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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 n