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September 28, 2007
Lack of Exits Is Not Slowing RSS Feedreading Innovators
Sister site the alarm:clock writes about the lessons learned from the first wave of pure-play RSS reader software developers, and speculates on how Netvibes, Webwag, and Pageflakes will develop.
Your alarm:clock euro reporter would like to add that the innovation continues, there is yet another wave of RSS reading and filtering tools coming to the market, according to a recent post in TechBytes, from Jason Ball.
So how will these developers that know a thing or two about RSS and related web technologies make money? One strategy is applying RSS prowess to the enterprise, or to specific types of applications used by businesses. Finding a niche is what the alarm:clock calls it.
There is already a trend on this side of the Atlantic of applying RSS know-how to market intelligence, which seems to be creating some growth for early adopters.
Ball's funds has invested in Magpie, which is applying RSS know-how and its own proprietary crawlers to brand intelligence and media monitoring. Note we are talking about Magpie whose service is called BrandWatch , not to be confused with Magpie, an open source RSS reader.
From what its website says, Brandwatch not only tracks hits (mentions in the press and blogs), it measures the sentiment, and the credibility of the source, for example. The screen shots suggest it delivers the plethora of data in a way that you can actually use it.
In the UK, there are other examples of companies that have built new businesses, at least in part, on the ability to add value to the firehose of information being pumped out by RSS feeds. For example, Library House, which is specialized in fast growing companies, and StrategyEye , which is specialized in new media market intelligence.
And Skinkers has evolved its model since its early days. In recently published user case studies it says that it has turned on its software at places like Virgin Atlantic to improve the way the airline disseminates its fare information, helping it to make more money in the process.
We're sure there is more evolving at Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Webwag, and other innovators. And we'll report it as long as we hear about it.
Posted at 06:50 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Risc Acquires French-VC-backed Ornis
Elaia Partners informs us that Risc Group has acquired portfolio company Ornis, a telecoms-oriented managed service provider, for €35M.
This was the fourth recent acquisition by Risc, which is also in the managed services biz, according to 01Net. The others are BESDI, LINONE, and Backup Avenue, which were all smaller rivals offering backup and security services.
ORNIS is doing about €17M a year in sales and last year it had a a net income of above €1M. It forecasts EUR 22 million of revenues for 2007. Its customer base comprises 1500 SMEs.
The buyer, Risc Group, is doing about €39M a year in revenues.
Besides Elaia, the other investors were Iris Capital, Elaia Partners, Société Générale Asset Management, 123Venture and Crédit Agricole Private Equity.
Posted at 06:25 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 27, 2007
MirriAd Funded for Embedded Ads Business
Seraphim Capital has led a £2million round of investment into MirriAd, which has developed technology to do post-production product placement in films, videos, digital games, and DVDs.
The UK company with operations in New York and Mumbai has patented its technology that can digitally insert brand images into video content after filming has been completed, "making them look like they were always there", it said in a statement.
Early investors London Seed Capital, South East Growth Fund and Oxford Technology Partners, also participated.
View MirriAd
Posted at 12:48 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Seznam Takes Stake in the Czech YouTube - Profit Is the Goal
We have some news from the Czech Republic that Seznam, probably the biggest player on Czech web today, has acquired a stake in video sharing site Stream, according to Pavel Neuman, the editor of BuzzMag.cz.
Neuman covered yesterday's press conference and reports that Stream, which has been dubbed the czech youtube, has some not so subtle differences to the US giant.
After reading Neuman's analysis and coverage of the content of the press conference, we'd say the biggest difference would be the cash burn-rate. The Czech startup has achieved a lot and created something quite valuable for its target market for an incredibly small amount of capital.
For a profile of the acquiring company, Seznam, there is a very good one in Czech Business Weekly, published last year.
But back to Neuman's observations on Stream, a lot of the content is created by its staff, he writes, adding that Stream also managed to convince Petr Ctvrtnicek who is a "popular czech actor, entertainer and mischief-maker" to post his parody series of a communism-era hospital soap opera.
We checked out the clips and even if you don't speak Czech, you can see the quality and the humor. They just need the talented and thrifty folks over at DotSub to create sub-titles and they'd have a huge audience: anyone that has been exposed to Soviet-era TV programming would get the jokes.
Seznam will make some changes to Stream's business and positioning, reports Neuman. It will delivers in-video-ads and will be sharing the revenue with authors/producers and website owners. Also the flash player will get better, along with the support of embedded videos.
Seznam said it will use Stream's videos in it's own sites including Super.cz and Horoskopy.cz. The forecast is that Stream will achieve one milion users a month by the end of 2007, writes Neuman, adding that Seznam qualified that with a statement that the only criterion for measuring Stream's succes is the "profit, not revenue, number of users", or things like that.
Stream's annual budget is €666,666.66, writes Neuman. Stream's CEO Milos Petana (who comes from the TV world) expects to 'burn' about the same amount this year. Petana is partnered with Patrick Zandl, who is the #1 blogger in the CZ domain and an enterpreneur.
Seznam has already made great inroads in identifying and launching local versions of Google's popular applications, according to Buzzmag's editor, with several 'copycat' projects, such as Seznam's freemail (GMail), mapy.cz (GMaps), Sklik (AdWords) and "almost anything Seznam did [in the] last few years".
Mind you, writes Neuman, when it comes to developing basic and popular Internet apps it is hard not to be called a 'copycat'.
Read Buzzmag's report
View Stream
Posted at 08:07 AM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
September 26, 2007
Meet CSR, Intel, and PicoChip Execs in Edinburgh
There's a conference on October 30th in Edinburgh that sounds worthwhile going to if you're within a decent distance of the city. We say that not just because we love the atmosphere there: the "closes", the aging elegance, and the high ceilings. And we're not a media partner, it's just that discussions on offer sound pretty relevant.
Called Bridging the Gap, and organized by Scottish Equity Partners, the theme is how do emerging companies target large multinational customers from the early days. Finding the right decision-maker in the right department in the right country is not easy, and selling to them is even harder, so SEP has lined up some big names like Intel and Cisco to bring them a bit closer. It also has others that have actually made that leap like CSR, PicoChip, and MTEM on hand.
Why not visit the city that William Gibson recently described as "singular, in the way that Venice is singular", and get some good business tips too?
View Connect
Posted at 07:02 PM | Posted to Events | TrackBack | Permalink
VoluBill Raises €10.5M - Going For Growth
VoluBill, a French startup in the mobile data charging business, has raised €10.5M to fund an 'aggressive' growth strategy. When aggressive is used in connection with a financing round, it usually means that there's an acquisition in the works.
XAnge Private Equity, which led the round, joining existing investorsSofinnova Partners, Sofinnova Ventures, Seventure, DVCG and Argo Capital.
VoluBill said in a statement that its business quadrupled over the past two years and it now empoys 75. Its solutions are popular with the controlling department at mobile network operators headquarters because it helps them avoid revenue losses and fraud when it comes to Mobile Data services.
For this transaction, VoluBill was advised by Clipperton Finance, an advisory firm specializing in High-Tech and Media.
Posted at 06:38 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-backed PrePay Technologies Acquired by France's Accor
Venture capital firm Arts Alliance wrote in today to say that it had sold portfolio company PrePay Technologies Limited for £50M to Accor's Services subsidiary, which is in the voucher business. Arts and GRP Partners seed funded the venture back in 2000.
Its business is prepaid card solution to the likes of Debenhams, Virgin Money, and Ticketmaster and said in a statement that it was a pioneer in the field and it employs 50 people.
Arts Alliance invests in technology enabled services. Other investments include LOVEFiLM, Lastminute.com, Arts Alliance Media, Player X and Propertyfinder.
Posted at 06:28 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Purple Labs Linux Phones Cause Investors To Link Up Again
Chambéry, France-based Purple Labs, which develops mobilephone solutions, has raised $14.5M from Sofinnova Partners (Paris), Earlybird (Munich) and Partners Group (Zurich), an LP that does some direct investing.
Purple Labs was founded in 2001, employs about 100 in the south of France, and offers mobilephone comms software, including reference designs, turnkey phone systems, and software to target various types of cellphone manufacturers and service providers. Its specialty is Linux systems.
This deal is interesting because it sees the same team that backed Swiss mobile software company Esmertec, join together in a new venture. That previous investment will surely give the participants some insights (what to do, and what not to do) into being successful in mobilephone market.
Sofinnova said that it bought out Purple Labs’ previous Spanish owner about five months ago.
View PurpleLabs
Posted at 02:07 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
alarm:clock euro puzzler - A Turing Test
It's time once again for the alarm:clock euro's quiz question.
Name the venture whose founder was inspired by Alan Turing's legacy when he named his current company. The startup's name references Turing's efforts during WWII? Here is a visual clue:
To give readers in time zones other than GMT+1 a chance the winners will be the first and the 10th reader to write in to our European editor with the correct answer.
With our puzzler you have a chance to win fame, if not fortune, by getting profiled here. It would be nice if we could say you'll win a €500 Visa Gold prepaid gift card, or a year's worth of Business Class upgrades from KLM, but sponsors are not exactly lining up at our door here.
Posted at 07:00 AM | Posted to quiz | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro VC Fund News: DFJ Goes To Russia and UK Gets Giant Cleantech Fund
Draper Fisher Jurvetson sent the alarm:clock euro the news that it is continuing to create its 'global network' with a new $150M fund for Russia. Like it did in Europe with Esprit, it has a local partner. In this case it is VTB, a commercial banking group with over $52B in assets. Four partners are named: Andrey Zyuzin, Andrey Morozov, and Sergey Romashov and Alexandra Johnson (in Silicon Valley).
"DFJ has been observing the Russian start up environment for the last several years. It is safe to say that with the influx of institutional money, governmental support, and the migration of management talent of Russian origin back to Russia, the ecosystem for technology startups is now emerging,” said Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of DFJ.
View DFJ
The UK's Climate Change Capital closed a huge €200M fund to invest in clean energy companies. Its limited partners include Alpinvest, Robeco, HSBC, USS, Alliance Trust, Bankinter, Woelbern Group and Harcourt. We recognize the names of a few of the partners as attendees of the Zurich Energy Fair. While most of the partners have joined CCC from the private equity sector, there is one who jumped from another cleantech fund Bruno Derungs, formerly of the Swiss fund Emerald Technology Ventures (fka SAM Private Equity).
View CCC
Posted at 05:56 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 25, 2007
Cologne's Vendi Bought By US Ad Unit Maker EyeWonder
Atlanta, GA-based EyeWonder has bought Cologne, Germany-based digital interactive advertising firm and online-streaming-spot seller Vendi Interactive for an undisclosed sum. Vendi Interactive will change its name to EyeWonder and will provide expanded rich media and other interactive digital offerings in Germany, which will serve as a base for expansion in Europe.
Read - TechJournal South
Posted at 11:55 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
Lithuania's One.lt Buys Stake in Russian Facebook Clone
Lithuanian social network business One.lt (aka Forticom) has bouight a 25% stake in Odnoklassniki.ru, a Russian Facebook type of site for an undisclosed amount. Launched in March 2006, Odnoklassniki.ru claims 4M registered users.
Read - CNews via PaidContent
Posted at 11:45 PM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Dutch eBook Reader Maker iRex Gains More Funding
iRex has recently launched the 2nd version of its paperless book, magazine and newspaper reader called the Iliad. The reader sells for $699. It comes with automatic Wi-Fi connection finder and stylus calibration for better accuracy when drawing notes or editing certain types of PDF documents. French newspaper Les Echos has also recently launched an edition for iRex, although it will cost €365 ($506) per year so you'd better really, really like Les Echos and hate the print version.
The Iliad competes with Sony eBook Reader but many reviewers like the Iliad better
The Netherlands' iRex Technologies has held a €6M first close on a new VC funding round led by Main Capital Partners with return backer ABN Amro Capital.
View - site
Posted at 07:46 PM | Posted to Displays | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile SocNet's TruTap Raises $6.5M
London-based Trutap is led by founder, CEO and "Dragon" Doug Richard, who is also founder and chairman of Library House, vice-chairman of Cambridge Angels and co - founder of the Hotxt brand.
TruTap has raised $6.5M in follow-on Series A funding led by The Tudor Group for a total round take of $13M.
TruTap launched at the TechCrunch 40 event and in fact boasts that it was the only UK startup invited to speak. It is a mobile social-networking application that enables users to stay connected wirelessly plus online.
Read - announcement
View - site
Posted at 07:33 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
OnVista Snapped Up For €138M
Fimatex, ultimately majority-owned by Societe Generale in France, has made a bid for OnVista valuing the company at about €138M. The German web venture runs OnVista.de, the biggest independent financial portal in the country (according to research published on it IR pages).
It was acquired by Fimatex for its users, according to FT Deutschland. The financial news portal has about 480K unique visitors (according to the aforementioned analysts' research reports).
Fimatex bought the company to get access and to hopefully convert OnVista's users. Fimatex' main business is e-trading, as we understand it. The deal rationale is a notion backed up by what we hear from our own sources.
It's looking like the French buyer got a bargain, even if the purchase price is at a premium to what OnVista's share price was yesterday morning before the deal was announced.
We say that because the company was generating about €22M a year in sales. It also has several other web properties that could very well be sold off post-acquisition, suggested one of our trusted readers in an email exchange.
In addition to OnVista, it recently launched Namendo, an address brokerage, it runs an ehealth portal OnMeda, Ligatus, a performance marketing biz, and Ad2Net, an online advertising sales business it recently acquired.
Word is that OnVista's management had been posisitioning the company as a media acquisition target after selling its stake in a stock market information systems company to joint venture partner IS Teledata in 2005.
Read - Fimatex Mutter übernimmt Onvista (ftd)
View OnVista home and IR page
Posted at 09:26 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Former Red Bull Exec Funded For Suso Drinks
London-based SUSO Drinks has raised £4 M in VC funding from Smedvig Capital. Suso is a new carbonated beverage startup being launched by former Red Bull managing director Harry Drnec. Suso will not compete with RedBull.
Posted at 12:15 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 23, 2007
Hot betas: MindMeister, Restorm.tv, and RapidObject
The hot betas section used to be beta only but now it is a place to highlight Web 2.0 things, mainly, that we see or hear about.
MindMeister
This reporter has tried mind mapping software from Microsoft in the day job but didn't get very far. So the MindMeister app is probably facing a hungry market. At any rate it is wowing investor types, well at least it wowed Hasso Plattner Ventures, which gave it the 2007 Software Design Award recently. HPV says MindMeister, which is from a startup called Codemart, "skillfully hides the complexity of its full capabilities to first-time users, it may initially appear simplistic. But any extended use will quickly reveal the several advantages of the product and the careful, deeper design decisions that were made during development."
Rapidobject.com
Its like a Vistaprint for three dimensional objects (the company behind it has a chain of printing shops equipped with 3D printers). RapidObject gets high praise for innovation and business sense from exciting commerce blog, which covers the ecommerce seen in Germany closely and critically.
Restrom.tv
Swiss startup restorm.tv has raised seed financing from active business angel Peter Schuepbach. It does what the logo tagline says, combines music videos with a soc net. It is a good idea to have a platform for acts that don't make the local versions of Viva or MTV, but the site is using Quicktime which served up some annoying sync problems between sound and video. Schuepbach is also backing kyte.tv, plazes, as well as studivz, Xing, and owns Genevalogic.
Posted at 05:39 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Quotables from Moo, FON, and EVE Online
We're trying out a new section under the Being European tag, posts with selected quotes from Europe's tech trendsetters and founders. It is totally coincidental that all the people quoted come from companies whose services has just three letters.
" We’re in Clerkenwell, which is the literal and spiritual home of print. It’s home to the oldest printing business on the planet, it’s fantastic. We wanted to be somewhere with some significance; Silicon Valley’s not known for its printing..."
Richard Moross co-founder of Moo, the online business card print service backed by Index Ventures
Found in Vitamin
"A lot of people in Europe think entrepreneurs are thieves..."
Martin Varsavsky, FON founder, serial entrerpeneur, and business angel.
Found in Financial Times Tech Blog
"Basically I'm just trying to understand all aspects of the game, but of course I find the trade and marketing aspects of the game most interesting. It's also fun to go out there and shoot at somebody, of course..."
Eyjolfur Gudmundsson CCP's Chief Economist aka EVE Online's Central Banker
Found in Slashdot
(image source: eve online)
Posted at 04:14 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
September 21, 2007
Private investors Put SFr6.5M Into Nivio's Virtual Desktop Ambition
The private investors, as opposed to VCs or business angels have put SFr 6.5M (about $5.5M) into Nivio, a startup founded by 24 year old Sachin Duggal. Nivio offers a virtual desktop service.
The investors, which are listed in Nivio's press release, are mainly investment banking and foreign exchange trading execs from places like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
Nivio's hosted Windows desktop service is in limited beta at the moment. The idea is that via any browser-based PC and a broadband connection users can access a couple of dozen applications running on Windows or Linux. You can also store, sync, and access your files on Nivio.
Once it goes commercial, it will cost $12.99 a month.
The virtual-desktop-for-consumer idea is bubbling in the tech world in different forms at the moment. We've yet to actually try any of the new services out (although we did register) so keep that in mind - but we're thinking of startups like Xcerion out of Sweden, and Ulteo in France, for another example. Ulteo is from former Mandriva exec and founder Gaël Duval. Updated: we wrote Duval's name incorrectly originally - thanks Ulteo blog ;-).
The service he is developing is dubbed the Ulteo Connected Desktop.
Ulteo, as we understand it, is using a more user-friendly version of Linux that Duvall developed with his open source coding crews and it will offer users several applications too. A beta launch is in the works there also.
Giving Duggal's effort some processing power and industry credibility on top of his track record, which we'll get to in a sec, is the fact that earlier this year, AMD signed a partnership with Nivio to supply some of the technology for its grid-computing platform. AMD is not an equity investor.
Duggal's professional experience includes working at Deutsche Bank, while getting a degree at Imperial College in the UK. His tech prowess is still generating the investment bank part of the business 'millions annually', according to his bio that we received from Nivio's PR company. He's also run a systems software company and a PC disti.
His background in investment banking systems probably explains why there are foreign exchange trading execs as investors.
The virtual desktop concept is not new as several trade publications have pointed out (one example from The Register is here) but Nivio is going for standard office applications and works in standard browsers.
We asked some of our smart readers about the idea, the feedback ranged from interest to surprise that this is being tried. Generally positive then, although no one we emailed has yet been able to get an account or see a demo.
One word of caution came from the founder of a password security startup - since it his startup's core business we figure his comments are informed. He said to expect something stronger than the unencrypted password over naked http being used for registration for the beta once it goes to commercial.
Nivio's data center is in Switzerland, and India is home to its R&D.
View Nivio
Posted at 06:29 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
September 20, 2007
Trigami Financed To Get More Bloggers To Write About Clients' Products
Swiss startup Trigami has raised capital from active Swiss and German business angels, including Peter Schuepbach (who also invested XING, studiVZ, plazes, Hitflip, Smava, and kyte.tv) and several other names regular readers will recognize [via Trigami founder Remo Uhrek's corporate blog].
The startup's proposal to bloggers is write honest reviews and get paid by Trigami. Launched just a few months ago, Trigami has about 300 clients and about 8 times that number of bloggers on its roster, according to its homepage.
Several local ecommerce and online services businesses are listed as clients of Trigami, namely Blacksocks AG, Exsila, Hitflip, and Plazes. You will note the overlap with Trigami's backers' portfolio - a case of the business angels bringing more than just capital to the venture.
Posted at 07:19 AM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
After The Launch Let Down - What To Do About It
Over at Blognation Germany, Markus Spath has written about the after launch let-down and what Web 2.0 founders are experiencing on the way to cracking a real market for their products. It's a common dilemna and not just for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, if our discussions with pioneering-type tech founders over the years are anything to go by.
Spath says that if you know what to expect, or what is feasible, it could be less frustrating. He offers a link to stats from the creators of mite, an online time-tracking application, which he describes as "an almost paradigmatic example of a small but dedicated startup and probably the most 37signal’ish team from Germany".
Taking a look might help Web 2.0 founders - and maybe some of their backers - to "manage their expectations."
Another resource to add to the mix is a new blog called Kitchen 2.0 from social media marketer and software developer, Gary Reid in the UK. Topcis include how to use RSS, social bookmarking, and corporate blogs to win new customers. It is worth a regular read.
Posted at 06:54 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
September 19, 2007
PicoChip Reveals Samsung Funding
PicoChip, the UK-based fabless semiconductor with a flair for multi-standard wireless silicon, wrote in to say that Samsung is the strategic investor that participated in its $27M series D-round announced in July. That round has brought the total company funding to $70.5M.
Read - PicoChip Wires us $27.5M (a:c euro)
Posted at 09:11 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Socnet Stats France: Skyrock Dominates
Comscore has some stats on the French social networking market compared to the European market. The news nugget is that while MySpace dominates the Euro market, Skyrock (which runs the Skyblog sites) leads by a long shot in France.
FRANCE
EUROPE
Source: Comscore
Posted at 08:58 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Danish Startup Enters Booming eSport Market At Speed
Who knew that watching gamers compete against each other live and online would be so popular that you could build a new category of entertainment business on top of it? We didn't. Your a:c euro reporter is into watching soccer so the photos on the homepage of Electronic Sports World Cup (ESCW), which is the source of those Then and Now shots below, were a bit of surprise.
With an eye on that growth, no doubt, Copenhagen-based Regroup Esports, has raised 'several millions' in new capital from Preben Damgaard, the Danish ERP software entrepreneur [via Library House's data rich weekly newsletter].
From 2003
ESCW belongs to games-service (formerly Ligarena) the French company behind the series.
To 2007
And ESCW is just one of several competition marketers/organizers.
Regroup, through acquisition operates some popular web properties where gamers from around the world gather and compete. It covers electronic sports for both the PC and Console market.
It has hit the ground running since starting up: acquiring 5 gaming communities and an online community software startup; while raising capital from SEED in Denmark and now from Damgaard's private investment vehicle.
View Regroup
Posted at 08:02 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 18, 2007
Euro VC Fund News: PTV Primes The Pump While Viadeo's and MXP4's Backer Raises €150M
French firm Ventech , which you may recognize as the backer of startups we have covered here like business socnet Viadeo, and MXP4, has closed its third fund on target at €150M.
It says it will continue to invest in early stage companies operating in the IT (software, hardware and communications, and applications and services) and biotechnology sectors in Continental Europe.
New LPs contributed nearly half of the fund's capital, which is an indicator of investor confidence in the firm's ability to generate returns. Ventech has already made several investments from its new fund, including Crocus (supplier of DRAM products and technologies), MXP4 (digital interactive music format), Skyrecon (security solutions software) and Viadeo (business social networking).
Prime Technology Ventures, announced a first closing on its third fund on €60M. The target of the fund is €150M. The early stage North-West European-oriented investor said that its existing LPs, such as Adams Street Partners, Feri, Parcom Ventures (the private equity arm of ING Group) and a number of family offices are on board.
Its first investment with the new money is in Vespro, the company behind Greetz, which offers printing on demand service for personalized greeting cards. Other recent new investments include the video clip advertising innnovator Adjustables, which we have covered, soc net startup Netdialog (also covered in these pages) and Palringo.
In the last 12 months the firm said it successfully exited investments in Global Collect, Human Inference, MarketXS, Tridion and Watermark, which explains the LP interest in the new fund, no doubt.
Posted at 08:12 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile Portal Startup Texomobile To Raise New Capital
Neteco is reporting that Texomobile, the French startup behind mobile portal i-Gloo, is starting to meet investors in advance of launching a new multilingual portal called iGloo World.
In Neteco's interview with founder, Vianney Settini, we read about how the company's i-mode roots enable it to offer an apparently popular, and operator-independent portal, aggregating a blog platform, its own dating site, video publishing service, search directory, among other services.
It recently launched a service called myigloo that lets users create their own mobile homepages, which is why it can justify being called the Netvibes for your mobilephone, we guess. This year it opened an office in New York and has been doing some mobile advertising campaigns for Screentonic (recently acquired by Microsoft).
The startup resulted from the merger of two ventures -- three year old BeMobs and Ater Studio.
Read i-gloo partie immergee iceberg (neteco)
View texomobile
Posted at 07:15 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Oanda Taps US Investors in $100M Round for FX Trading
Sister site alarm:clock weighs in with some analysis of the online foreign currency (FX) exchange market along with the news that Swiss-founded Oanda, a platform operator and broker, has raised a $100M Series B investment.
A syndicate of investors came together to boost the now Delaware-based firm's capital - namely New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Cascade Investment LLC, T. Rowe Price (mutual funds), and Legg Mason (mutual and hedge fund manager), along with early investor Index Ventures.
Oanda, which offers its platform as a white label service, was founded in 1996 and has been profitable since 2001, according to Index Ventures.
It raised the new capital to boost its balance sheet to be capitalized on par with the larger fx trading ventures, something it needs to do if wants to grow a white label service to banks and other financial institutions. Going white label is a necessity in this high-volume low margin business.
According to the cftc (a regulatory agency), Oanda had about $34.4M of net capital on its book at the end of May (pdf).
Elsewhere, Dow Jones quotes an unnamed source who said Oanda's valuation is up to half a billion dollars.
Oanda was co-founded by Swiss entrepreneur Richard Olsen and Michael Stumm, a professor at the University of Toronto.
Read - Oanda Gets (dow jones via fxstreet)
Posted at 04:29 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
September 17, 2007
Newly Listed GoAdv On the Lookout To Buy Good Domains
GoAdv is an Italian-founded startup that is looking to acquire some 'well-visited' sites or networks with 'underperforming transaction rates' in Europe. We learned about the web traffic wizard, which does about €9.8M in annual sales and is profitable (Source: COFSIM), after Truffle Venture let us know that we missed reporting its investment in GoAdv last month.
The company runs several web sites, including betterdeals.com, gomeo.com, and meilleures-offres.com and generates qualified traffic for its partners like meetic, lastminute.com and Immoscout.
It listed on the Alternext Market in Paris last month, following a €6.6M investment by Truffle, AXA, and IDE. Its market cap is about €42M.
GoAdv's operations are based in Ireland, its technical team is based in Rome and its R&D centre in Pisa, where it is working on “search marketing”.
View GoAdv
Posted at 07:10 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Mojowatch.eu: ACCO, Xcerion, and Floobs
Mojo Won
EETimes takes a look at recently-funded ACCO's chances to penetrate new mobile and broadband wireless markets. Its backers are Pond Ventures and Partech.
Read - 3G power amps to use revised CMOS
Read - France's Acco First Round(a:c euro)
Xcerion, the Swedish startup that aims to offer a web platform for running business and productivity applications, is in the news again. But some of its backers wish the firm's founder would stop hyping the technology, which just goes to show the only people that you as a Euro tech entrepreneur possibly have a chance of pleasing are your customers. Pleasing the money is probably impossible. You are either too modest, or you need a kick in the butt, or you're freaks, or you are overhyping.
The point is that Xcerion will be needing a bit of press coverage, in addition to the €50K seed funding it's offering developers to develop for its platform, if it is going to get a good volume of users of its platform.
Finnish startup Floobs got some coverage by Reuters last week and newteevee thinks the business proposition sounds like Kyte.tv. We can judge for ourselves when floobs launches.
Read newteevee post
Posted at 05:31 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 16, 2007
Intel Acquires VC-Backed Havok - Irish Gaming Middleware
Updated: Trinity Venture Capital (TVC) disclosed today that it sold its stake in Telekinesys Research, the company behind Havok, to Intel for over €15 million ($21 million) in a deal that values the company at about €79.2 million cash. (Source rte.ie )
Intel has acquired Havok, a nine year old Irish developer of middleware that is used to create special effects in video games and movies. [via tg daily ]. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
It was originally a spinout of Trinity College in Dublin and there is potential for more like this to emerge from the region, according to Silicon Republic.
Havok was backed by Irish venture firms Trinity Venture Captial , ICC Venture Capital and Iona.
View havok
Posted at 05:17 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro VC Fund News: New Italian and Finnish Early Stage Funds Attract Buyout Pros
Two new tech venture funds for Europe reveal some interesting contrarian activity among founding general partners.
It looks like a few buyout investment pros in Europe are leaving LP-money-magnet buyout funds to the less LP-favoured asset class: early stage European VC.
Read on to find out more about a few that prove that not all PE pros are in it for the fat management fees.
In Italy a brand new partnership called Innogest Capital has two founders that hail from the buyout sector: Marco Pinciroli, formerly of BC Partners, and Claudio Giuliano, formerly a senior associate at Carlyle Group [via realdeals.co.eu]. They’ve just closed an €80M fund for Italian tech ventures called Innogest. And in Finland, Contor Venture Partners has attracted one of the founding partners of Eqvitec.
It is positive news that Innogest actually closed a first time fund in Europe. Its portfolio firms include HT Srl (€1.5M raised) whose products and services are aimed at government agencies and law-enforcement to combat computer crime, and “TheBlogTV” with the same amount of capital.
You can get some insights into the tech zeitgeist in Northern Italy where this fund is active on Torino Wireless.
Finnish Contrarian Move
Pinciroli and Giuliano are not the only private equity pros to leave the money-heavy asset class. Jari Mieskonen is now a managing partner at Conor Venture, also a new Euro VC fund targeting the early stage.
He was a founding partner at Eqvitec, which has been moving away from the early stage roots, a result of growing its funds' size and adding mezzanine finance.
Conor is in fundraising mode on its first time fund, and has made a few investments that we’ve covered here: Aitos and digital billboard ads startup Virtual Advertisting Systems.
Expect to see a more active approach to building tech startups from Conor when it comes to things like mergers, acquisitions for growth, and building syndicates of investors from this team. He believes that European VC has been too passive in the past. He said: "We intend to look at merger opportunities sooner rather than later... We are about bringing in the resources a venture needs other than money."
A lot of VCs in Europe assert that they do more than hand over cash. There are indeed a few that have added value, based on what we see as outsiders. And we have our keyboard at the ready to point it out when we see it.
View Conor Venture Partners
View Innogest
Posted at 08:50 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
September 14, 2007
German Online Real Estate Ads Site Valued at Half a Billion Euros
Deutsche Telekom is reportedly paying €360M for the 66 percent it didn't already own of online real estate classifieds site ImmoblienScout24, according to the Financial Times Deutschland [via Deutsche Startups].
There had been no official confirmation from any of the parties involved by the time we put this post up.
Immobilienscout24, did about €53M in turnover last year with a profit (before taxes) of €21M, says the business paper. It was founded in 1998 and is part of Swiss-based Scout24, a holding company comprised of several consumer oriented web sites, which Telekom acquired in an earlier deal.
Read Telekom übernimmt Immobilienscout 24
Posted at 05:36 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Search What's Said On German TV and Radio With Spactor
The title of this post harks back to one written about Podzinger by Marshall Kirkpatrick, where he wrote about the English language audio and video search tool.
This one is German and it is called Spactor.com. It comes from a one year old Bremen-based company called Mediaclipping GmbH, which sells a a real-time audio clipping service for the German-speaking business market.
It recently launched Spactor as a freemium product. It lets you search for keywords inside broadcasts from some 75 radio and TV stations in the region.
If you follow the links it digs up, you can hear the immediate context of the audio cast. If you want to hear the whole clip, then you need to subscribe to mediaclipping.de.
A lot of things come together well in the Spactor service: speech to text, keyword search, and audio playback - and it does it without the need to download anything. It is all available in the browser (we use Firefox 1.5)
We learned about it via a press release his week via Deutsche Startup blog, reporting it had raised an undisclosed amount of seed capital.
Spactor's cloud of the most commonly 'heard' words. No big revelations though - it's traffic and money that dominate the airwaves.
The speech to text technology comes from Sail Labs, which is now backed by private equity money from IPO Austria and Tecnet Equity.
Mediaclipping's roster of investors include Redalpine Venture Fund, Sparkasse Bremen, PictureSafe media/data/bank GmbH along with business angels Detlef Hanke, Andreas Hanitsch, Jan Andresen, Peter Schüpbach und Martin van Os.
View - Spactor
Posted at 05:40 AM | Posted to Media | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 13, 2007
Spanish Virtual X-ray Clinic Taps Kennet for Growth Capital
Barcelona-based European Telemedicine Clinic (TMC) has raised €7M to grow its reportedly thriving teleradiology business. The seven year old company provides clinical image diagnostics services to public and private healthcare providers, mainly in the UK.
There is quite a bit more about the company and the market opportunity with links to the announcement in Technofile, a blog from one of the general partners at Kennet.
The Spanish venture capital firm Active Capital Partners, an early investor TMC, sold some of its holding in the startup to the UK fund as part of the deal.
Read - This is the era of telemedicine (technofile)
Read - Active Capital Partners sells part of TMC shareholding to UK fund (Molins da entrada al fondo ingles Kennet en el lider de la telemedicina) (press rel.)
Posted at 07:10 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
User Profiling Gets Visual With U-lik and Imagini
If Last.fm (acquired by CBS for $280M) was last year’s taste-matching trendsetter, what will be next year’s? A couple of European sites that are onto something are U.[lik] and imagini.net. Both are taking a more visual approach to creating user profiles based on interests, tastes, and habits.
And both package the profiling - at the moment - in a social network that promise to match users based on similarities.
There is also French startup Criteo, which could probably fit in here, but we profiled it earlier.
Imagini.net is running two ‘personality’ tests at the moment. It is kind of a visual rendition of one of those personality tests that used to be staples in mainstream consumer magazines. There is one based on what you desire and another to determine a personality profile.
No registration is required to do the tests, but if you want to save the selection you have to register. About 4 million people, according to the site ticker, have completed profiles.
At u-lik, after a basic registration step, a user gets into choosing and rating based on things like stuff you already own, or things you’d like to own, see, or have and so on. It doesn’t print you up a personality analysis but it also offers matching with like minded people.
It is a bit more geeky at the moment than imagini.net. We say that not just because of its name, but because the user interface takes a few seconds longer than imagini's to internalize.
We met the founder of U.[lik], Raphaël Labbé, a couple of months ago. He’s been obsessed for the past two or three years with the idea that people are better described by what they want or what they like than what they buy. (Note that sister-site the alarm:clock will be doing a profile of imagini.net soon).
We asked him what the two sites have in common. He said that beyond a new twist on user profiling, there’s a common business model: affiliate marketing based on a personalized list of products, and selling on the aggregate data about users’ consumption habits.
Read on for a Q&A that touches on what Last.fm did right, what Amazon could be doing better, and Labbé’s view on how his technology can contribute to better online sales and online customer conversion. It is based on an edited version of several weeks of email between the a:c euro and Labbé.
What is wrong with Amazon's recommendation engine in your view?
Amazon’s recommendation engine is a very efficient sales booster, since it’s actually their second source of sales representing about a third of total sales, just after their own search engine. Considering a sales volume of $10.7B in 2006, no doubt you’d pay a tribute to Greg Linden, the engine inventor, as Jeff Bezos did.
But Amazon’s recommendation engine is not really user-customized. It’s far from being like the trusted librarian or friend who knows your tastes. That was the kind of experience we were looking for and are currently building with U.[lik].
We started U.[lik] two years ago because we weren’t satisfied with Amazon’s generated recommendations, despite being one of the most visible recommendation systems at that time, built on a large-scale platform and fuelled by a huge number of click streams.
Amazon‘s engine mainly computes selling statistics from their customers’ purchase history. It has flaws like two DVDs that end up being rated as similar because many people bought them at the same time. Flickr provides many such examples.
Also, my purchase history is not a really good proxy of my tastes: I dislike some CDs I ordered and many books I bought were intended as a gift for someone else.
Amazon has actually few social / community features that would entice users to rate items and share them. We even assume that a merchant site can’t do that business well. That could explain why Amazon is launching alternative solutions like Amapedia, or investing in a company like shelfari.
E-retailers have never created such an experience but sites like Last.fm have by providing a social and personalized experience (with a business model based on affiliate marketing and sales revenue sharing).
U.[Lik] is on a similar track, building a trusted place where users can discover entertainment and culture, rate items based on a personal scale and engage with users having similar tastes.
You wrote that the next wave of Web innovation is ‘all about math’ - what do you mean by that?
Due to the sheer wealth of information available on the web, maths and algorithms are essential to organize and filter that huge amount of data humans can’t handle.
Nowadays, the main issue is to give access to less known but relevant content. Existing algorithms are becoming inadequate because they tend to rely on popularity.
To address these problems we need new approaches and math tools that focus less on statistics and more on organizing information at a lower scale -- a few like-minded people is definitely more valuable than having a thousand contacts.
The difficulty is that computing at this micro-scale is harder because you’ve got less data, so you’ve got to be more precise.
How do you address the problem of less data and more precision?
The U.[lik] algorithm tries to mix several sources to gain in precision: computing is mainly based on the votes of users. It is completed when data is lacking with natural links between the items (the casting for movies for example) and tagging (filtering by genres for music for example).
Pandora with its Music Genome is also following this path, what we call “content based” algorithms.
Can you point to any other examples that are not based on statistics like "popularity" or "what else did I buy" ?
Pandora is unfortunately a rare example. But attempts are being made, for example with music by trying to analyse the songs directly in a project at Sun Microsystems from Paul Lamere ). I am not sure if librarything is using its huge amounts of tags in its algorithm, probably not.
You wrote that you agree with the view that we’re coming to the “end of the page view”.
Value is less in eyeballs and more in interactions and leads generation. It’s more valuable to sell “intention” like Google does when it puts related advertising to what people are looking for. Its recent move to introduce “pay per action” PPA where advertisers only pay for a result is creating another challenge for “page views” business models.
Web technologies are changing with rich internet application, Ajax and streaming. All are making pages views less relevant to capture what users really do.
Nielsen’s decision to focus on time spent to measure online engagement is a recent acknowledgment of this change.
Social networks have to deal with two issues when they are monetized by pages views advertising. Doing advertising on a user profile is much harder than advertising on a given topic.
The intention of the user is to engage socially and most social networks don’t have a clear view of what ties people together. The more the network grows, the more complicated it is to sell its inventory, especially when a real energy has been developed to optimize that same number of page views.
These two phenomena can explain why many social networks deliver lower conversion rate on ads as they grow.
Building a social network around socials objects enables to capitalize on affiliation programs, which are the first and main form of PPA.
Building a trusted context where user can opt-in to engage with brands is another possible approach. While building U.[lik] we have always kept in mind that advertising or suggestions when reaching a certain level of personalization will likely be as valuable and useful as information.
Posted at 06:29 AM | Posted to Being European | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
September 12, 2007
Mobile Socnets + Location Not Compatible With Making Money
Mobile socnets with a user's location feature are profiled in a TechCrunch post this week. There you will find several out of Europe, including imity, aka aki and mobiluck. The post had us trawling the net for news on one of the first ones in this category that we profiled, ClicMobile, which was not highlighted.
The startup still in business and is actually doing well (at least five techie jobs on offer), but it has dropped the location-based aspect of its service.
It offers its mobile social networking software and mobile marketing service via a white label business model. It has several reference customers from the media and cellco worlds, according to founder Alex Kummerman who responded to a quick email this morning.
"So far we signed Vivendi and Orange. We are about to announce 2 other telcos. Telcos are not the only target we have: Media groups such as M6 ( france ) and MBC ( Dubai ) are also using our platform. We have as well signed Nokia for their Mobile advertising platform," said Kummerman.
The cellcos are stalling on opening up their location based data, which led to Kummerman's decision to change from the original plan. "Indeed, we stopped the location based service because of the business model imposed by telcos to get location a location fix. It is just too expensive and complex for a 3rd party publisher," said Kummerman, adding that he concluded "there is no room for margins with a Cell ID a business in europe."
The difficulty of comibning location services with mobile social networking is one of the issues discussed in the Gong Show's Mobile Frustrations, an aptly titled post that looks at the money-making chances and barriers to market penetration for such projects. [via Techmeme]
Posted at 12:42 PM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
Tagsys On Track - The Money Says So
Tagsys, the French VC-backed RFID startup must be making its milestones with its announcement that backers have released the second tranche of its $35M series C round. We covered the deal last May. It has raised $80M to-date.
The red tab is not the only tag you'll find in your next pair of Levis
The startup is active in the item level tracking end of the RFID market these days and recently signed on with Levi Strauss, the apparel manufacturer.
View - Tagsys
Posted at 09:23 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Kewego Raises €5M To Take Video Platform Abroad
On the back of proving that it can make money with its video sharing and rating platform - €2M last year to be exact (source) Kewego out of France has raised another €5M round from early investor Banexi Venture, who invested this time along with CDC, according to Joural Du Net.
The four year old company provides video clip sharing and rating sites to media and portals companies and will use the capital for international expansion.
It raised the new money despite issues surrounding copyright infrigement on its network. The investors are aware of the risk, says the founder in Journal du Net's report. Indeed, they couldn't miss it since it's been widely covered in the French press.
Read - kewego leve 5 millions (JDN)
Posted at 06:41 AM | Posted to Media | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 11, 2007
Capman Invests €8M in Maxwell's eHealth -Growth Deal
(image source: maxwell oy)
Finland-based Maxwell Oy has raised €8M in growth capital from Capman. The six year old company provides business intelligence software, as well as the tech to enable patients to do more 'self-care' and hospitals to manage their digital images and clinical data. [via Tornado Insider]
It sells through partners like GE Healthcare. Maxwell employs 120 and expects €10M in sales this year.
And one last thing, we note that Maxwell is yet another venture that has tapped EU funding for R&D. If this keeps up we're going to have to change our very-long-held opinion on the small impact that the European Commission's funding for research has on the startup economy. It looks like a few participants are making the transition now from filing research project applications to writing (and winning) RFPs.
View Maxwell
Posted at 07:38 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink
VMWare Acquires Swiss Startup Dunes Technologies
Lausanne-based Dunes Technologies, which developed software used by the IT department to manage virtual computing environments, has been acquired by newly public VMWare whose mkt cap is currently $25.4B.
The six year old software company's products competed with some of VMWare's own management software. It has been acquired for an undisclosed amount.
Your alarm:clock euro reporter had been following the company's founders since some of them were at their previous venture, Lysis SA, an IPTV software startup that was acquired by Kudelski during the downturn. (See swissinfo article circa 2004 for more about Dunes' early years).
Dunes had raised some capital in the past year from Affentranger Associates, a small Swiss corporate finance and investment firm based in Geneva.
Read VMWare Acquires (virtual strategy)
Posted at 07:02 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
September 10, 2007
Mojowatch.eu: Perpetuum, Qliktech, and all Swiss Web 2.0
A couple of European startups are in the headlines this week for doing more than raising capital.
Qliktech Fast
Qliktech is the world's fastest growing business intelligence startup, according to InformationWeek. That nugget of success news came from an article about Cognos' acquisition of Applix for $329M. Qliktech has been on our radar for a few years now. It is hot in the US and Europe because its software delivers a flexible, quick turnaround on different sets of data. It does it with a new architecture that exploits today's faster chips - the older systems don't, we guess.
Read - Cognos to acquire Applix for $339M (it news)
Vibes Power Texas Instruments' Chips
Perpetuum, a startup out of the UK, has just launched its first product, a battery-less power system for TI chips targeting wireless sensor networks. It recently raised £2.2M in capital from Quester and two other institutional investors.
Several reasons why this startup is of interest beyond its garnering press for its innovation. One, it tapped Mike McTighe, one of your more venture capital savvy board members in the Uk. His portfolio includes Frontier Siliocn, CamSemi and Alphamosaic, all venture-backed semiconductor startups.
And two, it managed to make the transition from EU funded research project participant to market. It is not easy to go from the Union's byzantine grant-application hoop jumping to getting ahead in business, and yet the founders of Perpetuum seem to be making that transition.
Some background on energy harvesting and how Perpetuum fits in an article in Engineerlive , while EETimes takes a look at first product from the startup.
Swiss Webby Wonders
And last but not least, the Swiss Web 2.0 gets the treatment from Techcrunch France.
Many of the startups profiled will be familiar to regular readers as they have raised VC, but there are several newer names - the most intriguing and controversial (controversial at least in the eyes of established security heavyweights ) is WabiSabiLabi. (via Gruenderszene
Posted at 06:36 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink