frame. Based on a user-defined profile (e.g. "show me the latest pictures from the diving group in Flickr" or "show me the latest video from my blogger friends Loic or Rodrigo", radio podcasts and the like) the frame lists the matching hits. You then select one and the frame retrieves the contents one after another and plays it back.
View mobitrends (Casassovici's blog)
View Wavestorm
Posted at 07:17 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Benchmark Plays Football Match W/ $8M Into Anglo-Swedish PowerChallenge
Power Challenge Sweden AB has closed a $8M round from Benchmark. Power Challenge develops online-games with 3D technology + community. Its first game, Power Football, claims more than 1.5M registered players and is currently localized into 4 languages.
The startup is run by co-founder Tomas Ahlström, who lives on a farm outside of Linkoping, Sweden and who has been doing 3d games for a decade and who launched Power Games in 2003 but has only been at hit full time since February. His co-founder is London-based Johan Christenson, who had founded ManagerZone, which merged with PowerChallenge.
Read - Swedish Game Site Power Challenge Raises $8 Million From Benchmark Capital
Posted at 07:08 AM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Solar Company PV Crystalox Prepares For GBP500M IPO
PV Crystalox, a UK-based manufacturer of silicon ingots and wafers for solar cell modules, is to float on the London Stock Exchange in early June in an IPO that could value the company at £500M.
The flotation aims to raise about £150M, netting the company about £50M in new capital to finance a new plant in Germany.
The graphic shows where PV Crystalox fits in the solar cell value chain.
The company was founded in 1982 and its founders have managed to maintain a good sized stake in their venture. According to a report in The Independent, founders Iain Dorrity and Barry Garrard, and a third director, the late Robin Greaves, have stakes valued at £80m each.
View PV Intent To List
Read - Solar Power Chiefs Generate (the independent)
Posted at 04:49 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Synchronica Raises $7M For Mobile Email
UK-based Synchronica, an AIM-traded mobilephone synchronization and over the air wireless device management software provider, has raised $7M to fund its push into mobile email. The three year old venture, which acquired Germany's Weblicon (SyncML) in 2005, is hoping its open standards mobile email solution will see some major uptake this year. Its latest financials report annual sales of GBP1.1M in 2006 and losses of GBP7M.
It competes with Funambol, also open standards-based, that was founded by Italian entrerpreneur Fabrizio Capobianco, a US startup that has recruited at least one of Synchronica's former executives.
Other independent mobile email firms, Seven and Visto, are also competing for this market that has stubbornly refused to fulfil the expectations of analysts and startups targeting it .
Two other competitors Intellisync and Good Technologies were acquired recently by Nokia and Motorola respectively.
Posted at 04:16 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 12, 2007
Brandalley Raises €5M Second Round
Brandalley, the French private sale fashion company, has raised €5M in a second round of finance. We found out about the deal today while watching today an episode of Decideurs.TV, a French video blog specialized on entrepreneurship. The deal was actually announced in April.
It has a couple of new backers: A Plus Finance, lead investor, along with early investor Banexi, and CDC Entreprises (Caisse des Dépôts) and France Investissement.
This kind of ecommerce site a trend in Europe that we've been following. Brandalley, founded in 2005 by Sven Lung, is one of several to attract venture funding.
The site is Flash based and is easy to navigate. But that isn't why investors forked over the cash. Lung says the investors think it has good industry partners and they liked the numbers, such as 40 percent increase in sales in 2006 and 400 percent increase in the number of registered shoppers.
The decideurs.tv interview revealed that breakeven is expected in 12 months time. That would be a good bit longer than what the founder was quoted as saying last year. Brandalley raised its first round of €3M in December 2005.
Read - Offprice fashions for members only: European trend (a:c euro)
View Brandalley.
Posted at 10:50 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 11, 2007
eCommerce M&A - Premiere and PriceMinister Acquire
Over in Germany, oldstyle ecommerce startup Home of Hardware, which sells consumer electronics, has been acquired by Premiere, a pay TV broadcaster
According to several German press reports HOH was doing about €40M in annual sales. (See onetoone report in German). Premiere acquired 65 percent because it sees "synergies" in the fact that HOH sells statellite and digital receivers and TVs. No dislcosure on the price.
And in France VC-backed PriceMinister, whose website looks a lot like Home of Hardware's, announced its second acquisition in the past year or so, buying A Vendre A Louer which is a fifteen year old company that runs several real estate sites (www.avendrealouer.fr, www.lesiteimmobilier.com and www.123immo.com), a realestate management company, and publishes a monthly magazine.
Last March it bought the company behind three auto related sites (with www.321auto.com, www.321moto.com and www.auto-evasion.com).
Founded in August 2000 by Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, Pierre Krings, Justin Ziegler and Olivier Mathiot, PriceMinister, says it is ranked number three in France for e-commerce with 5.9 million members and more than 52 million items on sale. Its backers include 3i, which continues to invest in Web 1.0, and who can blame them. They have had some successful exits with Web 1.0 ventures, such as selling online drugstore DocMorris, with a couple more in the pipeline, like Seloger, that runs French realestate online ads sites.
Posted at 05:03 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
French Gaming Group In-Fusio Acquired By France's Zenops
Bordeaux, France-based In-Fusio together with its its subsidiary Mobile Scope has been bought by French company Zenop. The amount of the deal was not announced. Zenops CEO, Pascal Boiteux, claims that the acquisitions mean that Zenops is the number two player in Europe”and is in sixth place in the western world.
In-fusio has made headlines in January for its lawsuit against Microsoft. In-fusio claimed that Microsoft is breakaing its contract with In-fusio to create a mobile game based on Halo. In-Fusio agreed to pay $2M for the license to the game, but when Microsoft refused to approve its game designs the French company withheld payment of its second installment, prompting MS to end the agreement. The troubles may have forced In-fusio to find a new owner.
Read - Zenops acquires In-fusio (Games On Deck)
Posted at 04:12 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Belgium's Web 2.0 Contenders
Robin Wauters alerted us to his new blog covering Belgian Web 2.0 projects and startups. He's tracking up and coming startups like Incrowd/Facebox/Netlog and Mobiya, but also others that were new to us like Not So-So, a baroquely named startup that compares itself to asmallworld.com (but less exclusive), or Bezoom.tv, which offers video and web products to SMEs, and Attentio, a Brussels based company whose products measure and analyze data from blogs, forums, and newsfeeds, and the intriguing freshly founded Tunz, a new mobile payments operator.
Wauters says "Big Things Can Come from Small Countries". Indeed - some of the most original startups come from Europe's smallest countries. We've got his feed in our reader now - so watch for more Belgian news.
View: Web2point.be
Posted at 07:12 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-backed ZetVisions Acquires OpenData
Heidelberg-based ZetVisions, which sells a corporate investment management software solution (that is integrated with SAP) has acquired OpenData Systemshaus for an undisclosed amount. ZetVisions needs more SAP-experienced systems integrators to keep up its growth.
The startup, which is backed by German early stage VC, first ventury, helps users to comply with regulatory demands. Its customers are billion euro companies that have a multinational structure. And the software tracks and reports and consolidates financial data streams from subsidiaries and independant holdings, things like how much they are spending on acquisitions, sales, and personnel for the top management and other finance officers.
View ZetVisions
Posted at 06:42 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 10, 2007
Joost Raises $45M From Sequoia, Index, Viacom et al.
Joost, the latest from Zennstrom and Friis, has raised $45M worth of financing from Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Li Ka Shing Foundation, CBS Corporation and Viacom. This confirms the whispers we've been hearing about this IPTV platform for the past couple of weeks.
And it also shows that capitalism doesn't hold a grudge. The two founders have gone from being the target of lawsuits from big media companies (they also founded Kazaa.com the music download service) to being the target of their investment and strategic partnerships in a few short years.
This deal is also yet another Euro investment for Sequoia.
The capital will be used accelerate product development, global expansion, localization, and service offerings, according to the PR.
And we posit it will be used to pay for all this gear Joost is buying
View Joost
Posted at 06:48 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 09, 2007
Rumor: Belgium's Mobistar To Buy Luxembourg's VoxMobile
Belgian mobile operator Mobistar, a unit of France's Orange, will announce a planned acquisition by the end of June after identifying an unnamed takeover target, CEO Bernard Moscheni said. Mobistar is in talks to acquire Luxembourg-based mobile phone operator VoxMobile, which is backed by Audiolux and BGL Investment Partners, says financial daily De Tijd. According to the newspaper, two other candidates have also expressed an interest. No financial terms have been reported.
View - site
Posted at 06:49 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Luxembourg's KNEIP Raises €37M To Do BPO For Hedges
KNEIP Communication, a Luxembourg-based business process outsourcing company for the investment fund industry, sold a minority ownership position for €37M in private equity funding from 3i Growth Capital.
The company says it represents 9.000 funds.
Founder Bob Kniep has done well enough that he has a valued art collection that he opens to the public once a year.
View - site
Posted at 06:11 PM | Posted to Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink
HgCapital Goes For Wind Farming
HgCapital has paid €69M to acquire a French wind farm portfolio from German power producer Enertrag. Bank of Scotland provided leveraged financing. The deal involves four wind farms located in the Picardy region of France. One is already in operation, with the other three to be built over the next year. As part of the deal, Enertrag will operate and maintain the wind farms for 20 years.
With this transaction, HgCapital will be able to produce total power output of over 100MW, which represents investment volume over €150M. HgCapital has also secured the rights to buy further renewable energy projects in Europe, which would produce over 500MW of power output.
HgCapital has also invested in other wind farms including Sorne Wind in Ireland, Tir Mostyn in North Wales and Wind Direct in Cumbria, England.
View - site
Posted at 05:59 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
Swedish ComActivity Funded To Bring Web 2.0 To Business Processes
In a deal we missed last month, ComActivity has secured itself about €4.5M (SEK 40M) in venture finance from Industrifonden and Via Ventures. The Swedish startup that was founded 2001 is doing about €2M (SEK 19 million) in annual sales and turned a profit last year. It employs 25 and is based in Stockholm.
Comactivity's founder has a vision about Web 2.0 and enterprise service oriented architecture..
Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of Internet-based services and Web applications. Web 2.0 changes the perception of Web applications as being rigid and slow to a rich, highly interactive, user-friendly interface. This is a revolution of such magnitude that it will no longer be a question if the user interface should be compliant with Web 2.0 but how fast it can happen. And as such I think it is fair to say that Web 2.0 will emerge as the missing link in SOA.
One Web interface linking business processes even if the underlying applications and databases are aging.
In its own words:
ComActivity supplies development and streamlining of companies' existing business applications, making these web-based and above all user friendly. Rather than replacing old systems, ComActivity modernize them and renew the company's way of working by integrating several applications, both internal and external, into a common information flow, complemented with new functionality. The benefit of the system is increased and the lifecycles of existing system investments are prolonged.
It works well with IBM's Websphere platform.
ComActivity - The Lean Software Company
Posted at 04:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
France's Arkeia Software Gets $3M
Arkeia Software, a developer of data protection software, raised a $3M Series B round from SPEF Ventures (Banque Populaire) and Crédit Agricole private equity, reports ByteandSwitch. The new money enabled it to hire a couple of industry veterans and it will be investing in R&D as well as sales.
The company is going to add new products to its multiple IT environment network backup line, Arkeia Smart Backup and Arkeia Options, and will launch a new appliance called EdgeFort in the summer.
Read - Arkeia Secures B Round
Posted at 03:53 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Denmark's Qator Funded
Denmark's Qator has raised an undisclosed amount from local VC Via Venture Partners. The four year old startup sells software into the pharma and biotech industry to help manage compliance with regulatory authorities.
It has a quirky ad campaign running trade journals at the moment.
View Qator
Posted at 01:33 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
French Dealmakers Outdo Brits
France has a new president and a new record in venture capital this week. In what may be a first (we cannot recall it happening before anyway - Updated: apparently it did happen once before, back in 2001, according to today's VentureWire) France actually saw in the first quarter more venture rounds than the UK, according to VentureOne and EY who track European VC investment. (Image source: francetourism.com)
In Europe, the UK and France are the top two countries for VC, with UK typically surpassing France in terms of dealflow and total amount raised.
In the past, it used to be the UK and Germany that topped the ranks. While the UK still raised more capital (€317.6M versus €297.8M),there were more deals done in France. And the gap between the two countries is narrowing at the moment.
One thing that has been spurring French VC investment is the large number of serial entrepreneurs, tech founders coming on and starting up their third and sometimes fourth ventures. And the success of that country's favourable tax regime for individuals that invest in venture and private equity funds.
But in Germany, VC investment is still weak after the boom and bust, with about €120m raised per quarter lately. It's partly due to the low number of new venture funds being raised and closed in Germany. And it could also be the stock markets causing a slowdown in exits, which does affect investment activity. Our impression based on IPO newsflow is that Euronext is better for tech stock IPOs than the Deutsche Bourse.
View VentureOne
Posted at 06:35 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 08, 2007
Xelerated Raises $23M
Swedish-born Xelerated, a fabless chip co with a flair for optical network processing, has raised $23M in its fourth round led by the Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (the Sixth AP Fund). Xelerated’s existing investors Atlas Venture, Alta Partners, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners also participated in the financing round.
The new funding will mainly be used to expand sales and support as well as for development of new products.
Xelerated's processor competes with ones from Intel, EZchip, and Marvell.
Founded in 2000, this startup weather the downturn and continues to evoke confidence among its investors, although one of the founders, and some early employees, moved on to found Edgeware, which makes IPTV video servers.
Posted at 06:36 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Accel Backs Finnish Comeks
Sister site alarm:clock reports that Finland's Comeks has has raised an undisclosed amount of first-round funding from Accel Partners. It makes tools to create user-generated mobile comics.
View - site
Comeks is targeted for users between the ages of 10 and 18, but we can certainly see old folks using it. These cartoons can include photos, video, text and sound mixed with cartoon characters, speech bubbles and graphics.
View - site
Posted at 06:32 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
The City's Hedge Funds Invest £15M In London's VideoJug At £30M Valuation
When we first profiled UK-based DIY/How-to video site Videojug late last year we concluded that this was a smart position for online video and we were very familiar with the management team which has made big things happen. Videojug launched with professionally made how-to videos, and encourage user created videos. But we have to say we are surprised that the company has been able to raise £15M for a minority position. Videojug's valuation is now around £30M.
Private equity financier Jeremy Coller, founder of Coller Capital, has increased his stake in VideoJug as part of a $30M round. Hedge fund Sloane Robinson also participated. The company's founders have deep pockets. Dan Thompson sold his computer games company Renegade to Time Warner and co-founded 365 Corporation and took it public, along with VideoJug co-founder David Tabizel, who also co-founded Durlacher, an English investment banking firm.
Videujug competes with Israel-based 5Min, which recently raised funding.
View - site
Posted at 06:25 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
London's TotallyLegal Bought For for £11M
Trinity Mirror has bought UK-based online recruitment site TotallyLegal.com for £11.8M ($23.6M) in cash. This is a career site for the UK legal profession and also operates a sister site serving the financial sector, TotallyFinancial.com.
Trinity Mirror has smartly been making acquisitions of web sites. It bought martnewhomes.com, Email4Property, and has a stake in Fish4Jobs job search joint venture.
Read - release
Posted at 03:30 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
Fifteen Finalists for Web 2.0 Startup Competition
Over at ReadWrite Web the list of the 15 finalists in that Spanish Startup 2.0 competition we reported on a few weeks ago are listed. There is a short project-owner description for each.
A few we've covered, like Trivop.com and Properazzi.com, as well as clones or local language versions of popular sites like Digg, but there are a some new names and new apps to peruse too.
View- Top 15 Web 2.0 in Europe? (rw web)
If you want to see the full lists of contestant projects and how many votes each got from the public (as opposed to the above which were selected by the jury), the list is here.
Posted at 05:41 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
May 07, 2007
German Startup With Sim Tool For Fuel Cells
Visimbel, a German research institute spinoff, has launched a couple of products for modelling and simulating fuel cells and power generating systems.
It's able to take the electro-chemical measurement data from analytical instruments, model individual components, see their effect in a sub-system and then visualize its performance in an overall system, all with the same tool.
.
Co-founder Nicola Bundschuh heads up the one year old spinoff from the German Aerospace Research Centre (DLR). Judging by some of her recent speaking engagements, we'd say the startup is looking for some early stage funding.
And she will probably find it.
Fuel cells, especially portable ones, are making some headway in the mainstream market these days and are being developed not only by startups, but by more established systems vendors. We think there should be some healthy demand for the product and services around it.
View - Visimbelhttp://www.visimbel.com/
Posted at 07:24 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Nanosolar's German Plant Coming Online
The German press is reporting that California-bsed Nanosolar is getting its new German factory online and hopes to be in volume by the second half of this year.
The factory, located near Berlin, will be assembling Nanosolar's innovate Copper, Indium, Gallium Diselenid (CIGS) solar cell modules.
It's working with Conergy, the German solar cell company, too.
Nanosolar's founder is Germany-born Austrian Martin Roscheisen who made his first fortune with Internet startup eGroups. He also co-founded TradingDynamics, acquired by Ariba during the bubble.
Read - NanoSolar A Bay Area Media Sensation - To Receive State Visit (alarm:clock)
Posted at 07:20 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Seed Funding for e-Senza's Wireless Sensor Networking
We have a tech investment to report today, a seed round for E-Senza out of Constance, Germany. The company, which raised an undisclosed amount of capital, sells a mesh networking solution along with the low-power wireless devices to go with it.
It's a wireless sensing product line targeted at the industrial pressure, temperture, and data sensor market. The Economist recently published a feature article on the topic outlining the wireless sensing trend and what's to come (you can view it for free if you agree to look at an ad for AIG bank - a fair deal in our opinion for a normally paid content site).
A startup with products that has lots of TLA (three letter acronyms), modules, software, and batteries - how refreshing after what seems like months of web wonderdeals.
Its early investors are High Tech Gründerfonds, ERP Startfonds, and Jorg Bartsch, a business angel with an entrepreneurial background in the instrumentation and analytical instrument industry.
The startup sells systems for AMR (automated meter reading), remote sensor networking and management software, as well as MTL (indoor tracking and localisation). It claims to be able to work with sensor installations that are already in place.
View e-Senza
Posted at 06:35 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 05, 2007
Italy's Zooppa Seeded To Take On Brickfish and Co.
Last week, we reported that European VC firm Mangrove had invested in Brickfish, a US-based site that gets its users to make ads and videos for its corporate sponsors.
This week we note that Italian incubator H-Farm, located a little North of Venice is backing Zooppa.com, which is very clear on what it does:
Zooppa.com partners with international companies to sponsor their brands through Zooppa's video competitions. Based on the briefs companies provide, users are invited to create their own commercials for that brand. This can mean designing an animated sequence, writing a script or concept for a potential ad, or actually shooting their own video.For each company that Zooppa partners with, a new contest is launched for users to compete in.
Users are also encouraged to create their ads using concepts or scripts posted by others. As an incentive to share one another's creativity, Zooppa rewards this type of collaboration with a Bonus Team Prize.
Its backer is interesting. H-Farm's founder is Italian Internet entrepreneur Riccardo Donadon (at right) who founded mail.it and then sold to Infostrada in 1999 and now known as publicly traded Libero.it.
He then founded e-Tree, an Internet and IT company, which was acquired by Etnoteam in 2001 after rapid growth. He started up the incubator in 2005.
Donadon Says He Likes Mowing His 1100-hectare Lawn at the H-Farm When He's Not Working With Founders
View- Zooppa
Posted at 07:14 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
TestFreaks Founders Take Northzone Money A Second Time
PriceRunner founder Martin Sundquist wrote in to the alarm:clock to say that his new and recently funded company Wiral Internet Group has launched TestFreaks. The venture is backed by Northzone, which invested in the founding team's previous venture PriceRunner.
It is rare for founders to double up with their previous VCs so Northzone must be doing something right.
PriceRunner was founded in 1999 and grew to 100+ employees and over 10M monthly users in Europe. It sold to ValueClick in 2004 for $29M + $6M in incentives.
TestFreaks aggregates data on specific products from professional reviews, user reviews, video reviews, blogs, and forums. TestFreaks is already localized for 6 markets and says it will expand to another 14 markets before the end of this year.
Read - PriceRunner Founders Launch TestFreaks. Raise $2.8M
View - site
Posted at 07:05 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Ebay Invests in Turkey's GittiGidyor
Sister site the alarm:clock reports that eBay has a acquired a stake in Turkish auction site GittiGidyor. The PR says that eBay was keen to get access to the country's 17 million Internet users (about a quarter of Turkey's total population).
If you're a regular alarm:clock euro reader, you will be familiar with GittiGidyor and know that it is backed by iLab Ventures, a local venture firm with holdings in several Internet businesses because we reported it a year ago. And you'll be aware of the eCommerce market in Turkey already (recent posts here and here)
We're not saying that to prove we're super scoop-ers here - just that we're doing the alarm:clock thing: Keeping you alert.
Read- eBay Inc. - eBay Acquires Stake in Turkey's GittiGidiyor.com (eBay PR)
Posted at 05:50 AM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
May 04, 2007
Tibco Acquires Swedish VC-Backed Spotfire for $195M
Spotfire, a 10 year old Swedish/Us software company that makes stunning visualization of data for business intelligence and research purposes, has been acquired by TIBCO.
The startup was backed by Atlas Venture and Innovationskapital and had its origins in a research project at Chalmers University of Technology. It is still led by Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO and founder. He was on the cover of Inc magazine last month and has a blog.
Read - Spotfire predicts world cup soccer results (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:06 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 03, 2007
France's Emailing Solution Bought Out By Experian's CheetahMail
Experian through its Cheetah Mail subsidiary, has acquired Emailing Solution, a French permission-based email marketing company. Founded in 2001, Emailing Solution claims over 300 clients from diverse industries, including Orange, Staples and Hewlett Packard.
According to Forrester Research, the French market is one of the largest and fastest growing email markets in Europe.
View - site
Posted at 07:26 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
Blockbuster Sells Its Games Station Business For £74M
On the same day Blockbuster announced poor earnings but a sharp upramp in new subscribers, it also announced that Game Group has acquired its British video game unit, Games Station, from Blockbuster U.K. for £74M ($148M). Game Station is a British PC and video games retailer employing more than 1,800 in 217 stores.
In 2006, Game Station had Ebitda of £6.5M on revenue of £203.5M. The buyer said they expect the acquisition to deliver synergies of approximately £7M per year by the second full year following completion through improved efficiency, inventory management and leveraging existing overheads.
Posted at 07:16 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Paris' Mobile Ad Startup ScreenTonic Bought By Microsoft
Microsoft is steadily assembling the various slices of the full advertising spectrum. Last year it acquired Massive, with its expertise in in-game advertising and today it bought mobile advertising focused ScreenTonic.
It does seem that Microsoft wants to be more disciplined about the amount and or multiple it will pay for its acquisitions. (Read MSFT blogger Don Dodge who will let you know that Microsoft takes pride in buying companies early while they can still be had at a relative bargain.) Last year Microsoft was reported to have had talks with US mobile ad firm Third Screen Media, but did not close a deal. Likewise, Seattle-based Medio would make sense if not for the price that it might demand.
ScreenTonic is based in Paris, France. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Founded in 2001, ScreenTonic had raised raised €5.5M last April from 3i and I-Source Gestion.
ScreenTonic’s mobile ad solutions are targeted at mobile network operators and publishers. It runs mobile portals with ads such as sponsored links, banners and video ads on their mobile website. So far it has been quite successful in the French market. Last January it boasted it had hit the 1B pages served marker.
After its April funding, ScreenTonic expanded its relationships to operators in Belgium and the UK, and now we expect to see Microsoft take the technology stateside and to Asia. Additionally, it will be interesting to see how quickly Microsoft will be able to integrate ScreenTonic with its Adcenter Web advertising business.
Screentonic Serves Fixed Banners
Video Banners
Interstitials and several other ad formats
View - site
Posted at 04:30 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
May 02, 2007
Hot Betas: sMeet, Trivop, and Ekaabo
Today we're feeling sociable and are profiling a couple of online community-type startups that seem interesting: Ekaabo out of Germany, and sMeet, out of Berlin, both of which will be at the upcoming Innovate Europe confab in Spain next week, which means they are probably pitching to VCs. The third is Trivop, out of Paris with a new video guide to hotel and lodgings in Europe.
Ekaabo is a Weinheim, Germany-based startup founded in 2006 by Marco Ripanti. Its specialized in developing and designing online communites for special interest groups in Europe (so it's not really a beta). It has eight of its own, and has done almost twice as many for its clients. During the last venture cycle, it was great to be a website design firm- maybe during this one it is great to be a community design firm. (Image source: Ekaabo blog)
sMeet - Billing itself as a reality communications community, sMeet already has a staff of 25 and was founded in September 2006. It runs an online community that lets members create avatars and switch to their own phones for voice. It was all the buzz at the recent Red Herring European confab. It is not a beta, it's an alpha.
Trivop - France's Videoagency which is specialized in the production and publication of online hotel videos, has launched Trivop. Reviewed on Mashable, as a great resource for travellers, we think this one sounds good. The founder is Thomas Owadenko who is a 32 year old Parisian. According to one of the startup's board members in his blog, Owadenko is a serial Internet venturer and has sold at least one of them to Lycos in 2000. It is obviously made by someone that knows how difficult it is to figure out which hotel to book when you've got business meetings or a conference to go to in a new city, even with the plethora of travel sites on the Internet today.
Posted at 06:21 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Sex and the Social Networking Phenom
Over at the popular and often amusing Mashable blog (check out Web startups and the lying liars that lie about them , the results of its survey to find out The Social Network Most Likely to Get You Laid are in.
The winner? MySpace, which stormed ahead of Facebook in the voting. MySpace was also declared by one commenter to be the site “Most likely to get you chlamydia”, making this a double victory.
The surprise was that Digg and LinkedIn made the ranking. And that none of the soc networks popular in Continental Europe appeared at all - no Webjam, no Facebox/Netlog, not even Badoo.com. It's probably a language thing.
The topic reminds us of something that Lars Hinrichs, founder of Xing.com, said a few years ago about the secret to building a popular online community. It was something along lines of enabling members to get what they need or really want. There were four or five things to enable....
There were four or five but the only ones we can remember are sex and money.
Read - Revealed: The Social Network Most Likely To Get You Laid (mashable)
Posted at 04:55 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Europe's Answer To SecondLife Taatu Looking to Raise €5M
Two year old Taatu, a Belgian animated chat and virtual world, is seeking €5M to €7M to grow its online reach, according to a Belgian newspaper. The company mentions breakeven in its pitch.
Update:
One of our valued readers wrote in with a translation of the text in Tijd.be, explaining the context of the "breakeven" we picked up on....
Tatuu, established in early 2005, is market leader in Belgium. Last
year it had 75.000 members. Due to their expansion to France and
Holland the number of members has doubled. Tatuu want extra money to
finance its international growth and to become European market
leader. According to Kenneth Berard, the financial director of Tatuu,
the company needs between 2.5 and 3 mio members to obtain break-even.
We suspected something was afoot because of an uptick in the number of hits we're getting on earlier stories on this startup and so we decided to do a little digging.
One of the startup's shareholders Yannick Bollati - posted this cool photo of himself on Flickr.
Editor's note: One of the benefits of having a blog that covers startups is that we get a pretty good idea of which ones are hot by the number of Google searches that land on our pages from folks looking for info about those startups or from kids trying to find hacks for Stardoll and Habbohotel (a lot!). In fact, following up search strings is one way we get our scoops, dontcha know.
Taatu's co-founder Jean Philippe Dumont has a Linkedin profile is here .
Read - Taatu wil 5 tot 7 miljoen euro ophalen (tijd.be)
Read - More Habbo Clones in Europe (a:c euro)
Read - Taatu Launches (a:c euro)
Posted at 10:08 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock On Growth Hormones
The first day of every month we take stock of our traffic and financial progress at the alarm:clock network. We want to thank or readers for you support and for spreading the word about our product because we're now doubling in size every two months.
Our growth chart is sheer beauty to our eyes, especially the site and RSS stats. At least it has been for the past 6 months and we will do our best to see that it will look pretty over the next 6 months.
Since most of our readers are sober-minded business people, we welcome any thoughts you might have on how we can a) get in front of more readers b) increase revenues.
comments@thealarmclock.com
Posted at 07:04 AM | Posted to Sponsored Post | TrackBack | Permalink
Augmentra Seeks Capital for Location Bases Software Biz
Over at Science Business we read that three year old UK startup Augmentra is looking to raise half a million pounds to finance its off-road mapping software business.
Since "real men" don't ask for directions, this startup might just be on to something good. Its location aware maps are currently available on Nokia S60 smartphone platform.
The founders, Craig Wareham and Mike Brocklehurst goal, according to the Tourist Experience blog is to make Augmentra's flagship product, Viewranger, the "off-road satellite navigation system of choice of consumers and outdoor professionals.” Before starting up Augmentra the two founders were at Advanced Rendering Technology Ltd, also based in the UK.
View Augmentra
Read - The Great Outdoors (The Tourist Experience blog)
Posted at 06:39 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Fuel Cells Camping and Capital
Germany's Smart Fuel Cell, which makes portable Methane powered fuel cells, is preparing to float on the Prime Standard in Frankfurt (the main stock market). No word on the size of the flotation yet. It's doing about €7.5M annually in sales with its EFOY unit (shown below) and expects to reach profitability this year.
SFC's shares are traded over the counter but it is now making a move to the Prime Standard, the main stock market in Germany, to raise new capital. Its stock is currently held by some big name mutual funds.
SFC is going to get some new competition this year, though, as Truma, a German portable generator manufacturer makes its move into the fuel cell market.
That's not a new a new video server for the digital living room above, it's Truma's prototype of a product that it wants to take it to the market this year.
Smart Fuel Cell was founded in 2000 and got its early financing from VC firms like 3i (who exited quietly, along with other early investors, it seems).
Read Erster Brennstoffzell ... Boerse Handelsblatt
Posted at 06:10 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
May 01, 2007
Mangrove Makes Another Web Investment
Sister-site the alarm:clock reports that Mangrove Capital has seeded Luxembourg-based Jambaz, a developer of a stock picking game with cash prizes for making the best calls. It lets users create their own widgets with their picks.
The post also rounds up Web 2.0 dealmaking by Mangrove, which is best known for investing in Skype early. The European VC is backing a couple of other web wonders: such as San-Diego-based Brickfish, a platform for tuning or pimping existing brands in contests sponsored by the same brands (interesting business model), Piczo, online photo album generator, Quintura, search result innovator, and Properazzi, vacation rentals web site.
CEO is Roberto Bonanzinga who is a board adviser at Piczo and Germany-based Pageflakes and who has a telecom background.
Read - Stock Pick Widget Maker Jambaz Launches/Gains Seed Funding (a:c)
Posted at 05:53 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Samwers Invest in Twitter Clone
The Samwer brothers have invested an undisclosed amount in Twitter clone Frazr.com. According to one-to-one, a trade pub, there's a whole slew of micro-blogging services popping up in Germany that broadcast posts of up to 150 characters via SMS and RSS, including Wamadu, Faybl, 1you, Sloggen, and Partnr.de.
After spending about 90 seconds surfing a couple of these sites we think that there might be a new opportunity to offer silence as a service.
Read - Twitter-Klone: Samwers setzen auf Frazr (one to one)
Posted at 05:19 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Buyout At Spanish Anti-Virus Firm Panda
Bilbao, Spain-based Panda announced that it has taken a private equity investment of an undisclosed amount. The deal sees the founder of the 17 year old anti-virus software company selling about 75 percent of the company to two Spanish private equity firms.
Speculation among private equity industry insiders in their blogs suggest a valuation was about €133M, meaning that the software company which does about €100M in annual sales went cheap.
We like the Global Threatwatch tickers on Panda's homepage.
Read - Panda Software Fire Sale (european capital blog)
Read - Panda Bought Out (technophile blog)
Posted at 05:06 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
