August 14, 2007
Scottish Startup Raises £1M For TV Signal Shifting
In early stage news today, Scottish Inxstor has raised £600K from Braveheart, the Scottish venture capital angel network, and backed by the Scottish Co-investment Fund, according to The Scotsman.
The new money will be used by the Dunfermline-based company to expand its product development programme and its technical team. It raised seed funding last year of about £400K.
The startup is a spinout from Infinite Data Storage, another Braveheart portfolio firm, that designs portable data storage devices for the consumer electronics market, says the press report.
The Inxstor website is not loaded with information, but from the reports we read, it will be delivering tech that supports Tivo-like television viewing, but it is calling it place-shifting rathern than timeshifting. It says it "allows the user to watch TV shows they usually receive at home" in any location on devices other than TV sets (such as mobile phones)."
That would mean you could get your pay per view tv channels on the road, we guess. There is copy-proofing and signal-stealing-prevention tech in there too -- the press reports mention DRM -- so that makes us wonder if you would have to pay more to the service provider for the privilege of watching something on a different box than the one you are already paying for.
Read -Inxstor Finds Place
Read - New funding takes Inxstor past £1m
Posted at 07:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 25, 2007
Two-Way TV Bought By Investor For £5.34M
British investor Ingenious Media has bought a controlling stake in interactive TV content developer Two-Way TV for £5.34M. Two-Way TV creates interactive quiz show, wagering and SMS products for British reality TV shows. The company plans to take its business to the US.
Two-way TV last week announced a deal with Virgin Media to power iTV for its interactive gaming channels, The Winner Channel and The Roulette Channel. In a parallel deal, Virgin Media has acquired – for an undisclosed sum -Two Way TV’s Ark Technology for the UK and Ireland.
Founded in 1992, Two Way TV is led by Canadian Jean de Fougerolles who was head of distribution at MTV Europe. Ingenius Media is an interesting investment house that we are just getting to know. It has 100 industry players in the group. It recently invested in Crystal Entertainment and plans to invest £50M in multiplayer games startups.
Posted at 03:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2007
Delft Video Portal .Org Tribler Raises 6M Euros From Gov't
Netherlands-based Tribler caught the attention of the Net today with the launch of v4. Tribler, which is a joint research project from Delft University of Technology and the VU University Amsterdam, is a video aggregator that pulls in YouTube videos, Torrent downloads and other video file formats. Tribler layers on some personalization to help users find niche content in the sea of Net videos.
The non-profit group has caught the eye of several researchers, broadcasters, and the Dutch government, enticing twenty scientists working on Tribler and 6M Euros in Dutch government funding.
Read - Tribler Combines YouTube, BitTorrent, and Last.fm (NewTeeVee)
View - site
Posted at 04:51 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 27, 2007
France's iWedia Raises €4M
Iwedia announced raising €4M from French venture firms for its digital TV zapper and middleware development. The two year old French firm provides middleware components and solutions for digital TV set-top boxes and engineering services "across the digital image chain".
The investors in what looks like a second round are CDC Entreprises Innovation, I-Source Gestion (C-Source fund), iXCore and Thales Corporate Ventures.
Milestones to be achieved with the funding include improving the quality and price of its zapper or remote control software to stand out from the competition, adding new features to the software for the mid-range to top-range set-top terminal market, enabling things like digital content-sharing within the home (transported using USB storage or over domestic networks) and storage. And to speed up product dev on software for digital TV operators, partiularly advanced security.
Partners and customers on Iwedia's website
The company has partnerships in place with a few electronic component manufacturers and conditional access system (CAS) suppliers. Customers have been announced in Poland and Uruguay and its system has been qualified for the UK market.
Posted at 06:13 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 28, 2006
Sweden's Tilgin To IPO
Swedish supplier of set-top boxes and gateways for broadband consumers to access so-called triple-play service (Interactive TV/Internet/Voice) is currently in the runup to float on the Stockholm Stock Exchange on December 15. It's a small IPO, aiming to raise about €11.5M, and from what we could see in its prospectus, which is only published in Swedish, there are no venture firms backing it.
Earlier in the year we covered Tilgin's quick growth mode. It sales were SEK 283mn (US$ 39.83mn EUR 31.06mn) during the first three quarters in 2006. The firm expects to be profitable in the second half of 2006.
Tilgin's French rival, Netcentrex, a much larger venture-backed operation, was acquired by Comverse last month for $170M including earnout.
Read - Read - Tilgin's Hockey Stick Growth (the a:c euro)
Posted at 09:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 24, 2006
EuTubes - The Venice Project And VideoJug
Over at sister-site the alarm:clock there's some commentary on mainstream media's current interest in finding the next YouTube, highlighting Venice Project, one from Europe, and US-based BitTorrent's new service.
One that we have our eye on is the VideoJug project, also coming out of Europe. It launched in September. It's different in that it only contains "how to" videos. Most are created by VideoJug and they are well-produced, nice and short too.
A look at the list of "most viewed" videos suggests that viewers are worried about diseased sexual organs, their appearance, how well they play (golf and juggling), and are fascinated by sushi.
There is also some amusing content created by users on topics such as "How To Fold a T-Shirt" and a Ginglish (German English mixed) video on "How To Cook And Eat White Bavarian Sausages".
A Top Ten List That Let's You Know What Others Find Interesting
We agree with what some of its users have said, that it is a good use of the Internet for video, with plenty of user feedback and features you can only offer if content is being accessed on the Web, as opposed to broadcast TV, but it looks like an expensive business to run.
We haven't interviewed the founders to learn how they intend to sustain the business over the medium term. But they have deep pockets, we assume, which will give them time. We say deep pockets because the founders are Dan Thompson (no relation to this a:c euro reporter), an entrepreneur that sold his computer games company Renegade to Time Warner. He also co-founded 365 Corporation and took it public, along with VideoJug co-founder David Tabizel.
Tabiziel also co-founded Durlacher, an English investment banking firm whose incredibly optimistic research reports were for European Internet, telecoms, and mobile sectors what Mark Meeker/Morgan Stanley's were for the Internet in the US.
Read - New website that shows you how to perform everyday tasks (DailyMail)
Read - The Biggest Venture Story In Mainstream Media: The Next YouTube? (a:c)
Posted at 06:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 19, 2006
Buzz Buildup For Neuf Cegetel IPO
Yesterday Les Echos reported the IPO slated for next week of Neuf Cegetel, the French alternative telco and broadband operator, is meeting demand.
Telcos and ISPs traditionally do well on Europe's public markets. Its rival, Iliad, had a stellar IPO back in 2004 that woke us all up after three years of post-bubble gloom and doom. We hear that the early investors in Iliad returned about 75 times money on that exit.
Neuf Cegetel is a good-sized float: if our math is right, a mid-bookbuilding price means the company would raise about €800M, circa €200M of which will actually flow to its coffers as new money. The rest buys out old investors. It would suggest a valuation of €4B.
We don't know much about how customers feel about Neuf Cegetel but we think it is pretty innovative compared to rivals.
It has shown that IPTV is not just about delivering the same stuff we get over the cable or terrestrial networks on a broadband pipe. For example, it launched a VOD service (provided by French startup Glowria) in a simple format.
Through a subsidiary it offers free phone calls in a Skype-like service called Wengo, and its "Hitview" audience monitoring service shows promise too.
Hitview enables IPTV subscribers to "see" not only what channels everyone else is watching, but also which shows are more the most popular. It says it's real time but we notice a 12 hour delay in the data online this morning. Realtime or not, it is difficult to this kind of thing with ease on cable and over-the-air broadcasting networks.
Neuf Does Things With IPTV That Satellite and Cable TV Operators Just Can't
Read - Wengo Expects Breakeven (a:c euro)
Read - Vodafone affiliate Neuf Cegetel IPO two-times oversubscribed - report (afx news)
Posted at 07:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 15, 2006
Janus Friis Is So Money
Kazaa and Skype co-founder Janus Friis still checks in at Skype, but he is transitioning to his next project, code-named Venice, according to his blog. We doubt he will struggle to raise funding for this. A son of Copenhagan, Fris is not forthcoming on Venice but says that it concerns the marriage of TV and the net and leaves it at that.
Euroman Janus Friis
Expains Friis: "It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!"
Posted at 10:46 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 12, 2006
Revver Signs Big Deal With Sky For FameTV
This is a pretty exciting deal. Come November 6th, the online video sharing site Revver will launch in the UK on FameTV, part of Sky Digital Network. This may become the seminal case of user-generated content meeting the small screen. FameTV will screen Revver videos and pick candidates Pop Idol style.
Users vote for their favorites through SMS which they are charged a fee for, and as expected, you get to share the revenue generated by the votes on a 50/50 basis with Revver.
The lure here is that any jerk can become rich and famous from a viral video as the broadcast promotion will feed more views of a video.
View - http://blog.revver.com/?p=289
Posted at 01:54 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 02, 2006
FruitLounge Funded To Fill Channels With KaChing TV
Dutch venture capital firm, Van den Ende & Deitmers, which manages about €150M in two funds and counts several former Endemol execs as GPs, is backing the international expansion of Fruitlounge Media, an interactive TV company that resulted from the merger of broadcast design agency The Fruitlounge and Marketgraph, a software developer for game shows and quizzes.
The investors acquired a 30 percent stake in the company for an undisclosed amount. Fruitlounge says it generates approximately 1,200 hours of television each month. (For readers that don't recognize the name, Endemol is the company that created the Big Brother reality tv show concept - whose popularity we still don't quite get.)
Pay Per Call TV and SMS Quizzes Are Also Created By Fruitlounge To Fill TV Channels
This kind of TV programming generates sales from the audience that participate in TV programs by sending text messages and premium voice calls, typically sharing the revenues with telcos.
Some of its titles include Streetcam, Perfect Match, Date Factor, Lelang Jitu, Klop! and Indonesia versus Celebrity, none of which we've eyeballed from our base in Switzerland. And it has a music production studio for third parties, as well as its own use.
A Hostess Follows Fruitlounge's Website Visitors From Page To Page
We think that the Hostess service should come with an "OFF" button.
Read - Van den Ende & Deitmers Invests in Fruitlounge Media (press rel.)
Posted at 03:48 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 08, 2006
Swisscom To Buy VC-backed Interactive TV Startup Betty
Swisscom announced it plans to acquire Betty Holding, reports Reuters. Betty is venture-backed by Munich-based Target Partner, which also sold its shares in Gate5 last week to Nokia, and Cornerstone Captial. There was no disclosure on the offering price.
Betty TV users require a purpose-built remote control for participating in TV driven quizzes, contests, and the like.
Reuters said that Swisscom announced the deal at the same time as it said that Betty had won a contract in Germany with TV broadcaster, ProSiebenSat.1. Betty was founed in 2003 and employs 50. It says it has 5000 customers in Switzerland.
This seems like a smart move for Swisscom. It makes a lot more sense for a telco to get into interactive TV by providing the means to deliver it, as opposed to be in the business of developing TV programming, acquiring content, and becoming a media company.
Read - Swisscom lanciert mit (reuters)
Posted at 04:31 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 21, 2006
Awox Raises Second Round For Home Networking Play
AwoX, a French developer of software and consumer gear for Internet TV and home networking, has a raised a second round of financing of an undisclosed amount from INNOVACOM and CIC Capital Privé.
The company, which was founded by a team that parachuted out of Palm Computing Europe, sells software that manages video on demand, Internet Radio and electronic programming guides, as well as things like a universal remote and customer premises equipment. It's using Texas Instruments and Intel chips for its platform. Target customers are consumer electronics manufacturers.We did not find a list of reference customers on it website.
Read - AwoX réalise une deuxième levée de fond pour asseoir sa position de leader dans les technologies de convergence numérique (intelink)
Posted at 08:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 20, 2006
West London's Aggregator TV Raises £9 Series A For Broadband TV
Founded in May 2005, Aggregator sources, packages and delivers TV programming over broadband. The grand concept is for the start-up to build discrete, individually branded niche TV communities via the PC, which will later be pulled together under a consolidated brand when its set-top-box is launched in the UK in early 2007.
CEO Martin Goswami joined Aggregator from BSkyB where he spent 4 years as Commercial Director. Funding comes from big funds in Europe: 3i, Amadeus Capital Partners and Intel Capital.
View- AGGREGATOR TELEVISION ATTRACTS £9 MILLION FROM 3i, AMADEUS AND INTEL CAPITAL
Posted at 08:44 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 06, 2006
inLive Mass Audience Participation
inLive Interactive Ltd., an interactive TV application developer, has raised €5M in a third round of financing to accelerate roll-out across Europe and to check out markets in USA and Asia. The deal was led by Arts Alliance and 3i, which is a new investor.
Viewers Dial A Number To Participate In Real Time Survey. This Example Asks Who Do You Prefer Schroeder or Merkel
The startup, founded in 2005 raised earlier rounds from Arts Alliance and business angels. Its software is developed at its corporate headquarters in Tel Aviv. Its solutions are distributed to German-speaking Europe from Munich, Germany.
Posted at 01:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 03, 2006
Connecting The Dots On Marco Börries Connected Life
We were wondering whatever happened to Marco Börries, the young German entrepreneur that sold his office software company, StarDivision to Sun Microsystems back in 1999.
He was a bit of a legend in our part of Europe for his vision of creating a complete office suite meant to compete head on with Microsoft, and for using what was in 1999 a novel business model for productivity software applications, it was free for personal use. (The reason we were thinking along this line is an interview we did with the founders of Sproutit in Prague, whose business software and vision reminded us a little of Boerries'.)
Turns out, he's at Yahoo, heading its Connected Life division (mobile, TV and video business) as we found out from an archived post on MocoNews.
We knew he had raised venture capital and formed Verdisoft in 2001, and had operations in Hamburg and Silicon Valley, but the a:c euro missed Yahoo acquiring it back in early 2005.
MocoNews excerpt:
At 16, he dropped out of high school in Germany to establish StarOffice, the Microsoft office suite alternative; he sold that company to Sun Microsystems in 1999, joining Sun where he continued open desktop efforts Solaris and evangelized open source through GNOME.In 2001, he founded VerdiSoft to enable his vision of the connected life between PC, TV and cell phone. Yahoo bought VerdiSoft last February, bringing Boerries in as a top executive; the results started to unfold publicly at CES. Boerries’ responsibilities: mobile, digital home, PC client, broadband relationships — “pretty much everything beyond the browser.”
There are not too many European entrepreneurs that have sold not one but two startups to Silicon Valley giants, so we're asking how long will it be until an enterprising VC convinces him to leave when his contract is up and start another venture, maybe one that will make it to IPO this time.
Read - CES 2006: Interview: Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo
Posted at 09:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 27, 2006
Banexi Backs An Interactive TV Rollup
Banexi Ventures in Paris is backing a low-budget rollup of interactive video and TV startups by the founders of Pulsevision, now called Kewego. The startup announced raising €5M in a second round from Banexi Ventures this week, the acquisiton of one year old Pooxi.com, a French video sharing and aggregator, and in the process it changed its name to Kewego (via Kelblog).
Pulsevision was founded in 2003 by Michel Meyer and Olivier Heckmann, two of the five founders of Multimania which was acquired by Lycos in a deal worth some €220M during the dotcom bubble. It started out developing text messaging applications for interacting with TV broadcasts and channels in France -- the same kind of applications as RedLynx in Finland and 2Way Traffic in Netherlands offer.
It then acquired Tedisys, a developer of digital real-time displays used for advertising and information dissemination. If you live in Europe, you've seen these large plasma or LCD screens delivering ads, info, or promotions at airports, kiosks, and post offices. It's a highly fragmented market, with two or three leading suppliers in each country.
Now it has acquired Pooxi, which aggregates videos across a wide range of topics, for an undisclosed amount. Pooxi is one of three video sharing sites in France. The others are DailyMotion and vpod.tv. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Pooxi founded in January 2005 was the oldest, we believe.
We like the ambitious nature of Kewego.
The funding will help KEWEGO acquiring leadership in the Video, Broadcast and TV Industry and developing the next generation of products and services around the concept of TV 2.0.
It's targeting a market slated for quick growth, but it's a highly fragmented market both on the product side and on the supplier side. We believe a consolidation strategy would have plenty of potential targets and the prices are still reasonable, which should give Kewego a chance to carve out a leading place in the European interactive TV market.
You may recall that the same VC backed Kelkoo, which was acquired by Yahoo two years ago for a princely sum after building up a successful Pan European online business. (This might explain why the letters "K" and "o" are being re-used here. If you want to know more about the story of Kelkoo, it has been written up in a book by Julien Codorniou containing interesting insight into the people behind the success story.)
We know that Banexi has a flair for building Pan European ventures and finding good exits - it is one of a handful of venture funds in Europe to not only raise a new fund in the last year, but also to have more money coming at it from LPs in the US and Europe than what it targetted.
We've interviewed Michel Dahan several times and listened to him speak at confabs over here. We recall him describing Banexi's strength:
"What we can do is build companies with complex business models in a complex market," he said. "Europe is multilingual, multicultural. The business culture varies from country to country. Just try negotiating with a Dutch merchant, for example. They are tough. Or try entering the German market, where newcomers are not exactly welcomed. This is the kind of thing that we know."
Read - Pulsevision becomes Kewego (press release)
Read - Michel Meyer 2.0(kelblog)
Posted at 05:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 13, 2006
Mobile TV the target for Iwedia's software
France's Iwedia Technologies raised €2.7M in an internal round of financing with its French investors. This round of funding brings the total to €5M raised by the company, which makes software to manage the delivery of mobile TV, as well as software for digital TV set-top boxes. It emerged as an MBO from a unit of French systems engineering and IT company Teamlog. It currently employs 110.
Posted at 03:12 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 27, 2006
Vodafone' flash mobs to view secret gigs
The Register has an update today on interactive TV goings on in the UK market. The a:c euro notes that Vodafone has joined forces with Channel 4 for a series of televised flashmob concerts.
Over the next couple of months, Vodafone will text random people with details of the secret gigs, said to feature "international artists of the calibre of Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera". The results will be aired live on C4 or E4 in a slot designated 'TBA' in the schedules. So, what if no-one turns up to the concerts? That'd be TV gold.
Our reaction to the Vodafone item? We could imagine a lot of people showing up at a free Justin Timberlake concert, if you paid them.
A French website, Parismobs, posts pics of a flashmob lying on the ground for no apparent reason and photographed by Martin Graham. We note there has not been much activity on the site since 2004.
Entrepreneurial types might want to create a new business, offering Vodafone and the like, a guaranteed crowd or mob. It is not that much different from PR firms running word of mouth campaigns, and infiltrating the blogoshpere to pay people to do viral marketing, is it? A recent example of which is highlighted in an Ars Technica story about Microsoft’s new Origami PC, while the Village Voice tries to get a grip on the ethics of it all.
Read - Sugar wins the ratings war (The Register)
Read . Origami and Microsoft (Ars Technica)
Read - Morals get fuzzy as biz tries to embrace the blog world (Village Voice)
