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June 29, 2007
RoyaltyShare Buys UK's Musicalc
I a minor deal, RoyaltyShare, which sells digital royalty solutions to the entertainment industry, has bought out Musicalc, a UK-based provider of royalty accounting software for the music industry. Musicalc has been in business for 25 years and has about 100 clients.
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:27 PM | Posted to Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink
Job Search Engine Jobindex List With The Nordic Exchange
Jobindex has listed on OMX: The Nordic Exchange at First North. Jobindex is a search engine, which says it provides people with access to more than 500 job exchanges and private companies' recruitment pages in Denmark. Jobindex has more than 10.000 job ads daily and 40K people have posted their CV on the website.
The tiny exchange says that Jobindex is the ninth company to start trading at First North in Denmark this year.
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:00 PM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Applied Materials Buys Swiss Solar Wafer Tool Outfit for $475M
We are a bit late with this news but earlier this week semiconductor manufacturing equipment company Applied Materials Inc. said it will acquire privately-owned HCT Shaping Systems out of Switzerland for $475M.
According to a report in EDN, Applied said that "the acquisition is part of the company's strategy to accelerate customers' ability to reduce the costs of photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturing to make solar energy more competitive with grid electricity."
The Swiss company's equipment is used in manufacturing silicon wafers for the solar industry - for shaping ingots and sawing them into wafers.
Applied buys Swiss solar technology player for $475M - 6/26/2007 - Electronic News
Posted at 05:32 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
QuantaSol Raises €2M For Solar Cell Tech
UK-based QuantaSol has raised €2M, according to this week's Tornado Insider newsletter. It mentions the two other deals we wrote about recently Heliatek (new materials for solar cells) and Solaire Direct (power generation plants ), and sees them as evidence of a continued interest in solar cells by investors, pointing out all three companies were founded in 2006.
QuantaSol aims for higher efficiency output using GaAs wafers under optical concentrators. The Cleantech Investing Cleantech Investing blog says:
This type of PV [photovoltaic] cell is most appropriate for use in concentrator-based solar power systems.Its backers according to the report are Imperial Innovations, Low Carbon Accelerator, NetScientific and Numis Corporation.
There was another recent investment in high efficiency photovoltaics targeting the same market segment, namely Concentrix Solar out of Germany which raised capital from Good Energies, an investment vehicle that has an impressive track record in backing photovoltaic companies, mainly in Europe.
Read - Industrial Strength Solar (a:c euro)
Posted at 05:03 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Cuculus Funded To Turn DSL Providers Into Hotspot Enablers
Cuculus in Germany has raised seed funding from High Tech Gründerfonds and co-investors. The startup which has a few patents on its technology aims to license it to established DSL providers and hardware manufacturers.
The pitch to DSL providers is that it enables their subscribers to offer wifi hotspots and use other ones run by the same ultimate provider when they leave home and travel within reach of that providers' extended network. SOHO users sharing broadband connections via Wifi? That sounds familiar.
View Cuculus
Posted at 04:41 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Finally A Phone Display You Can Read Outside
In daylight and outdoors, phone displays are virtually unreadable so we are almost thrilled with Qualcomm's announcement of a new MEMS display that promises to alleviate one of the most annoying things about using mobilephones and other gadgets in bright light.
We don't normally cover product announcements, let alone product announcements by multi-billion dollar US companies but this Qualcomm scratches an itch.
Instead of trying to stuff more applications and functionalities into devices, software applications, and web tools, it would be great to get some existing user issues solved first - as Niklas Zennstrom says - solve a problem find a business model.
Valleywag and Technofile have a whole lot more to say about what's annoying about consumer technologies, and more amusingly than us. The Valleywag post even manages to squeeze in some advice about carbon reduction ploys beyond the DotGreen glam trend.
Posted at 05:53 AM | Posted to Displays | TrackBack | Permalink
June 28, 2007
DotGreen Variation: Trendwatching Still Made Here Report
We wrote about Bruce Sterling's call on the DotGreen boomlet. Trendwatching sees a carbon offset friendly trend too, one that is evident in the manufacturing and retail sectors in the Still Made Here Trend Report.
Trendwatching says that USA swimwear manufacturer still makes it clothing in the US, and it does so profitably.
Posted at 07:03 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Forbes on EuroFroth
Forbes reports on European tech venture, seeing signs of a mini-bubble but also giving plenty of space to mention some European tech ventures, such as Iminent, Netvibes, Garlik, Smaato, FON, smeet, and Properazzi. These are startups regular readers will be familiar with.
Quoted is Mark Tluszcz, a managing partner at Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners and an early backer of Skype, who in true VC style bemoans valuations and cuts to the chase about the weakness in blockbuster exit activity.
"I get excited by the evolution of the European venture scene, but I am very concerned about froth," he says. "Our market has not had the exits to justify the valuations we are seeing."
While Herman Hauser takes the opportunity to mention portfolio company Plastic Logic to the thousands of readers of that business publication.
The news nugget of the Forbes piece is here:
The multi-lingual buzz at the Innovate!Europe 2007 conference in Zaragoza was one sign that the pace of starting tech companies in Europe is picking up.
Actually entrepreneurs never stopped founding companies over the past six post-bubble years. (We just cannot help kibbitzing). It is just that the business press, potential customers, and VCs have started to put some stock in them again.
Read EuroFroth
Posted at 06:21 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Top 10 Reasons Why Tech Public Relations Fizzle Rather Than Sizzle
We’re linking today to a post entitled: And Now For Some Unpleasant PR Medicine: Top 10 Reasons PR Fails by Colette Ballou who runs Paris-based Ballou Public Relations.
You’d expect the blog of a PR agency owner to put a positive spin on her top 10 list like Top 10 Reasons To Hire A PR Firm or Ten Tips On Being a Media Darling, but Ballou isn’t much like other tech-oriented PR firms in Europe.
We recently met her team at a party for clients in Ballou’s stylish apartement in Paris. Except for the fact that we’re on two different sides (when tech journalists switch to the PR world where the money and the coffee is much better, gossip says they've “moved to the other side”), Ballou and the a:c euro have one thing in common: both are mainly occupied with tech founders in this part of the world and their attempts to make Silicon Valley-style money without the Silicon Valley history and geography.
So if Ballou is not over in France churning out press releases and emailing them to all the names in Gorkana remotely related to its clients market in a spray and pray manner, what does it offer? According to the post, it’s strategic advice. Press releases are barely mentioned.
Ballou writes:
… every once in a while we get a potential client who thinks that PR can make a "me too" business into a Goggle, or who thinks that PR can work wonders for their sales pipeline (when what they really need is another salesperson and not PR).
Other insights:
.
“The media works on its own timetable, which is usually much longer than the client’s”
And she tells clients that they “need to drop everything if the media calls. This may be inconvenient, but the media waits for no one”.
And number 11 goes like this:
Perception is not formed only by the media: it includes analyst relations, attending (not just speaking at) conferences and networking opportunities, submitting awards applications and blogging (whether writing yours, being an active participant/commenter in the community, or both).
Read - Top 10 Reasons PR Fails (A View From Abroad blog)
Posted at 04:46 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
June 27, 2007
German Twitter Clone Finds A Buyer on Ebay
One of the folks over at allesklar.com sent us an email to say his firm bought German microblogging community dukudu.de. The dukudu founders put the German twitter clone up for bid on Ebay.de last week and the highest bidder at about €43K was allesklar.com.
You may recall we reported last week that there were about 8 Twitter type companies in Germany.
The startup was acquired to add some communications features to city information site meinestadt.de (“my city”), which belongs to allesklar. It is not decided yet if the creators of dukudu will join the acquiring company, said the team's spokesman in an email in response to our query.
View Meinestadt.de -
Posted at 06:21 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
French Solar Power Company Gets Financed
Germany and Norway are the leading players when it comes to solar cell companies in Europe, so it was interesting to see that French solar power production company Solaire Direct raised €6.1M to finance its initial development.
Investors include TechFund, Schneider Electric Ventures, and Demeter Partners. The founding team sound like it has the know-how to make a go of it. They need a combination of people able to raise capital and know the solar industry: Thierry Lepercq (Founder of NetsCapital which was a venture fund), Amaury Korniloff (former - Business Development Director of Poweo, an independant power generation company), Stéphane Jallat (ex Industrial Director Tenesol) and Abdel Bounia (ex Engineering Manager Photowatt).
Founded just eight months ago, Solaire Direct claims to be the first photovoltaic specialist dedicated entirely to solar energy production in France. The company designs, installs and exploits photovoltaic structures of all sizes from residential installations to ground power stations, it said.
View Solaire Direct
Posted at 06:07 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Axel Springer Puts €284M Price Tag On auFeminin.com
Media companies in Europe continue their race to acquire their way into Internet market share as this latest German/French content deal illustrates.
The founders of Paris-based auFeminin.com, which runs several female oriented content sites in Europe have agreed to sell their stake (41.4 percent) in their publicly-traded, eight year old venture, which includes an online advertising business unit.
Axel Springer, the German media company, is the buyer and it has an offer out to take over the rest of the company.
The price represents 20.6 times EBITDA for 2007 (estimated).
Founded in 1999, auFeminin.com grew sales by 54 % last year to €13.4M. Its EBIT grew by 79 % to €7.3Ml. The firm has a margin of almost 60%. It has an audience of 14.6M unique visitors per month (its source is Comscore Mediametrix Panel) and employs about 50 full-time people.
View - aufeminin investor relations
Posted at 06:38 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 26, 2007
OutSystems Gets Growth Capital for Web Business App Wizards
Spain's OutSystems, a six year old developer of a rapid application development platform has raised €2.4M to build on its already impressive market from ES Ventures, the venture capital of the Espírito Santo Group.
CEO and co-founder Paulo Rosado (pictured nearby) led marketing efforts at Altitude Software, a CRM company before starting up Outsystems in 200. Prior to that he founded ebusiness company Intervento, which he sold in 1999. A stint at Oracle Corp in Silicon Valley preceded all that.
The company targets large sized organizations, mainly life science and energy companies, that have to mix information from a lot of different data pots into applications that better support their business processes and regulatory constraints.
On its site you'll find reference to the "Agile" project management buzzword. We've started but not finished two different books on the topic. But just because we couldn't get into the topic doesn't mean much - we don't make making our living developing software applications. It seems that plenty of people that do make a living that way have picked up on it.
It names Brisa Autoestradas, Bristol-Myers Squibb Portugal, Cofidis, Delta Energy, E.ON Benelux, EDP, Oxxio, REFER, and SurfControl, as some of its customers. It claims 70 worldwide businesses as buyers and over 400 applications delivered, and growing.
View Outsystems
(via Tornado Insider)
Posted at 08:04 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Hedge Fund In Exanet Round For Network Attached Storage
Exanet out of Israel has raised $18M in an "oversubscribed round" of financing.The round was led by US investors Coral Capital Management and QVT Fund LP, a multistrategy hedge fund, as well as existing investors. Exanet’s current investors include Evergreen Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Microdent, Kodak, CSK Fund (Hitachi), Dr. Giora Yaron and others (via Neteco)
Posted at 06:49 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
VOIP Phonemaker Gets Private Equity Cash
AmericanVenture.com is reporting that BO4 Capital has invested an undisclosed amount in snom Technology out of Berlin.
Beaufort Capital is a private equity investor that apparently manages a fund called BO4. It is based in Hamburg and counts one of the Technologieholding/3i partners as a founder. They target SMEs.
The Snom Phones Compete With Big Names Like Cisco For the Enterprise and SOHO Desktop
Posted at 06:41 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 25, 2007
Sofinnova Funds BlueKiwi To Make Blogs Safe For Big Business
French startup BlueKiwi has hit the ground running with its SaaS blogging and Intranet platform for businesses. A push from the Microsoft Ideas program in France didn't hurt either.
We first heard about it via Altaide blog (whose author runs an online job search company) a few weeks ago and in the meantime the same source says that BlueKiwi has raised €4M from Sofinnova.
It may be the first time we've used the Intranet term in relation to a startup for several years - BlueKiwi probably uses a different term but all its documentation is in French and ours isn't good enough to pick out the buzzwords. The single language support is probably going to change now that Sofinnova has forked over some new capital.
We hear the startup has signed up a few large-sized enterprises in France for the kind of renewable subscription fees that would make any ISV pretty happy.
The driver on the buy side is that management at these large companies noticed that employees were using just any old blog, wiki, or other social software application that they found on the Internet. Now they pay BlueKiwi to deliver the applications.
BlueWiki is onto something. If you've ever worked inside a large or medium sized business you will know the pressure there is for employees to use company standard applications. It's frustrating as hell and can lead to some jumbo-sized resentments - but "that is how it is in the industry" - as one of our mentors used to repeatedly inform us in an endearing little shriek.
Read BlueKiwi Scoop
Posted at 06:52 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Burda Backs eCommerce Biz eDelight.de
Deutsche Startups and Gruenderszene are reporting that online gift recommendation site eDelight has raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Burda Ventures. We were talking by email last week with one of the founders after getting a nudge from one of our loyal readers (thanks Juergen) and have some insights below.
In the meantime, we eyeballed several positive posts about eDelight in the Exciting Commerce blog, probably the most widely read one on the topic of online retail (we like it because it tends to cast a critical eye on the startups it reviews).
Peter recommends the wallmounted acrylic race track as a gift for business colleagues
eDelight lays claim to be the first social-shopping startup in Germany but even without that claim, which the a:c euro is not in the position to corroborate, what it does have is some innovative features, a nice clean user interface and unusual ideas for gift.
It offers "revenue sharing, widgets, reminder services about gift events or a dynamic gift finder just to name some of our outstanding feature set", says Peter Ambrozy one of the three co-founders.
A magnesium silicate candle to promote wellness
It not only aggregates user recommendations on various categories of purchases, it enables them to put up a shop on their own sites and to earn a commission on sales. It also offers support for merchants. Ambrozy says that "some large online stores like styleon.de, dergepflegtemann.de and livingtools.de have implemented a connection to edelight for recommendations in their online shops".
It's a good idea and will probably grab a lot of users who have been recommending products on other sites that don't offer a commission. The only limits are the selection of products - we'd have liked to be able to recommend a Moleskin City Guide or a Kuhn Rikon one-button travel bug. But as another trusty reader pointed out when asked for his opinion even Amazon is limited.
eDelight launched in alpha in November last year and is now in commercial launch.
Read - Social Commerce News: Burda beteiligt sich an Edelight
Read - Deutsche Startups
Read - Exciting Commerce
Posted at 06:38 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Zenstrom: Solve A Problem Find a Business Model
Niklas Zenstrom's, of Kazaa, Skype, and Joost fame, talked about serial entrepreneurship at the Zeitgeist Google confab (updated: confusion early this morning on the location). We didn't make it to the event but viewed the video. He says that if you solve a problem, you'll have a business model.
Sounds simple, but many startups have a technology looking for a problem. They miss the most important step, one that Zenstrom points out in his talk, and finding the model can take a year or two. Convincing investors is another story, he says.
For me, it's never been about trying to make .. a lot of money..or something.(via Atomico blog)
Posted at 06:14 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
From Dotcom Boom To DotGreen Glam
Living in Belgrade gives Bruce Sterling, the American futurist, the proof of concept he needs to believe that the Dotgreen movement just might generate massive consumer demand for 'cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade'.
Seeing venture capital investment turn to cleantech has also helped.
He wrote about it in the Washington Post a while ago and has since been popular at cleantech VC events, if his blog postings are anything to go by.
We found the Washington Post article via William Gibson's blog (we're fans of the Canadian novelist) where we also found the link to Mr Woo below.
Sterling writes:
….there is an absolute explosion of trendy green design Web logs, of which mine, Viridiandesign.org, was one of the first.They're all about creating irresistible consumer demand for cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade. It's the Net vs. the 20th-century fossil order in a fight that the cybergreens are winning.
Why?Because they're not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable.
The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money. We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival.”
Read - My Dot-Green Future Is Finally Arriving
Posted at 05:27 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Mr Woo’s Robots
We have all seen Sony’s Dancing Robots, but this weekend we discovered Mr Woo who lives about an hour from Shanghai via British journalist's Paul Merton's report. Check out Woo number 25.
He's had no formal training, just an unchecked passion for devising robots made from scrap metal and electronics. Even burning down the family farmhouse didn't stop him. What could he do if he had a good China-oriented VC firm behind him?
Via YouTube - Paul Merton in China Mr Woo Robots
Posted at 04:59 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 22, 2007
alarm:clock Launches Biz Network For Online Advertising At ad:bree
Next week is alarm:clock network's 3rd anniversary. We have enjoyed great support from our readers around the world and thank you all for being there and convincing us to press forward with our business.
A week ago, we quietly opened the doors to ad:bree - our business network for the online advertising community. In this test period, 200+ online advertising insiders joined the network. ad:bree members are publishers, ad networks, affiliate networks, media buyers, creative agencies, analytics providers, investors, and more. Members range from Google engineers, to Sand Hill road VCs, to USA Today biz dev'ers, to Metacafe execs to media buyers in Europe. The group wears everything from pinstripes to tank tops but has in common an interest to be friendly and make money.
In addition to networking, ad:bree has a group blog, forums and topic groups. This week the ad:bree blog features these posts:
+ Breaking Down Ad Servers With Openads' Founder Scott Switzer
+ Q&A With Matt Arkin, Tacoda Sr. VP of Sales.
+ Q&A With 360i's Emerging Media Lab Front-man David Berkowitz.
Why did we launch ad:bree? The tech economy continues to be driven by online ad sales. Most of the businesses that we cover at alarm:clock have online advertising as part of their business model. We think this market needs a business network to connect those of you who care about this sector.
Stay tuned for some more exciting announcement on ad:bree. If online advertising is important to you, get an invitation to ad:bree by visiting the site or email us at comments@thealarmclock.com.
Posted at 07:27 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Xing With Another Spanish Buyout
Fresh off its buyout of eConozco in March, Germany-based business network Xing has bought out Spain's Neurona. No price was disclosed on the acquisition. Neurona claims about 830K business contacts, which would make it larger than eConozco which had only 150K contacts at the time of the deal.
Read - Xing blog
Posted at 03:28 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
10 Things To Do When Your VC Pitch Flops
There are lots of posts in VC blogs about the art of saying "no". Just run "when vcs say no" through your favourite seach engine to see what we mean. The resulting hitlist is a big hint about what it's like when you deal with the risk capital crowd.
Now the thing is what's next when that happens. For a helpful answer we point to a recent post in the blog of famous founder Marc Andreessen. He suggests at least ten things to do when that happens.
First of all, it all depends on when the VCs said No.
If you were told "no" in 1999, I'm sure you're a wonderful person and you have huge potential and your mother loves you very much, but your plan really was seriously flawed.If you were told "no" in 2002, you probably actually were the next Google, but most of the VCs were hiding under their desks and they just missed it.
If they say 'no' nowadays, in a time when investing is more "rational" than either of those two eras, he offers some practical tips, many of which are about reducing risk for the investors.
Here's a couple of examples:
Try to raise angel money, or bootstrap off of initial customers or consulting contracts, or work on it after hours while keeping your current job, or quit your job and live off of credit cards for a while.The most valuable thing you can do is actually build your product. When in doubt, focus on that.
He ends by pointing out that "no" can turn to a "yes" at any time. Of course by then, the startups are often no longer looking for venture capital and are ready for growth capital from private equity funds or late stage venturers, but that is another story (actually just look up our posts on Spreadshirt, Meetic, VentePrivee, or king.com for some examples).
Read - The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 2: When the VCs say "no"
(pmarca blog)
Posted at 05:26 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
June 21, 2007
Qiro Funded To Find You The Nearest Bankmachine
Qiro, which was incubated at Deutsche Telekom labs, has been seed funded to grow its mobile location services business. . Investors include teh High-Tech Gründerfonds, VC Fonds Berlin GmbH, along with Berliner Business Angels.
You can download the Qiro client for free and it tells where to find nearby cafes, rent-a-bike places and bank automats. It is like having YellowPages custom-output a search result for where you are standing right now. The app will also locate friends (if they belong to Qiro too).
This is the kind of thing we helped to hype years ago by writing about it as though it was just around the corner -- we fell for market forecasts (won't be letting that happen again anytime soon - you may notice we don't quote them in these pages.)
Just today we were puzzling over why it has taken the telcos so long to get their location based services in gear with a mobile industry tech exec in Zurich. He said, he felt they might be a bit late because in the meantime there are several competing ways to locate mobilephone users, GPS is coming on, and a few startups have come up with alternatives.
The thing is the business model is not exactly obvious - we'll be watching to see how Qiro and others do the money-making thing.
Posted at 09:11 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
PicoChip Wires Up $27M
PicoChip, the software programmable wireless chip developer has raised $27M in a fourth round led by Highland Capital Partners along with undisclosed key strategic investors. This brings total funding to $70M for the 7 year old firm.
Existing investors include Atlas Venture, Pond Venture Partners, Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild, Intel and AT&T.
The company's chips are in demand because they can be re-programmed to suit the whims of the WIMAX standards development committees, for example. It's designs are also used in other flavours of wireless, making headway in the femtocell segment.
It's a TenX company: performance is ten times better and in a real world system it is "one-third the cost and one-third the power of DSP / field programmable gate array (FPGA) options", according to its press .
View PicoChip
Posted at 08:55 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Austria's CycleEnergy Raises Capital Bio-Power
CycleEnergy, an agro-energy power plant project company, has raised €6.7M growth capital for power plant activities in Central and Eastern Europe. Investor 3TS Capital Partners, which is backed by 3i in London, led the round, joined by founding shareholder investment company Ventacc.
Woodchips are what the Austrian startup is into at the moment, but it says it can adapt its power generation to whatever waste products are available in the surrounding areas.
The firm's CFO said in statement that this "is the first step in a series of transactions that should allow us to invest over EUR 100 million in construction and acquisition of bio-power plants across CEE countries.”
The company is currently completing construction of a 5.5 MW (nominal) woodchip fired
biomass facility in northern Austria.
View CycleEnergy
Posted at 06:03 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 20, 2007
Ormigo Brings In Second Angel For Lead Generation Biz
Following a recent investment by angel investor Hemjö Klein, Ormigo, the German online performance marketing startup, has signed on Michael Kleindl, as a new business angel and advisor.
Kleindl was a co-founder of AdLink, currently chairs the board at wunderLOOP, and is president of the European Interactive Advertising Association. The amount the company has raised is not disclosed.
The company was founded in late 2005 by Henning Lange und Oliver Thylmann (on the right in the image nearby).
Since we've been following Ormigo for a while because of its launch of a local performance marketing and lead generation business - even before co-founder Thylmann won one of our irregular quizzes - - we asked him to answer a few questions about the startup life. In our email Q&A he talks about the challenges in raising capital, making the leap to founding his own company, and his penchant for Apple's MacBook.
What did you do before starting your new venture and why did you leave to create Ormigo?
After having had my first experiences founding an internet statistics company during the Web 1.0 era, I started doing a part time MBA at the OUBS to learn more about the business side of things.
That led to a new start at OnVista Group in 2003 [financial news and stocks site]. There I first worked on different parts of onvista.de, and later joined Henning Lange, to build up a performance marketing unit, now called Ligatus GmbH.
It was my responsibility to make sure that we were building a sound technology platform, being a mix of product manager and CTO, if you need a name for it.
End of 2005 Henning and me left together to found Ormigo. We wanted to try building something fully on our own, having worked together at OnVista Group and instantly feeling that we are a great match. We have very similar ideas of life, corporations and business, while not stepping on each others toes when we consider our own core competencies. It is rare that you find such a good match, and we thought it was time to really build a great company together. The final idea developed from there.
What was the biggest challenge so far?
One of the biggest challenges was actually taking the decision to leave. We were kind of leaving our baby to have another one. Very weird feeling indeed.
In relation directly to Ormigo I'd say the biggest challenge was being a bit too far out [as in original] and not being a copycat. If you are not a "German Version of X", you have to do a lot more convincing.
This is especially true if on the surface a model seems simple, but it gets very complicated if you really get down to business. Therefor we were very happy to have been able to do our first round of investment with Hemjö Klein, as we are about getting Michael Kleindl on board. Their help and guidance has been priceless.
We read your blog and notice that you are using a Mac to run your company. Is this some kind of Euro founder trend - am asking because we noticed in Paris last week that the entrepreneurs we talked to are all carrying brand new Apple gear?
The office is at the moment is distributed evenly between Macs, Ubuntu and Windows. We have standard LAMP servers, plus some stuff on Amazon (S3/EC2).
But I actually just converted Henning over to a shiny new MacBook from Windows.
I do believe that entrepreneurs want to get things done. That's what the Mac helps you with. In terms of bang for the buck, the MacBook is currently hard to beat, which is another reason to go there.
Third, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lots of Entrepreneurs are using it, so more and more do. And they do look good.
ENDS
Posted at 06:50 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
MTEM Goes From spinout to $275M In 3 Years
Three-year old electro magnetic imaging startup MTEM, a University of Edinburgh spinoff, has been acquired by Norway's Petroleum Geo-Services ASA for $275M.
MTEM, which has been providing imaging services to oil and seismic exploration companies, was venture-backed by Energy Ventures, HitecVision and Scottish Equity Partners, each owning about 22% of the shares. MTEM's management and the University of Edinburgh held the remaining 35%. After the acquisition, PGS will own 100% of the company.
They invested about £7.4M in the company, according to an article in the Scotsman that was published a few months ago. If that report was accurate, then the investors made a nice multiple on their investment in a very short period of time.
Headquartered in Edinburgh, with 67 employees the company generated sales of £1.5M in the first quarter 2007.
We are following up on the news and hope to have more details in an update.
Read - Scottish Startup Seeks £25M To Grow Oil- And Gas Detecting Biz (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:42 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 19, 2007
Flirtomatic Raises New Round of Finance
We are a bit late with the news but we wanted to check that Flirtomatic's new £2M round, led by Seraphim Capital in London, also included early investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. It did. The new money is to finance its expansion into international mobile markets. Read -
Read - Flirtomatic Chalks Up
Read - Supersnogging and the Viral Myth (alarm:clock euro
Posted at 08:55 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Inquam Acquires Swiss Wimax Operator
San-Diego-based Nextwave via subsidiary Inquam Broadband (Germany) has acquired a 65 percent stake in Swiss Wimax Telecom, an operator of wireless networks in Austria, and neighbouring countries.
Nextwave has an unusual mix: chips, embedded software and wireless telcos and carriers. Its subsidiaries, include NextWave Broadband Inc., PacketVideo Corporation, GO Networks, Inc. and IPWireless, Inc.
This deal suggests its looking to grow its broadband operations in Europe.
View Nextwave
Posted at 07:24 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Media Companies Co-Invest With Mangrove In Nimbuzz Deal
Nimbuzz, the one year old Dutch startup that makes online IM services available to mobilephone users that are members of its network, has raised $10M from early investor Mangrove Capital, joined by MIH Group, which is the company behind Naspers - active in South African and BRIC countries, along with Holtzbrinck Ventures
The media investors bring more than money, according to a PR we received from the firm, they will help with the tough problem of distribution.
Read - Mangrove Back Numbuzz Free (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 06:36 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Trivop Taps Angels
Travel search needs an overhaul as we found out when planning our recent trip to Paris. Trivop, the French startup that offers video-enhanced hotel search services online is working on that one. To get there it has raised an angel round of financing, according to Mashable.
Once again, a set of experienced angels are signing on to back the founders. Mashable sees mscape and Everyscape as its competitors.
We actually used it to find potential hotels in Paris, but ended up booking directly once we found one because we had to check availability and amenities. We expect that Trivop is going to be working on providing a better engine to close transactions through its site.
Read Hot Betas Smeet, Trivop (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 06:51 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Accedo Raises VC For White Label ITV Content Business
Stockholm-based Accedo Broadband AB, which aggregates and sells content, like an acquarium for your TV and interactive games, to IPTV service providers, as well as the software to manage and provision it all, has raised about €1M from Industrifonden and its early backers.
The startup was founded in 2004 by entrepreneurs Michael Lantz and Fredrik Andersson. It has offices in Stockholm, Sweden and London.
View <"a href=http://www.accedobroadband.com/">Accedo Broadband
Posted at 06:40 AM | Posted to Broadband Networks | TrackBack | Permalink
Ex-Photoways CEO's New Venture Gets eCommerce Stars As Angels
Michel de Guilhermier, the French founder of VC-backed Photoways who parted ways with his startup's board about a year ago, has pulled together an impressive group of ecommerce business angels for his new stealth-mode venture called Inspirational Stores [via Altaide].
He says in his blog that his venture is seed funded for an undisclosed amount and the founder team retains the majority of shares.
Regular readers will not only recognize his name, but also most of his advisors and angels, we've profiled some of them over the past year or so. In our recent interview with de Gulhermier he revealed a little about ISG. Three or four of his angels have US market chops.
Robert Keane - Vistaprint founder an online business card printing biz whose mkt cap is $1.5B on Nasdaq
Fabrice Grinda - founder of Zingy (ringtones) and now working on Craigslist clone OLX
Loic Lemeur - whose blogging company was acquired by Six Apart a few years ago, he started LeWeb confabs, and is one of the top 2 bloggers in France. He is leaving Europe for Silicon Valley now, according to his blog.
Graham Hobson : co-founder of PhotoBox whose firm Photoways acquired in 2006
Jérémy Berrebi : who is on his second venture, the popular Zlio online shop building company
Patrick Robin : Imaginet founder which was acquired by Colt telecom and now runs a members only ecommerce site called 24h00.fr
Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet : founder of fast growing Price Minister, a top e-commerce site in France
Michael Copsidas : founder of Guide, a price comparison engine tradiing with a valuation of €60M.
Patrick Hannedouche, founder justeatemps.com, an ecommerce biz that delivers drinks on demand
Posted at 05:46 AM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
June 18, 2007
French Mapping Company Raises €3.2M
Neteco reports that InterAtlas, a French mapping company has raised €3.2M in financing. Its customers include PagesJaune and Microsoft for its new Virtual Earth product. It also runs sites called Paris VuDavion (Paris: bird's eye view) and urbimap.com.
Two planes
And a supercam give InterAtlas the cartographic edge
Read Interatlas Leve (neteco)
Posted at 08:51 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Spanish Investors Invest $25M in MyStrands' Recommendation Web
MyStrands, a "social recommendation" site, has raised $25M in a Series B round led by Antonio Asensio, who runs a Spanish media company called Grupo Zeta, along with a Barcelona-based venture firm called Debaeque and Sequel.
Founded in 2003, the startup has raised $31M to-date. Currently, MyStrands employs a team of 50 people.
Sister-site alarm:clock says it might be easy to call MyStrands a knock-off of LastFM, except that the company was founded years ago (although we imagine LastFM's buyout by CBS helped to lift vaulations.) MyStrands has been around long enough that it has a bit of everything: a music player, mobile services, widgets, recommendation engine, social network and more.
Sure, MyStrands competes with a host of companies from LastFM to Slacker and Pandora, but that doesn't seem to have slowed growth. Like these companies, MyStrands is getting into other forms of recommendations from movies to dining and shopping.
MyStrands focuses on mobile recommendations like its PartyStrands application.
View - MyStrands site
Posted at 08:25 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Russia's Quintura Raises Series A For Search Clouds
After backing Qunitura's seed round, Mangrove Capital Partners has invested "several millions US dollars" in the search startup's Series A round. Techrunch.fr got the scoop on Quintura earlier today.
The new capital is to grow the firm's affiliate model for site search and "build a semantic web index" using its neural networking techniques, it said in a statement. Quintura plans to pitch its search tech to web-sites and blogs to replace a standard site map with a Quintura cloud.
The affiliate model will be either free/ads-supported or subscription-based.
View Quintura
Posted at 08:18 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
ReVolt Charges Up €10M In VC For Battery Tech
ReVolt Technology, a Swiss/Norwegian developer of rechargeable zinc air batteries raised a €10M internal Series B round from its backers Northzone Ventures, Sinvent, Sofinnova Partners, TVM Capital, Verdane Capital and Viking Ventures.
The company recently signed on with Phonak to develop batteries for the Swiss company's hearing aids. Long term goal is mobilephones and consumer electronics.
Founded in 2004, the startup has raised €22M to date.
View Revolt
Posted at 08:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
MOMBastic News: Betas in Decline
Recent entries in the Museum of Modern Betas MOMB reveals "shocking news" from a betalogical point of view, fewer beta sites are winning 'best of web' awards on a global basis.
The MoMB, whose author tracks the beta quotient around the web, also does some other fun analysis:
Read -Germany 2.0, a listing of 100 German web projects and sites;
Read - Google's 50 Most Popular betas (how many does it have altogether if it has 50 popular ones?)
Read - Percentage ofGerman Twitter clones that are in beta (38 percent).
See - Recent entries on the MOMB blog
Posted at 06:03 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
June 17, 2007
Disrupting Web Analytics From Budapest
A Danish born, Budapest based tech venture COO has a good pitch:
Accompanied by the ballsy move of listing four of its competitors, Webtrends, WebSideStory, Omniture and Coremetrics, in all its press releases.
Who said it: Dennis R. Mortensen, COO of IndexTools, based in Budapest with offices in NYC. Tip: Don't call his product a web reporting tool.
What's Index Tools? The name of a seven-year old web analytics platform on the SaaS model. The company has offices in New York.
Mortensen's blog
View Index Tools
Review of Index Tools on Pay per click universe
Posted at 08:30 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
June 16, 2007
Spanish Digg Clones
How do you get a blogger's attention? Easy, send visitors to their site. A spike in traffic from Meneame on Tuesday is how we "heard" about this Spanish Digg clone. Thank you Meneame readers for the nice Karma.
We followed up and asked Julian Martinez, founder of free classifieds site Adoos.com, about the site. Martinez, who is also based in Spain, said there are two large contenders for the top spots in his home market: meneame and Fresqui.
We also found a Loic Le Meur video where we learned that Meneame is the third most popular news site in Spain. It is ahead of news sites that have hundreds of employees, according to Martin Varsavsky who is apparently a minority investor in the startup (see video below).
If it is true that the traffic is that much greater than established media sites, you can understand well why publishers are interested in acquiring such sites.
The site's creator Ricardo Galli talks in the video about the media company offers he's rejected and why he founded Meneame and he does it with disarming modesty and wit. Worth viewing.
As of February there were 380 Digg like platforms, according to the Internet Cash Machine.
Posted at 06:59 AM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
June 15, 2007
Skype : Still Europe's Best Kept Secret?
In AllThingsDigital there is coverage of an Index Ventures confab in Silicon Valley. The reporter talks to the founder of Moo in the UK, as well as a couple of other founders and Neil Rimer of Index Ventures.
We viewed it after Paul Kedrosky pointed out that around 5 minute mark, that Neil Rimer tells the anecdote of being at a recent conference in the Bay Area where folks were talking about whether it was worth doing venture investing outside the US, especially in Europe or Asia.
Rimer overheard someone saying, "Now, what Europe really needs is a Skype."
(links and video below).
Read - Kara Visit Index And Tests The Entrepreneurs
Posted at 06:50 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
New Twist On Open Source: The Bootstrapping Startup Behind Spreed.com
Today we profile struktur, the Stuttgart-based open source applications developer behind Spreed.com, an online service that caught our eye last year because of a fine user interface (Flash-based) to do online meeting and conferencing, including video and powerpoint, screensharing and even mind-mapping.
struktur has impressed since last summer because it is steadily developing new features for Spreed, it launched a financial planning application, which banks install on their customer-facing portals, and it sells icoya content managment software, which is the basis for a set of appliances it developed for e-billing that it claims makes invoice printing a lot cheaper for business and government orgs. (image of one the boxes right).
And it did all that with 20 employees.
struktur is an Open Source company, but not in the sense of a MySQL or a RedHat. struktur uses open software to create its business applications, which is apparently a very cost-efficient way to go.
If we compare Spreed with Sequoia-backed Unisfair, both are web-based conferencing and events applications: Unisfair has raised several millions in VC. Spreed.com has raised zero dollars in venture capital. 
Little buzz, but big customers.
Read on to hear co-founder Niels Mache talk about why he's not raising venture capital, on what's overhyped in Europe, and how his company makes open source profitable in the business with just 20 employees.
You host some of your software applications, like spreed.com, but you also sell software licenses?
Our core business is not software, nor technology. It is selling business applications to industries, i.e. banks, insurances, government and the manufacturing industry. We license business applications. Our licenses guarantee that the application, spreed for instance, is reliably available with
- a defined set of features,
- for a given number of users and
- during the contracted period of time.
Developing solutions for upcoming businesses in the future, understanding the customer need is what we essentially do. Except for spreed, services are not struktur's core business.
Basically your team develops code for certain OS communities in exchange for using it in your products, right?
We directly support and are part of a few OS projects. For example, Zope, Plone, Red5, icoya, WordXML, OSNelly -- the Nelly Moser ASAO open source project. We directly finance OS developers for development projects and we develop and release code for OS projects. Indeed, our product development takes advantage from shared OS development.
This helps us to improve quality and to lower development time and costs. Open Source is our most important instrument that helps us to have products ready for the market before others do and to work with cutting edge technology being able to deliver unique products.
In many installations the customers receive the complete source and therefore would be able to deploy the application on their own. But most customers don't deploy our software on their own. But they don't because it is simply too expensive [for them].
How many employees do you have now and how much do you spend on R&D?
struktur is a small company. 20 people are working for struktur. In 2001 the R&D budget was 250,000 EUR. In 2006 we invested in R&D 480,000 EUR. For 2007 the goal is to spend 850,000 EUR on R&D.
You have never raised outside capital from venture capital firms or biz angels?
Right. We have not raised venture capital. We started in 2001 with private capital of €1M [that is not a typo -it's one million].
What are your goals with Struktur? Do you plan to go public someday?
We had a few enquiries this year to get capital for raising our business to eventually go on the stock market. However this is not our goal, at least not in Germany.
Why?
German capital in the IT-sector is pretty stupid money. For most IT companies, capital from German venture capitalists does not really help to grow an IT business. Our strategy is to spin-off operations. spreed.com is one example. One of our product lines will also take a role in an IPO next year.
Can you elaborate on that statement about venture capital and IT sector in Germany?
I personally cannot think of a larger and successful venture-backed German IT company in the past 10 years.
There are many successful start-ups in other sectors: physics, Laser technology, medical, pharma, automotive and construction. Germany is a good market for start-ups in the consumer market. Examples include Car advertiser mobile.de, photo sales platform fotolia, Jamba mobile ring-tones, OpenBC/XING and social platforms (students, dating, etc.) are successful in Germany.
My impression is that the German venture capital investors focus on rather simple business models where no real technology is involved.
VC’s in Germany have mainly invested in businesses where the revenue scales directly with the investment in marketing, sales and eventually, production.
Venture capital over here is rarely invested for the development or deployment of a technology. Most investments solely focus on the growth of a revenue-proved product and market. Thus a typical German VC investment in not a venture finance, it is growth finance.
The revenue/customer - investment loop is also typically driven by a short term view: an investment today must result in an increase of revenue or number of customers within a narrow time frame of 3 to 12 months.
What is the most overhyped tech trend in Europe right now?
Europe generally and Germany in particular overhypes older technologies and underhypes the really new ones because Europe tend to adopt new technologies slower than the US and Asia.
Nanotechnology [for exampl] is decades old. It is not well suited to create much employment because most of the outcome of Nanotechnology will be pretty simple and straight-forward applications such as fluids, colors, windscreens for the automotive industry. Mass production of nano-products will be in Asia or the US.
The solar cell sector is also overhyped in Germany because of an artificial pricing for solar and wind energy. Solar energy is overhyped in Germany because of a legislation “Regenerative Energy Law” that force energy producers to pay high prices for electricity generated by solar panels.
The effect of the law is that the solar energy sector receives hundreds of millions of Euros subventions from consumers who pay for increased electricity prices. The unwanted side effect is that many solar companies can only survive on a subsidised market.
Finally, Second Life is massively overhyped (but this is a lot of fun for the media).
- End of interview extract.
Mache also told us about how he recruits for his startup, which we wrote about in How to Hire For Your Bootstrapped Venture.
Posted at 04:38 AM | Posted to Business software | TrackBack | Permalink
June 14, 2007
Clash Media Raises VC For Lead Generation Biz
MMC Ventures (MMC), has invested £2 million in Clash-Media, an online lead generation, or performance based ad business, based in London. The new money is for growing the sales force in the UK and establishing a global platform to move into the European and US markets.
Clash-Media was founded a year ago by Simon Wajcenberg, founder of TMN Media, an email marketing business listed on London's AIM.
The new backers say that lead generation is "still a nascent market in the UK. However, market data for the US shows that in 2006 the lead generation market was valued at about $1 billion, and was growing at the rate of circa 70% per annum."
Our go-to man on the art of online lead generation is Oliver Thymann, who founded Ormigo in Germany in 2005. From what he says, Ormigo and Clash-Media are addressing a fast growing opportunity.
The fact that Steve Umberger is one of Clash's angels and board member reinforces that notion. Umberger was a director and angel investor at Valueclick. He was responsible for setting up its London, Paris, Munich, Sao Paulo and Montreal operations.
View Clash-Media
View Ormigo
Posted at 07:13 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-Backed Nacre Acquired For Its Military Hearing Blockbuster
Norway's Nacre, a VC-backed developer of pro hearing systems mainly used by the military, has been acquired by French company Bacou-Dalloz for $120M, according to Tornado Insider's weekly newsletter. The all cash transaction delivered one of its backers, Ferd Venture, which invested €1.9M in early 2005, a return on investment of up to 15x in on the sale, said the report.
Other investors included Viking Venture, Four Season Venture and Sinvent Venture (which is 75 percent owned by Four Season Venture).
The startup has been winning large-sized contracts from the German army and a $30M order from the US Marine Corp in recent months.
View Nacre
View Tornado Insider
Posted at 06:30 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
UK's Codemasters To IPO After Balderton Buys Out Founders
Game-maker Codemasters plans on a 2008 IPO after Balderton (fka Benchmark Capital) bought out the founders. The Times reports that Codemasters is planning a for a £200 million-plus flotation. Founding brothers Richard and David Darling sold their remaining 25% interest to the existing investor Balderton Capital for what is understood to be tens of millions of pounds. The brothers may have taken £95M off the table and will now step down.
Balderton is not yet sure on which market it will float - perhaps Nasdaq. It did sell a stake to Goldman Sachs. Sales are expected to be about £75M with a target of £150M in 2007-2008. The company's big game is expected to become Lord of The Rings Online – a new multi-player game.
Read - Founders sell as Codemasters is driven towards a flotation (Times Online)
Posted at 06:09 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
ELP To Help Tech CEOs
Had to smile at the name of a new support organization for CEOs at European technology firms, including VC-backed tech companies. .It's called the European Leadership Programme. Resorting to geek form it is already being called ELP, a three letter acronym. Giving each other a little 'elp along the way.
Read - European Technology CEOs
Posted at 05:45 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
Paris' Open Source Data Integration Startup Talend Funded For US Thrust
Our intrepid a:c euro reporter mobile blogs from Paris where she heard from investment advisor Marc Brandsma of Chausson Finance who lets us know that opens source data integration play Talend has closed on its second round at $3.5M.
Say Brandsma of Talend:
"I love working with this company: the founders are energizing, the team is young and fantastic, and they are doing something really hard that is to establish themselves as a market leader in the USA. They have an incredible traction with lots of high level partnerships and an astonishing community and customer response. I bet that this company will enter the exclusive club of European start-ups enjoying a global success through an acceleration on the USA market."
Investors in Talend include AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners. In the US, there is a well funded open source data integration company called MuleSource. This is a complex field, we understand, and the two may not but heads initially.
Update: The difference is that MuleSource is an application integration company ( SOA) and Talend is a Data Integration solution. ETL is the three letter acronym here. Extract Transform Load. Such software can take large amounts of data from a legacy database for example and make it available in formats that newer applications can exploit.
View - site
Posted at 06:59 AM | Posted to Business software | TrackBack | Permalink
June 13, 2007
Index/Mangrove Invest In London's OpenAds
Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and several angel investors have invested $5M in a first round into London-based OpenAds (fka phpAdsNew). The business was founded originally as a technology division within Unanimis, a digital advertising business in the UK.
OpenAds says it is used by 20K publishers in 140 countries and in 20 languages. OpenAds lists Federated Media, Stardoll, and Sun as users.
OpenAds competes with AdServers from the likes of DoubleClick (Google), and aQuantive (Microsoft). Key differences to date have been that OpenAds is free whereas the others charge, usually very low CPM rates. OpenAds has done well but perhaps the underlying reason that it has not been stronger is that the commercial ad servers cost so little to operate and publishers expect them to provide additional services that they wouldn't expect from an open source product. Moreover, with the multichannels of online advertising (web, email, rss, mobile, video, in-game ads, etc.) large publishers turn to large ad networks.
OpenAds will remain free but will ramp up its consulting practice. We expect they will also enter into some of the other ad channels that we mention above.
Read - Blog announcement
Read - Buzzmachine post
Posted at 02:33 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
VC World's Sad Secrets And Glossing EVCA Stats
Marc Andreessen's new blog has run a good three part series on VC that Jason Ball, an early stage investor in London says reveals one of the top 5 dirty little secrets of VC and a tip on who the best VCs are. We'll let you read his post to find out what it is.
How VCs Really Spend Their Time
And over on Nic Brisbourne's blog, who is also in London and part of a VC firm, picks apart fundraising reports from the European Venture Capital Association, which should really be called the European Buyout Association. He discusses one of the things that used to frustrate this blogger when covering Euro VC as a journalist, the EVCA stats were practically useless if your beat was technology and early stage investment.
Lies Damn Lies And Venture Statistics
Posted at 04:18 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
June 12, 2007
momondo Gets TV Money For Low-Budget Air Search
We've posted about several airline ticket search sites over the past year and half, including Skyscanner out of Scotland, and DoHop in Iceland. Now there's a Danish name to add to the list, Momondo, which has just sold some equity to Danish TV group TV2. No disclosure on the value of the transaction.
Momondo says it also counts Kayak, Sidestep and Mobissimo active in the US market as competitors.
The startup got some free press coverage recently because it is a reference customer of Nordic mashup technology startup Kapow Technologies (one of the startups on our radar).
It says it aims to outshine the competition by getting better coverage of low-cost airlines than competitors, crawling websites and airlines and agencies to snag ticket prices for its comparison engine.
The search company was founded in 2006 by Thorvald Stigsen. And its board is headed by a former airline exec Jens Willumsen, who hails from SAS.
The startup's mission: To be the starting point for any travel in Europe and beyond.
View momondo
Posted at 05:55 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Germany's Mapsolute With Double Digit Growth
Mapsolute GmbH, the company behind Map24.com, is on an upward sales trajectory. It announced its sixth year of "continuous growth" with revenues up by 40% in the first quarter. It's unusual for a startup to announce its figures like this so we figure Mapsolute's owners are looking for a corporate finance event.
In an interview with Focus last year, the co-founder, 38 year old, Alexander Wiegand said that the firm is profitable and was doing about €10M in revenues. And that takeover offers are coming in at a fair clip. The startup employs about 60.
For once we're writing about a product from a startup that we actually use and for quite some time. Its route planner is great - it's got a clean way to deliver a lot of data, fast, tight design, and the company frequently updates its product with features you want.
Wiegand describes why his firm has been successful surviving in a market with some big names in it: steady revenues from customers like Daimler Chrysler and IBM, as well an internationalization strategy via direct and strategic partnerships with "successful players in the business of cartography in seven different countries". He said that its fourth subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil is heading for a positive ROI in its first year.
Read - Internet Routenplaner (focus)
View Mapsolute's latest PR
Posted at 05:33 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-Backed Drutt Acquired By Ericsson
Ericsson has acquired mobile content management software startup Drutt Corp out of Sweden for an undisclosed amount. The startup's shareholders include Provider Venture Partners Funds, TeliaSonera and some employees.
RCR points out that this is the latest in a "long string" of purchases for Ericsson; One of the biggest and most recent is its bid to pay $417 million for German billing company LHS.
Drutt provides a much needed service to folks wanting to get webcontent onto the phone - try using Google on your mobile to find the phone number of a Paris hotel - Drutt renders web pages into a format more small-screen friendly. It's platform also manages alerts and related content types.
Another catch: Ericsson snaps up Drutt for multimedia :: RCR Wireless News
Posted at 05:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 11, 2007
Telechargement.fr and Softela Download €5M
Nexway, the French company behind software and content ecommerce sites such as Softela and Telechargement.fr (which means Download.fr) has raised €5M in a second round of finance from CM-CIC CAPITAL Privé and earlier investors Turenne Capital Partenaires and XAnge Private. Christophe Chausson of Chausson Finance sent us the news as his firm brokered the round.
The five year old company, which also runs its platform as a white label service, did about €7M in sales in 2006, and employed around 25 people this time last year.
Founded by Gilles Ridel back in 2002, Nexway is growing internationally and that's the reason it took on outside capital. Ridel's last venture brought him about $10M during the last venture cycle Jet Multimedia acquired it.
The download platform business is not a bad one to be in and a trade sale could be a likely exit. Back in 2004 before the market started getting into the more vibrant phase that it's in now, Digital River paid a good price for German startup Element 5, which was backed Earlybird Ventures, 3i and others, specifically $120M in cash.
View- Nexway
Posted at 06:37 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
UK's Miles33 Bought For €83M
European Capital has acquired Miles33, a UK-based provider of software to the publishing and financial services sectors. European Capital paid a total of €83M for a 60% stake, while Miles33’s previous owners and senior management will retain the remaining shares.
Founded in 1976, Miles33 sells directory and composition systems that facilitate the production of complex directories and journals for newspapers.
View - site
Posted at 05:29 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
IRIS Software and CSG Bought Out For £500M
Hellman & Friedman is buying UK software companies IRIS Software and Computer Software Group from HgCapital, for£500M. IRIS sells accounting software. CSG provides software to the legal market. The group has combined revenues of £100M and will operate under the Iris Software Group brand.
Update: Max Bleyleben takes this deal under the microscope in his blog. Worth a read if you're wondering how private equity manages tech investments.
View Iris site and CSG site
Posted at 05:22 PM | Posted to Business software | TrackBack | Permalink
Bootstrapping Adoos.com
Three year old Adoos.com, a free classified ads site out of Spain, has more in common with Craigslist than the business model and early profitability, it has also decided to eschew venture capital to grow.
We came across the startup via founder 29 year old Julian Martinez' blog and were curious enough to contact him. His posts about some of his ideas about how to improve his products while keeping the cash burn low were the trigger.
That's a feat that impresses us especially after the spending excesses we saw in the late nineties that delivered nada in revenues, but also because we know well how much determination it takes to keep it all going. (Check out our earlier posts on lean startup practises below)
Martinez started Adoos in 2004 under the moniker habitamos.com with less than €100K (that's him on the far left pictured below), basically his savings from working in consulting in London and some money his father lent him. He had actually tried looking for VC funding but at the time, as Martinez puts it : "it was really hard to raise money in Europe for Internet companies." That's a statement your a:c euro reporter can vouch for.Over the next two years he worked on growing sales and kept operating costs low. "I offshored all the product development, marketing and IT to Argentina where salaries are 3 to 4 times less than Europe," Martinez told the alarm:clock euro.
As the "then and now" photo nearby illustrates, the startup had spartan beginnings. Today, Martinez says he is making more money than he would have as a young investment banker in London or New York. His startup employs 15 (nearly all based in Buenos Aires) supporting about 3M unique visitors per month. The firm is profitable on the back of sales of banners, premium classified ads, AdSense, and premium SMS services.
Adoos now receives offers for VC but he's not looking for it anymore.
No pricey PR photos at adoos.com but there is money to take the team to Brazil for some time out
View - Adoos
Read - Alfresco's Bathroom Positioning (a:c euro)
Read - The New Tightness of Euro Founders (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:13 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
June 10, 2007
BW Digs 18 Europe's Hot Founders Under 25
Now that Jennifer Schenker is working for BusinessWeek, the European coverage is improving: last week the magazine published a roundup of startups from Europe founded by people under 25 - with lots of names that are new to us. But we are left wondering where were France and Germany's young entrepreneurs during the nominations?
Schenker's name will be familiar to a lot of readers as she was largely responsible for RedHerring's Hot 100 Europe series for the last couple of years.
There are 18 teams profiled from Spain to Estonia. Some of the highlights BytePlay which has its own search tech that it applies to verticals; Wakoopa out of the Netherlands, that is actually getting thousands of people to download its widget enabling it to be the Alexa of the software category; moneytrackin.com out of Spain that tracks what you spend money on, manage a budget and a couple of other personal finance gadgets; and statcounter out of Ireland, a bootstrapping company that's making money with webstats - it's like Xiti or Sitemeter.
You can view all 18 and then vote on one of them. BW will then publish the results of the survey, we expect.
Read - BW's Andy Reinhard overview (Reinhard writes about technology and has been covering European VC and startups, among other things, for several years for BW in Europe.
Read - Europe's Young Entrepreneurs 2007 Click the arrows on the top right corner of the page to view the slideshow with pics and short profiles of each entrepreneur. At the end is a Vote button.
Posted at 06:08 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 09, 2007
French President Taps Sensitive Object
Demoing your products can be nerve wrecking enough without having your country's president and all the journalists that track his every move on hand, but Sensitive Object's man seems to be handling the pressure in this photo that a reader close to the company sent to us.
Those four round stickers and a long white rectangle on the desk in front of the new president are actually keyboards and buttons from Sensitive Object computer peripheral collection. The "blackboard" is also an interface. A tap is what it takes to send a command, as the startup's technology is based on acoustic sensors. They basically turn any surface into an input device.
We've been following the company since 2004 when all it had was a license for a patent and a fistful of euro dollars from Sofinnova Partners. You can find on its website a list of resellers in France if you're interested.
The source of the photo is elysee.fr and it was taken last Tuesday at a memorial ceremony Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a Nobel prize-winning (1991) researcher and a promoter of uni spinoff activity. He died in May at the age of 75.
View- Sensitive Object
Posted at 07:15 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
June 08, 2007
Stockholm's Nanoradio Raises $27M Towards Mobile WiFi Chips
Sweden's Nanoradio, which makes chips ofr low power WiFi (W-LAN) on cell phones and other consumer devices, has raised $27M. Investors are the Norwegian firm, Ferd Venture, together with the previous investors: Nordic Venture Partners, Innovacom, Teknoinvest and Industrifonden.
Founded in March 2004, Nanoradio's chipset targets demand for mobile VoIP. Demand is being driven by fixed-to-cellular convergence. The technology is supported by standards such as UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). In addition to mobile VoIP, Nanoradio's applications include wireless headsets.
View - site
Posted at 03:50 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
How To Hire For Your Bootstrapped Tech Venture
Famous founders know a think or two about hiring for their ventures as Marc Andreessen illustrates in a highly readable post on what to look for and how to identify it. One contrarian view of his is that super intelligence is not in the top criteria.
Today we also have some insights from some euro startups that we have on our radar:
Spotify:
Long ago, we learned a lesson by asking the first guy we knew with a driving licence to join our band (disaster!). These days we pick our team members very, very carefully. Most people we've hired ended up meeting us at least three or four times, but considering we see each other almost every day that's really not too bad. We enjoy each others company in and out of office, and social happenings are plentiful.
The fact that Spotify's founders are famous, as is Andreessen, must go a long way to aid recruiting the kind of talent required, but what about bootstrapped ventures that can't offer relatively big salaries and the founders might not yet be famous.
Once again, we have a couple of tips from some of our readers that are bootstrapping ventures and building good teams...
From the founders of struktur (the company behind spreed.com): We have hired engineers [after] having the opportunity to meet and talk at conferences. I also contact individuals directly when I find an interesting publication, a software or a blog. Recommendation can be also help a lot in finding good people. Social networks like LinkedIn can be goldmine in digging-out the personal background of a successful candidate. Before we contract engineers it is important for us to take a look of the past work and the quality of the software. Of course, this is easy for Open Source developers.
Andreesen also points out that once you have the talent on board, you have value the people so they stay.
Adoos, a bootstrapped clone of Craigslist out of Spain, has had success recruiting in Argentina, attracting early employees with a chance to experience two summers a year. And as it has grown the founders show their thanks by providing better gear to work on and by taking its engineers on holidays to the south of Spain. We'd say that Adoos is executing on the "valuing" part of the equation that Andreessen talks about.
Posted at 06:17 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
June 07, 2007
Vente-Privee.com Taps Summit Partners
Vente-Privee.com sold a 20 percent stake to Summit Partners, the US based late stage venture investor, according to a press release from Summit [via unquote.com]. The French startup is credited with pioneering the members-only offsale event online. And it's a model that is being copied at a fair clip now. But you can understand why Summit wanted in on this one. It employs more than 600 people and is on track for €300M in sales this year. It is based in Saint-Denis outside Paris.
ecommerce Guru Jacques Antoin Granjon Brings In US Investors
Read - ecommerce gurus from France
Posted at 12:35 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Adaptive Mobile In $14M Round For Wireless Security
Dublin-based Adaptive Mobile is making wireless and mobiles more secure against unwanted content and messages for consumers and businesses.
Doughty Hanson's early-stage venture capital fund is leading a good sized round to back its growth. Joining the UK based investor is Noor Financial Investment Company out of Kuwait and existing investor, Intel Capital. Founded in 2003, AdaptiveMobile targets Tier-1 mobile operators and service providers.
View: AdaptiveMobile
Posted at 12:08 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
The Shipping News Meets Web 2.0 And Makes Money
Mashing up its own wireless data network that exploits a ubiquitous radio protocol in ships and Google maps is the business of Vesseltracker.com. This early stage company is based in port city Hamburg (the sentence "Hamburg ist eine Hafenstadt" still echoes from that first German language lesson).
According to Deutschestartups blog, so far 150 companies have acquired a subscription to its shipping news service for €41 a month each. Target customers are logistics, parcel delivery companies, and ports-related businesses.
For people like us that live in a landlocked country in the middle of Europe, eyeballing traffic in places like Riga, Straits of Gibraltar, Gdansk and even the Elbe is tantalizing, as are the photos of laden cargoships and tankers with names like Crystal Emerald, Smaland, and the Dutch Aquamarine, but Vesseltracker isn't for those of us with a yearning for the high seas- or is it?
According to the same source, some 6000 users have signed up for the free version of Vesseltracker and have uploaded photos of 30K ships. That's a thousand more readers than have signed up for the alarm:clock's daily email digest!
View Vesseltracker
Read Deutschestartups
Posted at 06:09 AM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
June 06, 2007
London's GreenVoice Social Network Wins Funds For Enviro Activism
Greenvoice has raised an funding from undisclosed investors and is hiring ROR developers. The site is up and running and looks good enough.
It faces a field of competitors including: CommonCircle
, WorldCoolers, Care2, TreeHugger, and more.
Posted at 11:22 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Bertelsmann Invests In Mobile Social Network Developer Qeep
Blue Lion, which makes Qeep, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. The amount of the funding is not disclosed, just that its a multi-million euro A round.
Blue Lion is led by former execs from T-Mobile and Nintendo in Germany. Blue Lion mobile developed Qeep (spoke as "kweep") and launched a beta version of it in the German market at the end of last year. Qeep is a mobile service that includes instant messaging, photo-blogging and multi-player gaming.
The company is based in Cologne, Germany.
View - site
Posted at 04:39 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Hot Betas: Ziki, Steek, Sclipo, and 5min
The hot betas for this week are France's Ziki, which we found via Decideurs.tv, Sclipo, out of Spain, and 5min, out of Tel Aviv, both are video oriented sites that are pushing the envelope we hear and won recognition in the Euroean Startup 2.0 competition in Bilbao a week or so ago, and last but not least some upbeat news from France's Steekup.
Ziki is how you say better-than-MySpace in French (it's early and we cannot think of anything wittier to say than that). It has had a bit of buzz among French entrepreneur-bloggers. It's offering individuals, companies, and event organizers free rent to publish profiles and miniwebsites. Catalyzing early adopters to sign up was an offer for free sponsored links on Googe, Yahoo, or MSN, which was gratis for the first 10K users, a landmark that the startup reached a week or so ago.
No news yet on how much it will cost thereafter or how the startup is funding it. Ziki boasts a founding team with some Internet creds: Olivier Ruffin (former CTO of web hosting company Amen) and Patrick Chassany (founder of Amen and co-founder of Fotolia, the French stock photo company. Ziki currently reports the following user stats: 12,369 people; 2,074 companies; 392 groups and 76 languages.
Sclipo
Out of a pool of 250 companies in a competition to find innovative European web2.0 startups, Sclipo came in tops. It seems to be similar to VideoJug, also out of Europe, as well as the other finalist 5min (see below). The difference is that it's about skills while the others are DIY how-to sites. We guess you had to be there to understand the differences. Also placing in the top three was Properazzi, which by the way is now working with Nokia spinoff Widsets to take its property search mobile, according to its blog. (See our early post on Properazzi)
Steekup
The founders of Agematis, the company behind Steekup and Steekr wrote in to tell us that they now have 350 000 active users for its steekUP : an online backup solution for mass market backups and steekR : an online virtual drive to store, share and play your personal content. The steek technology is used by NeufCegetel for the NeufGiga service with more than 450 000 active users.
5min
A startup team out of Israel, 5min is like Sclipo, a short format, DIY video publishing platform. It's got some unique content though, like how to make homemade sex toys or how to adjust a sliding door. DIY cable TV shows watch out!
Posted at 11:09 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
OptoGAN Raises €5M For Bright White Lights
Optogan has raised €5M in capital in a round led by Via Ventures, a fairly new fund out of Denmark. The Nordic Venture Fund and several local vehicles invested too to finance the development of LEDs that will compete with bulbs on price, according to its PR. [via Library House Weekly Newsletter]
That's a bold statement. Optogan makes gallium nitride semiconductor wafers that it aims to sell into high-brightness white LEDs (light emitting diodes) market. Gallium nitride LEDs for white light are not exactly cheap to produce so this startup must have developed a new and reliable process, maybe a nifty etching technique or deposition process. (image source: micronova)
HB LEDs are better than bulbs in terms of energy consumption and long life, but they have not yet been able to compete on price. Its website was down when we checked this morning so we are not sure what it's edge is at this time.
If they get this right, the returns could be stellar. Despite the large number of competitors, the market is huge and there are potential acquirers with deep pockets that will be courting it too.
Founded in 2004, OptoGAN has a German CEO, Bernd Meyer, whose name we recognize - he was in the founding team at another German VC-backed chip company called Nanosemiconductor that has pretty much moved to Silicon Valley. The inventors are Russian and the startup's early R&D is done in Finland.
Read Via Ventures press
Posted at 06:30 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 05, 2007
French Online Travel's Go Voyages Raises Euros55M For Buyout
European Capital (LSE: ECAS) has invested euro 55Min Go Voyages, an online travel agent in France. European Capital's investment supports the acquisition of Go Voyages by Financiere Agache Private Equity and takes the form of senior and junior mezzanine bonds plus common equity.
Founded in 1997 and with 300 employees, Go Voyages markets scheduled airline tickets, charter
flights, car rentals, hotel accommodations and packages. Its primary focus is on low-cost scheduled flights (its homepage promotes the Polish airliner LOT most prominently.
Read - announcement
Posted at 07:28 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
Darmstadt's 10tacle Acquires Hot Hungarian Games Startup
Fresh from raising €6M in a private placement, 10Tacle Studios has acquired Stormregion Szoftverfejlesztő Kft of Budapest in a deal that should boost the German startup's bottom line, it said in a statement. The German games startup, which has some interesting backers as we've reported, is listed on the Entry Standard.
Stormregion is a pretty successful company so far. It created Codename Panzers, distributed in Europe by Electronic Arts, and employs 95. Its state of the art game is entitled “Codename Panzers: Cold War”. It had about €2M in equity and the IP rights to the “Codename: Panzer” series, as well as a development tool and games engine that is now the excluisve property of 10tacle's studios.
Read - SAP Founders Fund (alarm:clock euro)
View - 10tacle
Posted at 06:34 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-Backed Aepona and Appium Merge
The startups are calling it a merger but they will operate under the Aepona name. Both are VC-backed. Aepona is based in Belfast, and counts among its investors Amadeus, while Appium is based in Malmö and counts Innovationskapital and Nordic Venture Partners among its early investors.
Together they believe they can be the "world’s leading independent vendor for the Telecom Service Layer".
There was no mention in the press release if the investors provided more capital to go forward. Neither has raised VC money in the past two years. Aepona raised $20M in late 2005, while Appium raised about $6M in 2004.
The business they are in involves managing services and applications for telcos, as well as selling application development products.
What's a telco startup without some good old TLAs. These two comply with standards such as OSA/Parlay, SIP and Telecom Web Services. Aepona's universal service platform enables telcos to rollout new user-friendlier and revenue-generating services that glide easily between the mobile, Internet, and the fixed network.
For example, a subscriber to IP telephony gets a popup with caller ID when a call comes in, or two phone numbers on one handset, cellular to wifi roaming, or click to talk services for business users.
An analyst quoted by Aepona said that the two teamed up because telcos are still pretty wary about dealing with independant software startups.
View Aepona
Posted at 06:04 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Beyond The Consumer Internet: 10 Ideas For Tech Startups
We've been moaning about the dearth of geeky, disruptive startups getting funded, even the kind with more TLAs than an afternoon at one of Jeff Pulver's VON conferences. (Image credit: skysails.info)
So we got inspired by the thought that climate change and reduction of greenhouse gases do not only present problems to be solved by cleantech startups - there are a host of other things that are affected by climate change where software, online exchanges, and engineering, for example, could be exploited.
And therefore offer some upside for smart founders.
It's in the nature of the entrepreneur to understand change as a chance.
We snagged that quote and these changes, ideas, and industrial problems to be solved from a presentation by ecolutions, an emerging alternative investment company, that might provide some food for thought.
Building industry
Trend of prefabricated houses build in factories, independent from weather conditions and then assembled in 4-6 hours
Strong demand for cooling and isolation systems - businesses that downsize their energy needs by applying advanced materials and techniques, e.g. façade engineering.
Managing power facilities and consulting large industrial consumers.
Transport & Logistics
Extreme weather conditions leads to increase in prices for transport and logistics
services (e.g. aviation).
Car industry
New models for new climate zones
New actuation techniques (hydrogen, natural gas...)
Development of hybrid-drive cars (combination of cumbustion and solar-electric
engine)
Weather manipulation
Techniques to influence weather
Agriculture
Harvest outfalls due to heat peaks in summer
Reduction of usable land
Strongly increasing agricultural commodities
And here are a couple more classical cleantech opportunities. If anyone is seriously investigating weather manipulation, we'd like to hear about it.
Waste management
Absorbing environmentally damaging gases, like methane, by sealing
Energy extraction from reduced greenhouse gases
Biogas
Value chain improvements due to increases in production efficiency and economic
utilization of fall-outs.
Chances for investors during consolidation of fragmented biogas market in Europe.
Posted at 05:55 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
June 04, 2007
Israel Alert: Top 10 Web 2.0 Wonders
Our sister site alarm:clock has investigated the Israeli Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Israeli Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up. Read the full post here.
BTW - This is the third installment in our series of national Web 2.0 leaders. Previously we broke down Canada and France.
Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation, and 4) user uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz).
Helping us again with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and Israeli VC Ouriel Ohayon. Ouriel is also the gracious host behind the Israeli Internet mixer iDrink which is convening next in Tel Aviv in beginning of July (wear your shorts, should be warm).
Ouriel describes the Israeli Web scene like this:
"These recent years Israeli has turned out to be a central place in the global internet industry with a blossoming ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, providers and technical expertise . The challenge for Israeli company is to immediately manage to succeed in a foreign market since the local market is very small. Companies like Shopping.com proved it can be done and there are promising young companies as well as intensive deal flow that are doing a great job."
A survey by the Israel Venture Capital Research Center finds that Israeli Internet companies raised $64M in the first quarter of 2007 - highest in 5 years. $64M represents 16% of all capital raised in Q1 in Israel.
Jajah
HQ: Founded in Ra'anana, with development there, but new HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Intel and TMobile recently invested in a $20M round. Sequoia has also invested.
Business type: Free/cut-rate international mobile calls via VoIP.
Made the cut: Jajah says it currently has about 2.5M customers. Jajah has named a new CFO who has IPO experience. Intel and Tmobile deals might make it the space leader behind only Skype.
Competitors: Skype, Rebtel, OQO, Truephone, Fring and others.
Read - a:c post
Aniboom
HQ: Tel-Aviv
Funding: Evergreen invests $4.5M.
Business type: Animation portal. aniBOOM allows animators to upload their original animations (YouTube for animations). Recently the site had a competition with over 1,500 movies and top prize of $25K.
Made the cut: Sure video is bigger than animation, but it's nice to have a secondary niche to yourself. We are hard pressed to find many serious competitors here. Sure you can find animations on YouTube but there is no community around the art like you find with aniBOOM.
Competitors: Mytoons.
Read - NewTeeVee profile
Metacafe
HQ: Tel-Aviv and Palo Alto
Funding: $15M from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, plus $5M in a prior round.
Business type: Online video site. Calling card is fewer videos, higher quality than YouTube. Advertising business model.
Made the cut: Newish CEO Erick Hachenburg recently came over from EA. Its hard to be a runner up in a space where number one, YouTube, is so dominant and is hurting most of the competition. The company may have hired Lehman Brothers to shop them to Yahoo and Microsoft, and were asking for $200-$300M, but TechCrunch reports talks stalled due to traffic dip. Metacafe is very strong internationally.
Competitors: Blip.tv, VideoEgg, Dailymotion, YouTube, Veoh, Guba, Revver, Google Video. Grouper, Jumpcut, AOL, Eyespot.
Read - Techcrunch post
Speedbit
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Yossi Vardi is an investor in the company and founding investor of ICQ (acquired by AOL) along with STI Ventures.
Business type: Its download accelerator is integrated into the browser and
may speed up downloads by up to 300% . Its compatible with any Internet connection (Dial-up, Cable, DSL, etc.)
Made the cut: Speedbit recently crossed the 100M registered users and 1B files transfered mark.
Competitors: Bittorrent, Steam.
Read - BusinessWeek profile
Foxytunes
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Seeking investors.
Business type: Control more than 30 media players (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc.) from your browser window. More recently it launched a sort of wikipedia for musicians with a Pageflakes type interface.
Made the cut: Everybody loves FoxyTunes. Plus, with LastFM getting a big buyout from CBS, online music startups are again validated.
Competitors: Hard to peg as they do several things and integrate with potential competitors.
Read - Mashable profile
MySupermarket
HQ:
Funding: Just raised $6M from Greylock and Pitango.
Business type: Grocery shop price comparison
Made the cut: There are any number of eCommerce comparison sites but for grocery store visits there is a void. The company currently operates in the UK but we expect them to expand to the US and elsewhere with this model and to become a hit.
Competitors: Impossible to find strong competitive service.
Read - Searchengineland profile
Zlango
HQ: Ramat Hasharon
Funding: Zlango raised $12M from Benchmark and Accel
Business type: Emoticon language for Web and mobile messaging to augment your :), LOLs and FTWs and ZOMG!
Made the cut: Part of us says this might be Israel's Pets.com. We don't use emoticons, but on the chance that kids go with it, Zlango would own a generations vernacular and there have got to be ways to squeeze money from owning a global language.
Competitors: It's unique.
Read - a:c profile
MyHeritage
HQ: Bnei Atarot
Funding: One of the major investors in the online gambling site Empire Online, Aviv Reis, has invested $3M with a partner.
Business type: The site allows users to share family photos, showcase their family tree online, and organize family events. Through the site's face recognition technology, users are also able to organize and auto-tag their digital photos. In addition, they can find their own photos or those of their ancestors submitted by other users, as well as discover ancestors and relatives based on facial similarity. It also has viral features like Find My Celebrity Look Alike.
Made the cut: Competitor Geni.com has some of the strongest mo of any startup and we think MyHeritage is cooler. Older giant The Generations Networks does $150M in business here through subscriptions.
Competitors: Geni, Zoof, OneGreatFamily, The Generations Networks (Genealogy.com, Ancestry.com)
Read - Haaretz profile
WeFi
HQ: Founded in Israel with current HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Lightspeed and Pitango have invested.
Business type: Combines social/Web with wireless and with location-based services with a goal of helping us to find hotspots.
Made the cut: Finding WiFi hotspots and good signal strength continues to be a pain and there are no reliable answers. WeFi, if it gets some adoption, will power ahead of older services like JiWire.
Competitors: RadiusIM and Skyhook.
Read - a:c profile
eSnips
HQ: Herzliya
Funding: eSnips has received investments from Greylock Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Social content-sharing site where users can publish and share any media type - pictures, music, videos. Launched a marketplace for users to sell creations.
Made the cut: 2M registered users and over 10M unique visitors a month. Tough management: Yael Elish, former VP of Strategic Development at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH), is the founder and CEI. The company was initially funded by Nahum Sharfman, formerly the founder of both shopping.com (NASDAQ IPO in 2004, later acquired by eBay) and Commtouch.
Competitors: Plum
Read - Read/write profile
Read the full post here.
Posted at 08:15 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Berlin Startup Fits City Tours Into Little Red Multimedia Box
A multimedia city tour guide in a little red (200 gram) box called Cruso is the brainchild of a Berlin based startup called Dreifach Einfach (Triple Easy). Its impressive startup story was in the German press this week as the firm opens its first guided tour in-a-box rental outlets.
The gadget and related services were three years in the making - the battery life thing had to be solved. It now supports buying etickets, as well as providing directions (GPS), and audio visual information about sights in Berlin.
It beats walking around with a Lonely Planet guide and wrestling with maps, says the Tagespiegel.
The startup employs 20 and has raised €550,000 in capital, as well as a strategic investment by Dorazil the company that manufactures the firm's electronic devices.
According to Tagespiegel.de the founders say their venture has an €8M valuation, priced by a US firm that recently tried to acquire it. The founders aren't selling... yet.
Read - Die Stadt In Einer Hand (tagespiegel.de)
Posted at 06:50 PM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
Manchester's LiveLink Funded For Raw Video Portal
LiveLink has built a reputation for itself by playing the videos first that other sites flinch at - like the hanging of Sadaam Hussain and video of a lion eating a man. Given that YouTube blocks violence and porno, Livelink has found a niche for itself with both. The Manchester-based, but virtual company was on MSNBC today saying that they have raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding and that it is slightly profitable.
Watch this video of a baby being attacked by a King Cobra, or not.
View - site
Posted at 06:44 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
VCs Lining Up Behind Seatwave vs Viagogo To Be Best Stubhub Clone
eBay recently acquired Stubhub, a US aftermarket ticket exchange, for $310M. The same type of business is the model for two well-funded and well-foundered (just made up a new word) European startups: Seatwave and Viagogo.
In this corner we have Seatwave, whose founder was funded initially by Atlas Venture to build a team and launch the business in February. It announced today that it just raised an $8M B round with Atlas who brought in Mangrove Capital, an early Skype investor, and German business angel Oliver Jung (who backed StudiVZ and a slew of other tech and Internet companies).
And in the other corner, we have Viagogo, whose founders were part of the original Stubhub team. It is backed by Index Ventures (which co-invested with Mangrove in Skype's B round) along with Atomico (an investment vehicle of one of the founders of Skype), as well as Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com fame, and Fabrice Grinda.
Did you get all that? The world of venture capital is small in Europe and the alliances are fluid, aren't they?
Both teams have experienced founders (that's Seatwave's founder Joe Cohen in the nearby photo) and are making inroads into a fairly uncontested market opportunity, according to Vecosys blog.
Stay tuned, for the next round.
Read - Ticketing leader Seatwave scores $8M from Mangrove (fred destin blog)
Read Index Ventures Backs Stubhub Clone (a:c euro)
Read - Seatwave pulls ahead of ticketing pack (vecosys)
Posted at 06:03 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Amsterdam's Bliin Funded For GPS-based Blogging
Mobile blogging that pinpoints the bloggers local, while a neat trick, is not terribly interesting to us. Why do we care if a blogger is on their bed or in a pub? That said there are any number of companies making a go at developing mobile blogging software. Amsterdam-based Bliin has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Digital Pioneers and DCIF.
Bliin requires a software download and from there users can post photos, videos, sound & text - in real-time, located on a world map.
Bliin competes with Google's teetering Dodgeball, as well as Rabble, Gatsb and Twitter Atlas.
Read - Bliin Is GPS-based Live Blogging (Mashable)
View - site
Posted at 05:21 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Get Your French Startups On The Map
Thomas Crampton, a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and based in Paris, is looking for French startups to put themselves on his dismoiou map to find La Silicon Vallée. So far, over the past month or so, only 30 have tagged their location, including ubicmedia, kds, and vpod.tv. So why not go over and add yours. We'll link back to it when it's more populated. Maybe he would add other countries too.
Crampton has been writing about the media, telecoms, and technology sector over here for a few years now and recently started blogging on the IHT's Metamedia blog. He is still looking for La Silicon Vallée and from the tone of the posts, has not lost his sense of humor. Comments are also worth reading.
Read - original post inviting French startups to put themselves on the map is here in Metamedia blog
Go to- The dismoiou map is here (be patient with dismoiou - it's in beta -- it took quite a few seconds for our browser to load it)
Posted at 06:12 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
MyBlueZebra Building a VOIP Brand
One of our regular readers wrote in to alert us to mybluezebra, an Italian/US startup that's launched a couple of Internet-driven low-rate voice service. It has signed up Italy's yellow pages publisher PagineGialle, as well as a white pages directory, and a tourism site. They all use it for a click to call service to immediately dial the numbers you look up from any phone.
It is about to relaunch its consumer-oriented service. We note that this startup does not use its own VOIP infrastructure, it's using Abbeynet's, another startup out of Italy. The rationale for that move is that it should deliver better quality of service and competitive rate to end users.
We like the tagline: "call me social animal". And the corporate identity is cute, but maybe a bit confusing: are zebra's more sociable than other animals? Will a consumer associate the blue zebra with discount telephony. And since the startup does not seem to have much orignal technology, which would put up a bit of a barrier to competitors, will VCs back the company if it decides to raise capital?
Read- What's Click to Call In Italian (gigaom)
Posted at 06:03 AM | Posted to Early stage | TrackBack | Permalink
June 03, 2007
Respectance Gets Solid Ventures Backing
Last week, our sister site reported that memorial multimedia site Respectance, which operates out of San Francisco and Krakow was in line for some funding from a Dutch group.
In the meantime we had an email from Solid Ventures, saying that it is the sole investor in the startup's Series A round. The size of the deal is not disclosed.
Respectance is onto something, especially if you look at what it is basically competing with: the death notice section in newspapers. Make it past the age of the 35 and you might not read your hometown and local newspapers for their news anymore but a lot of people do read the death notices and classified ads.
We know what is happening to the classified ads section. What this site is doing just takes the print version to a new and more up-to-date level, although one that for the time being lacks the newspaper's ability to charge good money for it : most of us don't live in our hometown anymore and we use digital images as much if not more than text to communicate.
Will the startup generate sales and how much? Can it get the marketing right to enable it to grow into a lucrative web property?
The VCs think it will. Robert Wilhelm, a partner at Solid Ventures, said in a statement that the team at Respectance has the "business acumen and the right emotional approach" to address the market opportunity.
The team in question is Richard Derks (on the right in the picture nearby), one of the original founders of KaZaA, and Todd Wilkinson, both of whom have been working together for several years at digital marketing agency iizt, which is based in The Netherlands with developers in Poland.
Read - Bring Out Your Dead: Respectance (alarm:clock)
Posted at 06:49 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
June 01, 2007
German Digg Clone Yigg.de Financed
Yigg.de, a German digg.com clone says in its blog that it has raised an undisclosed amount from Baytech Venture Capital and business angel Roland Metzger, who founded online job search company jobpilot, which he floated, subsequently selling it to Adecco in 2003.
The site is a free "social news community" that was run as a hobby and has managed to attract some 6000 registered users. Some of the new capital will be used to form a GmbH.
It was probably the first to clone the digg style in the region - there are a lot more now. We posted about it in a report on Web 2.0 contenders back in March 2006.
Read - German Web Contenders
Posted at 06:09 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
London's Casual Gaming Biz iPlay Bought For $110M
Founded back in 1998, London's iPlay got a big payoff today as it was bought by Oberon Media for $110M. I-play's investors are Apax Partners and Argo Global Capital.
The buyer is NYC-based gaming company Oberon Media.To pay for the deal, Oberon raised an undisclosed sum in a new financing round, from investors including Goldman Sachs, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.
With this move, Oberon solidifies its position as a top company in casual gaming and a top IPO or big M&A candidate. The combined company is strong cross platform and will own more than a thousand casual game titles. It also count more than 350 partners, including Microsoft, Comcast, Sprint, AT&T, Yahoo Games, Electronic Arts and AOL Games. Oberon calls itself the fastest growing company in the casual games category, with a growth rate greater than 100% year-over-year.
Read - Casual Games Firm Oberon Acquires I-play for About $110 Million (Digital Media Wire)L
Posted at 04:10 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Yumondo Wows Bloggers - Its Backers Wow the a:c
Yumondo, a beta German social networking site, got write ups in ReadWrite and Mashable this week, which shows it knows its blog opinion-makers. Mashable says Yumondo helps its users get to know their cities better and ReadWrite says its reversing the “traditional Web 2.0 model” by building local communities that branch outward.
An alternative to Yumondo's way to get to know your city would be to go outside. But we're not here to give lifestyle advice, we're here to follow the money. The company behind Yumondo, is called Metaversum, and it has raised an undisclosed amount from Grazia.
The results of our research on its backer, Grazia Equity, impressed. Grazia we discover has been investing in entrepreneurs that you could characterize as able to build teams that execute - make money/find customers/create jobs - and establish themselves in tough, regulated, or risky markets.
It was an original backer of Conergy AG, a solar module integrator founded in 1998 that employs 1400 people, and boasts a €1.9B mkt cap – it just did a $150M private placement and it’s expanding into China where renewable energy interest is high as we hear from our moles.
In the meantime, it has co-invested with the likes of Venrock, Mohr Davidow, Benchmark (US), and Asia’s Mitsui.There are not too many early stage European VC types that invest alongside names like that.
In the US, Grazia is backing a la mobile (open source mobile tech) and Nanosolar ($100M in VC and counting), while in Germany it’s backing mobile TV pioneer MFD, which seems to have snagged some important licenses in its early days and is signing up TV stations and building a chain of retail outlets specialized in devices that support mobileTV; it has shares in VoiceTrust, a company we’ve been following for a couple of years now that does password voice authentification applications for the likes of Microsoft.
It also backed the company behind DVBN.de, an online platform for the German construction industry. And it even has a wireless sensor networking startup in its portfolio (the a:c euro is a WSN fan).
Grazia’s not a well-known name. But it’s doing what a lot of brand name VCs claim to do. If any LPs are reading this, you’re out of luck. Grazia doesn’t manage or raise a fund, it taps its network for the capital it needs.
Founded in 2006, Metaversum's first project was a 3D visually gallery (pictured nearby) in Second Life for a Berlin-based design collective. Launching multiple soc nets makes it a bit like Ekaabo, also German, but with cooler software.
Read Yumondo is an Urban Stylesharing Site (mashable)
View Metaversum
View Grazia Equity
Posted at 07:18 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
