March 20, 2008
London's SongKick Raises Further Funding For Online Concert Tools
London-based Songkick has launched and says that it has raised further funding. It initially raised a seed round from Y Combinator, Songkick. Further funding has now come from Saul Klein (The Accelerator Group), Jeff Clavier (Softtech VC), Dan Porter (SVP Virgin, co-founder of Ticketweb), Peter Read (Music Nation), Betaworks (Andrew Weissman and John Borthwick), and other undisclosed investors.
There's nothing terribly groundbreaking here but Songkick has clearly done a lot of work. Songkick has thrown up a few ideas including widgets that show which concerts you plan on hitting, links to ticket sellers like Stubhub, a Battle of The Bands feature which seeks to track popularity of bands on Myspace and other sites, as well as personalized concert recommendations.
Songkick was founded by several techie graduates from the University of Cambridge: Ian Hogarth, Phil Cowans, Michelle You and Pete Smith.
Does Songkick have legs? For sure music sites like LastFM and iMeem demonstrate just how much traffic can be gathered by doing right by music. We also do agree that there is a difference between songs and bands vs. concerts. You may like some recording but have no interest in seeing a band live. Sites like LastFM and iMeem do not focus so much on concerts which gives Songkick room to own this.
View - site
Posted at 07:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 14, 2008
Bebo Does It! Bought By AOL For £423M ($850M)
Bebo has found a buyer in AOL willing to lay-out $850M in cash. London and San Francisco-based Bebo likes to call itself the #3 social networking site in the English-speaking world (behind MySpace and Facebook), and #1 in the UK, Ireland, Australia & New Zealand. It claims 40M+ members and boasts the stat that it ads 5 new members every second.
WallStrip does its Up With Bebo profile
For AOL, this would seem to be a no-brainer. They have some nice momentum on the advertising side with the collection of Platform A businesses and now they have a hot social network that might make people forget about the AOL dial-up walled garden and have to refresh their image of AOL.
Founded after MySpace and Facebook, Bebo could have became a distant laggard. To get it to $850M, Bebo can thank its focus on original content. It co-produced "KateModern," a super popular Web TV show, now in its second season. The show contributed to the high minutes per session that Bebo enjoys (33 minutes per day on average).
Bebo had raised $15M in Series A funding in 2007 from Balderton Capital (then Benchmark Capital Europe). The big winners here are husband/wife founders Michael and Xochi Birch. Another co-founder is Jim Scheinman who is now an Entrepreneur in Residence at Charles River Ventures. It's good to see a guy like Jim get a payout here as he has been working this space, having been head of BD at Friendster.
BTW - The Independent of London reports that founder Michael Birch's dream is to someday have sufficient resources to build a tunnel under the Atlantic (he's a big fan of the English Tunnel.)
View - site
Posted at 05:33 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 05, 2008
Czechoslovakian Brothers: NetCentrum Pays €20M For Atlas.sk
Czech web portal NetCentrum has acquired Slokak Web portal Atlas.sk from EPIC Holding. NetCentrum will pay more than €20M. The new company claims 4.9M. NetCentrum was bought by Warburg Pincus last December, partially cashing out the company's founders. The company is run by CEO Pavel Mucha who was an analyst with McKinsey & Co.
Take a look at the site and you will feel that you are looking at a foreign version of Yahoo. It's certainly not the Web 2.0 way. But Eastern European sites have show skill at retaining users and building financial value.
View - Netcentrum site
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February 22, 2008
Rumor Mill: Google Sniffing The Ukraine's Bigmir)net
We discount this rumor, not due to the source or the logic but just because it seem like a convenient balloon to get people in the West to take notice of the Ukraine's igmir)net. Quintura's Yakov is passing on the rumor that Google may pay as much as $100M for the Ukrainian portal which boasts over over 2.5M unique monthly users. Yakov's rumor logic is that Google is still smarting over its decision not to pull the trigger on a potential buyout of Mail.ru.
A complication is that Bigmir)net is owned by the Ukrainian media group KP Media which floated on the Ukrainian stock exchange in July 2006. Its doubtful that Google or others would want to buy a public company in The Ukraine but on the other hand KP Media would surely part with Bigmir)net for the right price.
View - site
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October 03, 2007
UK Sports Site Raises $3.2M
PEHub reports that Sportsbuzz, the company behind Sportingo, has raised $3.2M from Ingenious in the UK. Sportingo is a site with user generated content write large on its About page.
Ingenious is an AIM traded fund that invests in the media sector. Other recent deals include two media marketing and communication companies, and Incisive Media, a business-oriented publisher.
View Ingenious
Posted at 04:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 02, 2007
The BBC Buys Travel Multimedia's Lonely Planet
We don't see the BBC do many M&A deals but today the announced they had bought Australia-based Lonely Planet. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The privately owned business is being sold by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who founded the company in 1972, and John Singleton, who became a
shareholder in 1999.
If you have ever backpacked in your life it is likely that you have bought a Lonely Planet guide. Lonely Planet has also built a Web site business and its newest business is Lonely Planet Television.
This would seem to be a great deal for both companies. Lonely Planet may be an overlooked power because it has been around for so long but its a great brand that can surely be helped on TV and on the Web by the BBC.
Read - press release
Posted at 07:10 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 14, 2007
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
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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 | 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 | TrackBack | Permalink
September 09, 2007
How To Be Habbo Hotel - Tips on Going Global
Sulake Labs, the VC-backed Finnish startup behind Habbo Hotel and IRC Galleria is a success story that by now offers up a few lessons for other social networking and roleplaying business.
Founded way back in 2000, it has come a long way since sister site, the alarm:clock, tipped it two and half year ago as having a business model with some staying power.
The latest insights into its experience and its numbers comes via a techmeme item that started with a Gamasutra report on the tactics Habbo Hotel took in developing its userbase, an article that has plenty of tips on socnet community management, virtual currencies, and handling cultural issues in a global market.
GigaOm commented on Gamasutra's coverage that with an estimated $77M in annual sales its "phenomenal success" continues to be "criminally under-appreciated" by the game industry.
Here are some snippets:
Credit cards and prepay cards are cool -- but they just don't cut it in the global market for selling to kids.... There's a massive difference between selling currency and selling property... Teenagers really do get the fact that you own a piece of property and you get to trade it.
Sulake's software developers have been converted it seems to using the Scrum approach for product development:
"We switched to Scrum last year and it's doubled the productivity of the teams. But Scrum is kind of hard to do. You need to fully embrace it -- that means that people have to really let go."[more on Scrum can be found at the Scrum Alliance]
the [virtual] items on Habbo Hotel in 2007 have a total market value of around 550,000,000.And some insights into the Habbo communities...
How to be popular in a soc net? Be nice."Habbo Hotel also has MySpace-like profile pages. He showed a popular profile of a Finnish user. The guestbook has more than 30,000 comments in it -- and this is just a regular user. She's just doing well in the world and being polite."War of the worlds: single-color versus multicolor. "There's actually this huge war between the single-colored groups and the multicolored groups."
Inexplicable fantasies: This is McDonalds -- there are people who are roleplaying a minimum wage job... it's all roleplay, you can't carry the food or anything. They're just emoting. ...There's lots of armies. Mafias are really popular as well. They can't do anything... they're just wearing the suit and standing there. They'll emote that they're punching something."
Posted at 07:56 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2007
Early Stage Money: Gamersprofile and Jobleads.de
The alarm:clock euro's reporter, Valerie Thompson, is still trying to get caught up with the news that flowed during her summer vacation, as well as interviews with Kevin Lomax, Misys founder, and Nick Ogden, Worldpay, founder. In the meantime, she has a couple of early stage news from Germany to report.
The HighTech Gruenderfonds has invested in Jobleads, which is launching a job and referral platform for executive types. It is in beta and only in German for the time being but HTGF sees a "scalable" business that has a good founding team. Two of the founders are former investment bankers and its chief techie hails from OpenText, the Canadian enterprise software company.A Blognation Germany review of the startup suggests its competitors are Zubka and H3. There's also Experteer, which targets your better paid jobs too. It's also German and backed by BV Capital and Wellington. According to Clemens von Bergmann of the HTGF who let us know about the deal by email: "It is kind of like the Zubka model in the UK but much better," he wrote.
Read - Jobleads first round
View Jobleads
Munich-based GamersClub, which recently launched a social network called gamersprofile.de, raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Mountain Partners (an investment company majority-owned by former smartcard entrepreneur Cornelius Boersch) and Tiburon (an investment vehicle that belongs to getmobile.de founders Tim Schwenke and Daniel Wild).
gründerszene » Gründer-Rückblick - Interessante Themen der letzten Woche (Gruenderszene)Posted at 05:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 20, 2007
Premiere Invests €10M in VC-backed Auction Startup 1-2-3.tv
Premiere, the German pay-TV broadcaster, acquired a 14.4 percent stake in VC-backed 1-2-3.tv, as Der Spiegel first reported last week. It is not clear to your a:c euro reporter if it was a capital increase or buying old shares, but DowJones later confirmed the transaction, reporting that it was a €10M deal. (via visavis ).Our calculator says that’s a €69M valuation for the three year old TV auction startup, which had a turnover of €67M last year, and has raised at least €32M in two rounds. It claims 500K customers participating in its daily dial-in consumer product auctions which are broadcast on cable and satellite free channels and on its website. Premiere will now also be adding the channel to its ‘bouquet’.
The venture has Munich-based Wellington Partners, 3i, Target Partners, and Iris Capital backing it.
Posted at 05:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 14, 2007
Reuters Chief Says Socnets Not A Bubble
In an all things digital interview with Kara Swisher (Boomtown blog) this month, Reuters group chief, Tom Glocer, said that social networking is not a bubble - in response to her questions about what's the biggest hype in Internet-related news today.
We don't normally quote the chief execs of the information industry here, but for our readers who have a stake in the category, and for 'bubble' watchers, Glocer's comments fit the bill.
About 5 minutes into the interview he begins to talk about how Reuters sees social media and the things that industry participants are still trying to figure out (e.g. monetization).
From the little bit that Glocer said, Reuters is looking at customizing news for individuals, or a community of interest - news alerts on what people need to know if they are diagnosed with cancer, or what is the current danger level at the airport you are going to be landing in next week.
Unfortunately, the talk digressed too quickly to learn if the effort will involve acquisitions, or starting up a new venture capital fund, which would have made this post a bit more relevant.
The Blackberry Curve-toting (the Curve is the RIM smartphone with Qwerty kybd) executive's informed answers to Swisher's questions about the trends make us speculate that he has Mashable in his RSS reader, or a subscription to the media stream on StrategyEye from MarketClusters, in addition to his company's experience with new platforms.
Read - Reuters builds an Enterprise 2.0 social networking community for their clients on the new Blogtronix 2.0 Platfrom and Reuters to start financial MySpace.
Go to - Kara Visits Reuters Tom Glocer
Posted at 06:43 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 03, 2007
Biggest Baltic Portal Delfi Group Acquired by Ekspress Group
Ekspress Grupp has bought the Delfi Group. The purchase price of the shares is EUR 54.05M.The transaction is financed by the Ekspress Group's recent IPO and with a bank loan from the syndicate of SEB Ühispank, Sampo Pank and Nordea Pank.
Delfi and its subsidiaries operate 7 Internet portals in Estonian/Latvian and Russian in Estonia and Latvia a portal in the Ukraine. This is their flagship site: Delfi.
2006 revenue for the Delfi Group in were 89.3M kroons. (1 Estonian kroon = 0.087333 U.S. dollars or 0.0639146663 Euros.) By the end of 2006 the number of Delfi users in the Baltic States reached 1.8M.
Posted at 06:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 19, 2007
Mangrove Invests in Luxembourg's Music Service Jamendo
Jamendo has raised an undisclosed amount of first round funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. The Luxembourg-based company currently offers a relatively small number DRM-free music tracks under Creative Commons license. Jamendo says it currently gets about 500K unique visitors per month and in January it began offering its registered artists a 50-50 rev shard on the ad revenue the site receives.Jamendo takes advantage of BitTorrent peer to peer technology to distribute tracks at a very large scale.
The company was co-founded in by Pierre Gerard, Sylvain Zimmer and CEO Laurent Kratz who was
Managing Partner USWeb/CKS - marchFIRST. They also launched another startup at Lesfrontaliers.lu
View - site
Read - PaidContent PostPosted at 06:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 06, 2007
Micro M&A: Israel's Sportingo Buys UK's CaughtOffside.com
This deal is no more than Sportingo hiring CaughtOffside.com's blogger, but they also get the blog brand and traffic as well. Founded in 2006, CaughtOffside is a popular football blog. Sportingo is a user generated content site run by ten people or so in Israel. It was founded by Tal Barnoach and Ze’ev Rozov, who previously lead a sports multimedia encyclopedic DVD company that went public in London in 1996.Sports social networks have proven to be very valuable in the US and Sportingo is showing some momentum in Europe.
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 16, 2007
Contortion Artist Dynetic Solutions Raises VC from Creathor
Creathor Venture, the German VC founded by Gert Köhler, has invested an undisclosed amount in Dynetic Solutions, a developer of mobilephone multimedia publishing software.The Kaiserslautern-based company employs 45 and already has customers like T-Online and Der Spiegel doing everything for SMS sports scores to mobile TV, and a Virginia-based subsidiary. It calls itself a "conversion artist", but "contortion artist" which is what you have to be to handle all the content, format, and publishing standards involved in getting multiple content types from the web to the mobilephone. It seems to be handling the transformations well, if its demo is anything to go by.
View DyneticPosted at 04:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 03, 2007
Prominent London Socialite Gains Funding For Cominded
Pre-launch, London-based Cominded is the latest brain child from Paul Birch who has one of the better social networking resumes that we have seen in a while.+ 2003. Birch co-founded the wildly popular Internet based birthday reminder/ecard service BirthdayAlarm.com with his brother and sister-in-law.
+ 2003. Launched and sold to tickle.com the social networking service ringo.com. The site got 300K members in the 5 months.
+ 2004. Birch co-founder with Robert Loch the business networking service soflow.com. Service launched in July 2004.
+ 2005. Birch co-founded and is now an adviser to Bebo.com. His brother Michael is the CEO. Birch says that the technology platform for Bebo is based on that we developed for BirthdayAlarm. In May 2006 Bebo, took $15M in funding from Benchmark Capital.
+ 2006. With his brother, Birch launched the London mixer Internet People.
+ 2007. Birch says he has funding and the team to launch his latest social networking business Cominded by the end of April. Its in Stealth mode and he's now saying how it works.
Paul Birch
Pre-launch Cominded already has caps, saucy girls, and beer
Posted at 08:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 28, 2007
Paris' Trace.TV Takes Strategic Funding From Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group has made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount. In addition to cash, Universal will provide Trace with global music and video rights, a weekly slot on Universal's International Music Feed and cross promotions, including an urban music partnership to sell mobile content in China.Launched in 2003 in Paris, France, TRACE began as a print magazine and now runs urban music programming in multiple languages across Internet, cable, satellite, radio, IPTV and mobile platforms. It expects to launch in the US market in 2007/8. In 2003, Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group made an investment.
Trace's founders are Claude Grunitzky, Olivier Laouchez who are former TV and record label senior executives, and Richard Wayner a former investment banker.
Read - Universal Music Group (UMG) to Invest in Alliance TRACE Media (TRACE)
View - site
Posted at 07:32 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 13, 2007
Paris' Digiplug Bought By Accenture For B2B Music Skills
Accenture has bought mobile music and video content distributor Digiplug from Japan’s Faith Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Digiplug sells music and video delivery software to record labels, mobile operators and handset manufacturers. The companies service range from: content aggregation, central products inventory, storefront animation and programming with integrated CRM modules and services performance statistics.Read - Accenture Acquires Digiplug SAS, to Serve the Media, Entertainment and Communications Industries
Posted at 04:31 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
London's 3D Film-maker Short Fuse Funded
Short Fuze secured $1.9M in its first round of funding for its new 3D application for video-making. The funding round was co-led by Create Partners and IQ Capital Partners, along with some angels.The new product sounds very interesting: "It is complete film-making product, covering everything from concept to final footage. It includes tools for scriptwriting, set building, character creation, editing and titling as well as filming itself. It is simple enough for first-time film-makers, while its advanced features allow more experienced users to create complex movies and generate subtle character performances."
Short Fuze was founded in 2003 by Matt Kelland and Dave Lloyd who had founded mobile phone publisher nGame which was bought by Mforma in 2002.
View - site
Read - Short Fuze Receives $1.9 Million Funding For Machinima Movie App (PaidContent)Posted at 06:32 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 08, 2007
France's MPX4 Raises $6.5M For Music Tools
MXP4 Interactive Music has raised $6.5M d for its new digital music technology that auto remixes songs.The investment from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech. The company claims: . “Listeners will now find in recorded music the same atmospheric harmonics and fluid musical interpretation as they would at a live concert.” We understand that the technology can remix one song all night long on the fly. Fred Destin points out that founder Gilles Babinet is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded MusiWave and Eyeka.
Read - Infinite Babinet strikes again: $6.5M for MXP4 (Fred Destin blog)
Posted at 10:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 01, 2007
London's TrustedPlaces Raises £500,000 For Social Review Site
TrustedPlaces has received a £500,000 investment from HOWZAT media, the team behind Cheapflights.co.uk. The ad-driven business plans to expand to other European countries. The company is reminds us of Yelp, which has made headway in the US.
TrustedPlaces may now be able to upgrade their office spaceRead - Your TrustedPlaces Receives £500k Investment! (Blog post)
Posted at 10:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 26, 2007
Huge London Deal In Works?: Viacom Might Buy LastFM
Dealbreaker has been reporting that Viacom is negotiating with LastFM on a $450M purchase and Vecosys says it was the talk of a recent confab in London that LastFM spoke at. LastFM recently signed a deal with Warner Music Group giving the internet radio station the rights to play WMG's entire music catalog.LastFM monitors the music that each user listens to and accordingly recommends music that the user might enjoy. The site also allows music fans with similar tastes to communicate and share their playlists.
The site also provides an ad-supported stream of the music from the hundreds of independent labels it has deals with. It tends to get great user reviews.
Financial backers include VC Joi Ito together with Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and Stefan Glänzer, CEO of 20six Weblog Services AG in the UK.
Read - The Rumor Mill: LastFM Being Picked Up By Viacom (Dealbreaker)
Posted at 04:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 21, 2006
Euro Contenders For Peer-to-Peer Video And TV
Technology Review has a feature on P2P video, mentioning a couple of the European enablers and early entrants, such as live P2P broadcasting firm Octoshape (backed by IVS and Nordic Venture Partners), Tribler (a Dutch university project), and CacheLogic (backed by Pentech, Amadeus, 3i ) which sells networking equipment optimized for managing P2P data.
The article leads with news about Bittorrent's acquisiton of μTorrent (microtorrent), a compact Bittorrent client, which actually adds a European angle to Bittorrent's future success as microtorrent belongs to a Swedish computer programmer named Ludvig Strigeus. (That deal also opens up the question that if microtorrent was good enough for Bittorrent to acquire, why didn't the project attract an enterprising VC to it.)
There is no mention of the Skype founder-backed Venice Project, now running a closed beta trial - the closed aspect may explain why it wasn't in there as the reporter only talked about what he could look at.
The Venice Project Blog Led Us To This ScreenshotWe'll be keeping an eye on the region's VCs to see if they can actually catalyze (and capitalize) these ventures and some of the others that are emerging to create a market leader.
Read - Technology Review: P2P: From Internet Scourge to Savior (technology review)
Read - P2P Streaming Goes Live (a:c euro)
Read - Variations On Bittorrent From Tribler Peerfactor (a:c euro)Posted at 10:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 12, 2006
DJTunes Funded To Acquire New Titles
DJTunes.com GmbH, a Germany-based startup running a legal music download service for club and dance music, raised €500K from the High Tech Gründerfonds to secure further content licenses.Online for 6 months, the firm says that it has gained popularity with club djs. It differentiates itself from mainstream portals, such as iTunes and Musicload (a German rival run by Deutsche Telekom), through its depth of specialized content and its "friendlier" DRM strategy, it says. The sites search engine is pretty sophisticated and the selection of titles is pretty large, considering its a startup. The founders have ties into the music industry, which probably helped a lot.
Read - DJTUNES.COM GmbH erhält Finanzierung des High-Tech Gründerfonds (press rel.)
Posted at 05:27 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 09, 2006
Social Media More Relevant Than We Thought
The Mediatech confab this month organized by Library House in London continues to be a topic in industry blogs a week after the event, which surprises us a bit. To be honest, we were sceptical when Library House asked the alarm:clock to be a media partner for its event earlier this year -- thinking that the conference's theme was based on startups and technology enablers overestimating their importance.
Library House Execs At mediatech 2.006
Softening our stance on the relevance of the tech crew was the news in the meantime that Skyrock, a French youth-oriented radio station, has not only made itself more relevant to listeners (and given online advertisers a reason to write Skyrock some cheques) with services such as free blogs, free email, instant messaging and a community thing, but it also created a new international growth opportunity for itself.And we've seen two German TV stations take stakes in video sharing sites, driving traffic to them with programming and prime-time promotion, giving us a hint that various platforms are not mutually exclusive.
We still don't know if the trend is good news for VC-backed media tech startups in Europe - there's the question of make or buy, for example, but the point is there's a trend and it is stronger than we thought.
We asked Richard Youngman, head of research at Library House (wearing the dark-rimmed specs in the image above) who organized the content for the event for a debriefing. He said with over 300 attendees, the event exceed its targets, pointing out that it was not a given, because there had been a similarly themed event, Digital Hollywood Europe, running on the same day in London. Mediatech is on for next year and Young is looking for input and ideas about what you'd like to see and hear.
On TechCrunch UK
Read - Reflections On Mediatech
Read - The Week London Partied
Read - Notes From MediatechAnd elsewhere
Read - Mediatech 2006 (mobhappy)
Read - mediatech 2.006 - Media and More (Ormigo's Oliver Thylmann blog)
Read - Mediatech Reporters Get A Buzz (alarm:clock euro)Posted at 05:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 14, 2006
Vpod.tv Launch Overwhelming
Paris and Madrid-based vpod.tv launched this week. The venture backed video publishing startup had the enviable issue of too many visitors and users wishing to sign up. The site performance was strained despite having its own content distribution network, according to its blog. Update: vpod.tv's CEO corrected our impression about the CDN - they have a deal with a CDN provider that they will announce soon.
It's available in 8 languages and offers video sharing at the moment, but we know the founders have more in store, that is if the demo we saw a couple of months back in Paris makes it into production.
There are already 1200 or so videos uploaded for public consumption and if you click the Entrepreneur tag in the cloud on the right, you'll find many of the people we've been writing about here at the a:c euro.
Read - France's vpod.tv taps varsavsky (a:c euro)Posted at 12:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 26, 2006
France's Medialive To Protect Content In Japan Mobile Deal
We've got our eye on Paris-based Medialive SA, a digital media copyright protection technology vendor. The startup impressed the a:c euro last year when it raised $4.2M from Reston, Virginia-based Nextel, a wireless operator, and a French seed stage fund, on the back of convincing Nextel of the value of its innovative content protection solution.This kind of thing is happening more than it used with Euro startups, but it is still rare enough that we notice it.
Medialive's Founders Might Be Brainy But They Can Explain To The Rest Of Us How Their Tech Works
Founded in 2000, Medialive developed “heavily patented” copyright protection software that is cheaper and easier to implement than existing encryption-based technologies. What makes it stand out is that its “digital keys” are still slim enough to fit on the tiny chips that are used for security inside mobile phones (so-called SIM cards).The company just announced that Primeworks, a Japanese mobile content platform provider has signed up to use its technology. There are a few competing solutuions for mobile networks out there and an agreement is not a guarantee of revenues, but the fact that it has a foot in the US market and one in Japan suggests that Medialive is getting somewhere in a global market.
Read - Medialive Signs Major Contract In Japan (press rel.)
Posted at 08:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 29, 2006
New Money For JobTV24
Some well-known investors and entrepreneurs have pumped an undisclosed amount of capital into JobTV24, a German satellite TV channel and web platform all about, um, jobs, according to PeopleAndDeals. New investors are Aurelia Private Equity, Roland Metzger (founder of Jobpilot.de), Tim Schwenke and Daniel Wild (founders of getmobile AG) and Falk F. Strascheg, who founded VC firm TechnologieHolding and sold it 3i, and now invests as a business angel, as well as running Extorel, a fund of fund.Read- Frische Finanzierung fuer jobtv24 (peopleanddeals)
Posted at 05:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 28, 2006
VCs Back Qype's Web 2.0 Local Search Play
Qype, a Hamburg, Germany-based local online search startup, wrote in to say that it has raised a first round from Advent Venture Partners and Partech International, as well as angel investors. The size of the round was undisclosed but it is meant to be enough to roll out across Europe.Since Qype is one of the new breed of tightly run web startups, the hopes that one funding round might suffice to cover Europe may be more than wishful thinking.
Founded in early 2006 by Stephan Uhrenbacher, who established travelchannel.de and also had senior positions at lastminute.com and online pharmacy, DocMorris, Qype launched in April. Since then we've written about it a couple of times, mainly because of its low-budget approach to developing an Web-based online directories service. We recommend its corporate blog for Web entrepreneurs.
Alexa Offers An Indication Of How Qype Compares To Incumbent GoYellow, Which Has Taken A More Expensive Marketing RouteQype recently added a Boolean-like search feature. Some typical searches shown here.
• “Nichtraucher + Restaurant” findet 30 Empfehlungen
• “Lecker + Pizza” findet 80 Beiträge
• “zuverlässig + Werkstatt” leider nur zehn.
• “Kinder + Sonne” findet fast 50 Empfehlungen.
• “günstig + Hotel” findet 30 EmpfehlungenThe firm’s blog explains how it works, pointing out that there are 80 recommendations for Tasty and Pizza, 50 recommendations of place to enjoy the outdoors with your kids, and 30 tips on cheap hotesl and no-smoking restaurants. But there are only 10 tips on reliable auto repair shops, which means either there are not the many mechanics that people would recommend, or they don’t want to put it out there who the good ones are for fear of never being able to get an appointment.
Then again it could also mean that it never occurred to Qype users to write about the topic.
Read - The New Tightness of Euro Founders (a:c euro)
Read- Qype and Wiki Receive Early Stage Attention (a:c euro)Posted at 09:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 24, 2006
Computer-generated Toons Startup
One year old Cyber Ainmation Group, a French computer-generated short film and cartoon production company, has raised €2.2M from Viveris Management and Cyber Capital, backed by Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild, and private investors.
Cyber Group Animation has developed its own 3D animation technology and will use some of the capital to take that further. The rest wil go to merchandising products related to its content, and marketing distribution rights worldwide for its content.The founders are former Walt Disney Company executives, Pierre Sissmann and Dominique Bourse. Accordingly, their company's TV series and movies are targeted at 2-12 year olds.
Read- Cyber Group Animation lève 2,2 millions d’euros pour financer sa croissance (mass media)Posted at 07:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 09, 2006
VC-Backed MergerMarket Covers Its Own Acquisition
Because we are financial journalists ourselves we appreciate it when our brethren can make a great financial success off gathering and documenting news. Today we learned that Mergermarket was bought by Pearson for £101M.
Mergermarket's co-founder Charlie Welsh, 40, was senior M&A correspondent at Financial News and he also worked at Newsweek. Apparently Welsh saw that banks in London and New York would pay a premium for early news on global M&A, so he launched MergerMarket to do just that. Welsh will take will take about £10M from the proceeds. The rest goes to other employees including the CEO and venture investor New Media Spark is cashing in its £28M stake. Its initial investment was £1.175M.
Ironically, given Mergermarket's focus, the company's announcement of its acquisition by Pearson was mysteriously bungled. They put out a press release, retracted it and then re-issued it just two hours later.
Updates: VCRatings, one of several blogs written by journalists who work for The Deal who are able tap into its meaty databases of transactions and articles, has some good insights into the deal - such as the note that the VCs will reap $50M each of the purchase price. It also gives the return multiples and a quote circa 2000 from Mergermarkets' earliest VC, NewMedia Spark. (Disclosure: alarm:clock euro's team leader was a venture reporter for TheDeal.com for two years starting in late 2003).
Read _ VC Ratings: VC Exit Rating: Mergermarket (vcratings blog)
Posted at 09:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 31, 2006
Mobile Music Download Startup Targetize Says Tech Validated, Wants To Raise More Money
In its latest press release, Targetize, based in Herzelia, Israel, reports its first big European client for its Anysong application, namely Universal Mobile Music's service which now runs on KPN's Dutch mobile network.Targetize also said its looking for $5M in a new round of financing at a “higher valuation” than last time from private investors and VCs.
Read - Music Industry Giant Select Targetize Mobile Search and Discovery Solution (prnewswire)
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July 18, 2006
Interest In User Generated TV Strong In UK
Mint Digital, a UK-based outfit that develops programming for TV stations, is running a conference on the topic of User Generated TV. We were thinking of attending it only to find out today that the event is sold out. Judging from the list of participants, media companies, such as the BBC, Sony, Endemol, and EMAP, are looking to get deeper into user generated content than they already are.Read - User Generated Content (Paul Fisher's blog)
Read - UGTV'06 Full House (Mint Digital blog)Posted at 06:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 04, 2006
Myvideo Seeks Network Effect And VC
Myvideo.de, a video portal for the German market launched in April, is gaining ground according to the firm's CEO and founder, Christian Vollmann, who told us that his website was the only German online video community to make it into the Nielsen Netratings ranking in May 2006 for Germany with 320,000 unique visitors.
Vollmann is aiming to build the "best video community in Germany with the most entertaining content" by partnering with the popular portals and movie rights owners.The 28 year old founder hails from dating site ilove.de, a subsidiary of Jamba!, which he started up and managed. Jamba! is a mobilephone ringtone and games service that was acquired by Verisign, and before that gig, he was with Alando (which was acquired by eBay back in the bubble era). He was the third employee at Alando.
Both Jamba and Alando were founded by the Samwer brothers. Vollmann declined to say whether or not the Samwer's were financially supporting his venture.
MyVideo has three revenue streams in the works and is currently looking for venture capital, or a strategic investor. It is registered in Romania where the R&D is done, but Vollmann is based in Berlin, the startup's base for marketing, support, and editorial operations.
The founder said that 98 percent of myvideo's content is user generated. We can add some of this content is raunchy, judging by the teaser stills and the description of the video titles that were on the front page the day we eyeballed it. It's not for kids.
Its closest rival in the German market is Sevenload.de, which started earlier. On the competition Vollmann said: "The first one who hits the network effect will lead."
Posted at 08:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 13, 2006
Euro VCs Back BridgeCo's Move To LA
BridgeCo, a Swiss startup specialized in digital home networking chips and middleware, has raised a series D round of $23M, led by two new investors, Advent Venture Partners and Wellington Partners, both European fund managers.They were joined by all of BridgeCo’s Series C investors: Benchmark Capital, Cipio Partners (formerly Infineon Ventures), Earlybird Venture Capital, Fidelity Ventures and Intel Capital.
The company also announced the opening of their new global headquarters in Los Angeles. The capital injection is to be used to "accelerate market adoption and product development activities".All but one of the firm's original founders have left the company and it has recently appointed Gene Sheridan as CEO who hails from an executive role in the communications unit of International Rectifier, a power semiconductor manufacturer. The move to LA is meant to tap the market proximity, the "entrepreneurial leadership talent, expansion, and exit opportunities" provided by that locale.
Read- BridgeCo Raises $23M in Latest Venture Finance Round
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June 09, 2006
Zattoo= P2P + European TV + DRM
Looks like P2P streaming is attracting entrepreneurs and European broadcasters. We've been writing about Octoshape and now there's another entrant to mention, Zattoo.The startup says it aims to deliver TV on the Web with the same quality as broadcast television, going for full DRM, authorized, and localized version of the service.
Based in San Francisco, with development in Ann Arbor and Zurich, Zattoo was co-founded by CEO Beat Knecht, a Swiss techie with management experience at UBS, McKinsey. Prior to founding Zattoo, he had been heading up marketing at Levanta (formerly Linuxcare) in San Francisco. Co-founder is CTO Sugih Jamin, an associate professor at Uni Chicago.
Zattoo debuts this week in Switzerland, broadcasting World Cup soccer matches for the national Swiss TV org Schweizer Fernsehen (SFI, 2 and TSR). It will be adding broadcasts from German, French, and Italian networks, as well as a smattering of news networks (Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, CNN etc)
We have an open question on the service - how does Zattoo know the location of the viewer? Is it based on the IP address or a virtual location based on email addresses? It must have some mechanism in place to restrict viewer access so that only those allowed to watch, based on the rights assigned the broadcaster, are given access.
Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 05, 2006
Your Choice: Best Biz Social Network
We know where the VCs are putting their money. But what about you, which is the best business social networking site for connecting to your peers in Europe?
Posted at 09:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 03, 2006
French Rival For OpenBC
Viaduc has tapped two French VCs for €5M to internationalize its business-oriented social networking platform.Founders are Dan Serfaty and Thierry Lunati, a team that also founded Internet startups Caramail and Lokace, acquired by Lycos and Tiscali respectively.
It's big in France with over a half a million users and the new capital is for platform development and expansion of the model into a couple of other countries, but the startup is not saying which ones.
We hear from Viaduc's corporate finance advisor, Chausson Finance, that 8 VCs wanted a piece of the Viaduc transaction. The founders selected two, AGF Private Equity and Ventech.
The deal gives OpenBC its second well-funded rival in the European market. The other is UK-based Soflow, which is backed by Clifford Holding and Mel Morris, a business angel.
OpenBC has a head start on European rivals.Posted at 11:24 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 02, 2006
P2P Streaming Goes Live With Octoshape
Danish startup, Octoshape, is a developer of peer-to-peer software that enables live streaming of videos and radio broadcasts. It's been on our radar for a while and we noticed that lately it's been growing its customer reference list.
Last month we mentioned that the Eurovision Song Content used Octoshape's software to broadcast the show live online. But others such as the International Ice Hockey Federation World Championships have used it recently, as well as the grand final broadcasts of World eSports Games, an online gaming tournament.
Niche markets to be sure, but the startup claims a 97 percent improvement over the costs of existing streaming methods and the ability to scale up for large audiences, so it has the potential to get bigger.
A media savvy sales team could do a lot with what Octoshape has to offer. Right now pricing plans are based on the size of the customer. Free trials for prospective buyers are available.
Octoshape is venture-backed and was founded in 2003 by two techies: Stephen Alstrup, CEO, and Theis Rauhe, CTO. Investors are Nordic Venture Partners and IVS.
Posted at 10:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 28, 2006
VC-backed Setanta To Raise More Cash
Publicly mulling plans to offer major sports content over free satellite channels and broadband to reach the magic audience numbers it requires to break-even, Setanta is putting the word out that it will need to raise more capital.
The pay TV group that recently ended BSkyB's dominance of live Premier League coverage confirmed yesterday it would screen matches on Freeview and broadband internet services as well as on cable and satellite.Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan, founders and joint chief executives of Setanta, dismissed suggestions from analysts that the company had overpaid for the rights and announced plans to launch a fresh round of fundraising for the company, which is 40% owned by venture capital firm Benchmark.
Setanta starts fund raising and seeks new investor (The Guardian)
Posted at 11:32 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2006
Benchmark Europe Backs Classmates Clone Bebo
Saying they are trying to pick the next Yahoo, Benchmark Capital has taken a $15M stake in Classmates.com clone Bebo, based in the UK with the plan to take it to the US. No disclosure on terms but we note that the founders still own the largest stake in the company.According to a report in the Guardian, Bebo has been winning market share in the UK from MySpace and is now the number two to MySpace's number one.
As alarm:clock, our sister site, has been reporting there is plenty of competition already in the US market. We're wondering what it is that makes Benchmark think this British upstart has a chance. Its London team has at least one partner with a strong television industry background. And both of the big exits in this field have been driven by TV companies, Friends Reunited was bought be ITV and MySpace by Fox Interactive - is that the direction they will go with this one? And as for saying they want to back the next Yahoo, we say: who doesn't?
Read - Setanta backers spend $15m in search for the next Yahoo (Guardian)
Posted at 05:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 17, 2006
Sound-tracks For Online Slideshows And Blogs
Calif-based Sonific has raised seed financing from US and UK based business angels of less than $2.5M. It is a media deal but because a lot of our readers have blogs, we’ve looked into it a little more closely than normal. Plus its founder is a European who lives part of the time in Basel.
Sonific's founder is Gerd Leonhard, an author and entrepreneur specialized in the muisc business. His last venture was LicenseMusic.com, a "typical dotcom", he said, one that is however still in business. He started up Sonific last year to provide licensed music to blog owners, people that photo albums online or websites that want to provide background music to their visitors.A link from the site takes visitors to the catalog of music of mainly indepedent and lesser known musicisans (that want to become better known) on sale from Sonific. If a visitor purchases a track, the blog owner receives a share of the sales. The affiliate marketing scheme is not going to be available for at least the next four months, said Leonhard, but the Sonific service is to go live within the next two. It's a global market, with strong prospects in East Asia, according Leonhard.
Link - Example of music integration as banner-ad in blog.
Posted at 01:52 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 16, 2006
Musicbrigade: MTV For The Broadband Crowd
Swedish VC fund Provider Venture Partners has invested about €3.2M in Musicbrigade, a developer of a platform for downloading and distributing music, videos, and audio via the web and mobile devices, buying itself a 28 percent stake in the seven year old venture.Musicbrigade started out as a music video distributor, an online version of MTV (at least the way it was in the eighties when it was mainly broadcasting music videos). It has 40 different music video channels.
But the Swedish company is now aiming to become a "onestop-shop for all digital music online", including audio and video.
Customers today are mainly in Northern Europe: broadband operators(Bredbandsbolaget, Telenor, Chello, Telewest/NTL, a o), portals (Microsoft Windows Media, On-line Spotlight, ao), mobile operators (3, Telenor/Vodafone, a o) as well as the hardware manufacturer Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
The plan is to use the capital to "substantially increase the presence on the European market".
Read - Provider invests in Musicbrigade (press release)
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May 14, 2006
More HabboHotel Clones in Europe
Sulake Labs' Habbo Hotel, the graphical online chat and virtual community site, has grown to over 40 million, and spawned a few copycats or variation on the theme, including Playdo in Sweden which reports 405,000; Dubit, based in the UK, reports 415,700 members and Taatu in Belgium with an unpublished number of registered members.
Playdo also develops gaming applications such as webcam-to-game integration. Sony's EyeToy has a similar feature.
Dubit offers members their own blogs, online games, and cash incentives to complete marketing surveys.Update: Silicon Beat has a post on yet another one, this one's called Doppelganger
Read - With record company (Silicon Beat)
Read - HabboHotel Clone Taatu (a:c euro)Posted at 05:42 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 11, 2006
Sports Content Hot For M&A
We're noticing a little spike in sporting news and content M&A in Europe. Yesterday London-ba
