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March 20, 2008

London's Spinvox Gets Agro With $100M Investment

Goldman Sachs together with GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management have invested $100M in London-based Spinvox, which converts voice mail to email. This third round of funding gives SpinVox a valuation greater than $500M. Spinvox had previously raised $100M.

SpinVox has deals with 12 cell phone carriers led by Canada's Rogers Mobile and Alltel Wireless.

$200M invested in a startup led by a 31 year old is a big bet. But CEO and founder Christina Domecq appears confident. (She is an American-educated member of the Domecq sherry dynasty.) And apparently Spinvox has won in the hundreds of thousands of users who have brought the company close to break-even despite a three hundred person head count.

View - site

Posted at 06:33 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

February 06, 2008

Finnish Mobile TV Middleware Startup Raises

Nexit Ventures announced it has invested in Finland-based Axel Technologies, a DVB-H mobile TV middleware vendor that also supplies the mobile client software. The product name is Salmonstream.

Co-investing in this undisclosed-sized round is existing investor Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., a state-backed fund manager.

Pekka Salonoja of Nexit Ventures said in a statement, "The company is already positioned among the top five developers of mobile TV middleware globally, with a track record of successful deployments at top-line customers including AMD and Thomson.".

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Former Skype Team Invests With Intel in FlowPlay

Showing that it can bring in some VC specialists to portfolio firms, Ambient Sound Investments (an investment firm formed by several former Skype engineers) has brought in Intel Capital for a $3.7M Series A round of financing for casual gaming technology company FlowPlay.

The Estonian fund informs us that it co-led the new round after making a seed investment mid-year 2007.

Crunchbase describes FlowPlay, which is based in Seattle, as a virtual world community built around browser-based casual games.

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VC-Backed Affiliate Marketing Firm in UK Acquired By AOL

We received the news yesterday that AOL has acquired the VC-backed company behind buy.at, a five year old UK affiliate marketing company. No disclosure on transaction size.

It is the second acquisition that AOL has made in Europe in recent months to bulk up its Advertising.com business. The other was its acquisition of AdTech in Germany

This deal, as paidcontent points out is meant to give some affiliate marketing mojo to advertising.com.

Europe's M&A has seen several affiliate marketing-related M&A deals of greater than €100M this past year or so, as we have reported, with Zanox getting bought for €214M (it was not VC-backed, we note) and Tradedoubler doing some acquiring too. Publicly-traded Tradedoubler was itself the target of a failed multi-hundred million euro bid to acquire by AOL (see second paragraph in this link).

AOL ACQUIRES UK’S BUY.AT AFFILIATE NETWORK FOR ADVERTISING.COM

Leading Provider of Ecommerce Affiliate Solutions Will Expand Advertising.com’s Performance Based Offerings to Advertisers and Publishers

LONDON – Feb 5, 2008 – AOL announced today that it has acquired buy.at, a leading independent affiliate network that provides a platform for performance based e-commerce marketing programs to advertisers and publishers. buy.at will operate as a wholly-owned business unit of Advertising.com, part of AOL’s Platform-A organization.

“This transaction will position Advertising.com to serve merchant and retail advertisers with the industry's most comprehensive set of e-commerce offerings,” said Lynda Clarizio, President of Advertising.com. “By leveraging our web advertising network and search engine marketing services and now buy.at’s innovative affiliate network we can provide advertisers a wide array of marketing solutions to drive sales and other transactions. We are looking forward to accelerating the expansion of buy.at’s affiliate network in the United Kingdom, United States and other European countries.”

buy.at, recently named the UK’s 9th fastest growing private technology company in the Sunday Times Tech Track, is an affiliate marketing network in which affiliates (publishers) partner with advertisers (merchants) to enhance sales growth by driving consumers to those companies' websites. Unlike traditional display advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) models, an advertiser only pays when a visitor to its site takes action (such as making a purchase or signing up for a free trial). buy.at has consistently been a leader in technology innovation and development, with recent releases such as its ContentEngine, which allows retailers to promote their products and offers dynamically on affiliate websites. buy.at was also the first network to launch an integrated affiliate solution for users of social networking sites, working with WAYN, the travel-focused social network. And through its buy.at leads division, the company sources high-quality consumer leads for merchants in the financial services industry. The buy.at affiliate network was founded in 2002 and is backed by venture capitalist DFJ Esprit.

“The combination of Advertising.com and buy.at provides a significant opportunity for advertisers to leverage an expanded publisher base with even more tools and services, creating a unique offering in the market,” said Kevin Cornils, CEO of buy.at. “buy.at has always focused on providing top-class customer service and customized technology to leading retailers and e-commerce businesses and we are looking forward to extending that to Advertising.com’s client base. Planned investment from AOL and Advertising.com will also allow the buy.at affiliate network to continue its growth and to maintain and even accelerate its market-leading offerings of products and services for our existing clients as well.”

“Within this fast-paced environment, only networks that can grow, develop and innovate with their advertisers and publishers will continue to deliver higher levels of incremental revenue opportunities,” said Brendan Condon, Managing Director of Advertising.com International. “Advertisers are increasingly coming to realize that along side display and search engine marketing, affiliate marketing needs to be an important part of their online strategies. We are excited to begin working with buy.at as we continue to increase our network offerings in the UK and throughout Europe.”

The acquisition comes as affiliate marketing in the UK grew by an estimated 45% in 2007. According to research published in E-consultancy’s Affiliate Marketing Networks Buyer’s Guide, total affiliate marketing sales were more than £3 billion compared to £2.16 billion in 2006. This research continues to illustrate the increased acceptance by advertisers to embrace this form of marketing as a way to drive online sales.

With offices in London and Newcastle in the United Kingdom and in New York in the U.S., buy.at employs approximately 70 people and offers affiliate marketing in both the U.S. and UK and counts over 200 leading ecommerce businesses as its clients. Advertising.com also has operations in the U.S. and ten other countries, nine in Europe plus Japan. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

buy.at is the fifth advertising acquisition AOL has made in the past 12 months. Last year, AOL acquired Quigo, a contextual advertising firm; TACODA, a behavioral targeting firm; Third Screen Media, the leading mobile advertising network and software provider; and AdTech AG, the leading international online ad-serving company based in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2006, AOL acquired Lightningcast, a leader in delivering advertising solutions for on-demand, live and downloaded video content across the Web. AOL acquired Advertising.com, which operates the largest third-party display network, in 2004.

About AOL
AOL® is a global Web services company that operates some of the most popular Web destinations, offers a comprehensive suite of free software and services runs one of the largest Internet access businesses in the U.S., and provides a full set of advertising solutions. A majority-owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), AOL LLC and its subsidiaries have operations in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia. Learn more at AOL.com.

About Advertising.com
Advertising.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL LLC, is a global online advertising services company. The company offers a fully integrated suite of online advertising solutions, including display advertising, search engine marketing, managed affiliate placements and video advertising. These solutions are powered by Advertising.com’s award-winning optimization technology and industry-leading third-party display advertising network, which reaches more unique visitors each month than any other online property.

About buy.at
buy.at, backed by DFJ Esprit and founded in 2002, is leading the next generation of affiliate marketing and drives significant online sales for over 200 leading ecommerce brands. With a specialized affiliate network focus, buy.at is committed to producing campaigns that add value to their client's current marketing strategy and drive maximum online results. Each client benefits from a customized package of industry leading commercial and technical innovations, supported by a pro-active account management team of marketing and technical experts. Having pioneered the idea of an 'open network', buy.at ensures that its clients build strong relationships with leading affiliates, managing their brand more effectively and driving market-leading sales volumes. buy.at is the trading name for Perfiliate Limited and Perfiliate Technologies Limited.

Posted at 06:02 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

February 05, 2008

VC-backed Lovefilm Gets Amazon as Investor and Wins Its UK/German Biz

Lovefilm, an online DVD rental service provider, is taking over Amazon Europe’s DVD business in the UK and Germany in a deal that could increase the UK's company's subscriber base to 900K.

The transaction subject to regulatory approval, will also make Amazon its largest shareholder, according to CEO Simon Calver in an interview with alarm:clock euro. "It has a minority stake, but it is the largest shareholder now," he said.

Lovefilm has several other shareholders as a result of its merger with Video Island in 2006 (a 50:50 merger), namely Arts Alliance Media, Index Ventures, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit.

This is the latest example of consolidation in this relatively young category of DVD rental and video downloads, what with Glowria, which did several acquistions itself, getting folded into Netgem (our report here).

On that topic Calver said: "Starting up a DVD rental business is easy, but getting the customer experience right is not as easy."

He said that some £20M has been raised by the firm, which has been invested in branding, marketing, and some small acquisitions, as well as in infrastructure (e.g. CRM software). Lovefilm's platform some features like a recommendation engine. Paidcontent describes some of the other services in an analysis of the deal.

Calver did not disclose sales figures. But it was reported last year in Times Online that the firm did £26M in 2005, a figure that has seen some quick growth and was recognized last year.

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Venere.com Acquires Italian Online Travel Biz

Advent International, a private equity firm, sent us the news that its portfolio company Venere.com, a 13 year old online hotel bookings provider, has acquired Italy's Worldby.com. No disclsoure on terms or size of the transaction.

Venere.com does 20 percent of its business in Italy and has operations in Paris and London. It could be that further acquisitions are in store covering other European countries, as Advent says it likes the "buy and build" strategy.
View Venere.com

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February 04, 2008

Norwegian Fund Invests in US-based Efficient Motor Team

Norway's Energy Ventures has led a $12M B round in Cerritos, California based Direct Drive Systems Inc, a two year old venture that manufactures high speed permanent magnet motors and generators of the multi-megawatts size. The units have no need for a gearbox, said the firm's backers in a statement, and are smaller, lighter and less maintenance intensive than conventional machinery.

We're reporting it because Energy Ventures is European and one of the handful of VC funds here that has experience in backing growth ventures that sell into the oil and gas industry, which is not exactly the easiest market for startups to break into.

A recent success story is MTEM, one of the top 10 vc-backed trade sales last year. It just raised a new $234M fund on the back of several good exits from previous funds. Energy Ventures has offices in Aberdeen, Stavanger and Houston. The firm is currently recruiting VC professionals.

Read - Energy Ventures announcement pdf

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Germany's Odersun Raises $90M for Factory

Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures (DHTV) sent us the news this morning that portfolio company Odersun, a thin film solar cell venture, has raised some €61M (about $90M) in finance, including grants, to build its second factory.

A €40M Series B round, is included in that total.
(Image Credit: Odersun)

We checked in with DHTV and it confirmed that Odersun has "proven that it can manufacture in volume" these new thin-film solar cells and modules. The firm's first manufacturing factory is up-and-running and shipping product.

This new equity round was led by Virgin Green Fund (US/UK) with participation from PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (US) and AGF Private Equity (part of Allianz Group) in addition to existing investors DHTV and Advanced Technology & Materials (China).

Caption: Panels are flexible, which means its tech can be used as solar rechargers built- into shoulder bags, but also panels that can be integrated into building facades, and windows.

Odersun says it is using a “reel-to-reel” manufacturing process, which is proprietary to the firm. Its cells are based on Copper-Indium-diSulphide materials (as opposed to silicon which is more common) and their "efficiency is comparable to other thin-film technologies", said DHTV's spokesman.

Greentech Media has a photo of its flexible copper-substrate panel if you are curious.

View Odersun

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February 01, 2008

Collanos Collaboration Company Raising Series A Round

Collanos, a Swiss/US startup that runs a workplace collaboration platform, sent us the news that it is raising a €3M Series A round, beginning with an investment by Zürcher Kantonalbank.

The company was founded in late 2003 and has raised between $2M and $3M to date, the firm's CEO Peter Helfenstein told the alarm:clock euro.

Collanos Workplace is currently preparing for the release of version 1.3. "It will have a new replication algorithm making team synchronization much more efficient and changes much more available to other team members," he explained.

It is the foundation for upcoming premium services, such as Collanos Permanent Peers (available end of Q2) via Collanos' partners like Translumina Networks, and Collanos Phone premium to launch at end of Q1.

Helfenstein said a roster of 15 people are working for Collanos, some part time or subcontracted, in Switzerland (Zurich), in the U.S. (San Francisco, Provo/Utah, Ukraine (Kharkov) and India (Hyderabad).

Since the launch of version 1.1 Collanos in mid-May 2007, about 10’000 users are registered.

Posted at 09:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 31, 2008

Clear2Pay's Backers Put in €10M More

Tornado Insider is the source for the news that Clear2Pay, an international provider of next generation payment technolgy and solutions, has raised a €10M internal round, led by Iris Capital and an investor since November 2006.

Clear2Pay has been an acquisitive startup since it started up in 2001, and as a result has operations in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, China, Malaysia and Singapore. China is next and that was the reason given for the new financing round.

It currently employs 340 staff.

Posted at 11:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Shozu Raises C Round, Brings in New Investors

Tornado Insider has the news that ShoZu, a UK mobile social media company that has its own client software, raised €8.1M in Series C deal. It was led by new investor SEB Venture Capital, a UK-based venture capital arm of Swedish financial services firm Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken. Existing backers Atlas Venture, Crescendo Ventures and TTP Ventures also participated.

According to the Tornado report ShoZu's client will ship pre-installed on more than 50 million mobile phones in 2008 and 100,000 users are registering every month.

Posted at 11:00 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Virtensys Backers Invest Another $12M

Another internal round to report this week as Virtensys raises $12M. VirtenSys, which has a virtualization solution for data centers, said it has raised $12M in an internal Series B round. It is backed by Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP), and GIMV.

The pre-revenue company, which recenlty brought in a new CEO and opened a US headquarters, said in the funding announcement the capital will be used to launch the first products and grow operations at home and abroad.

Before Virtensys on the left, and After on the right

View Virtensys

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January 30, 2008

Scottish Startup Makes 10X Smaller PDFs

Ten X claims catch our attention, which is the reason we did not pass on a PR from Crisp Documents, a Glasgow-based startup that sent us the news that it won an industry award (industry awards don't normally get coverage here).

Instead we dug up a couple of reports on the company in the local newspaper, The Herald to learn more about the business and its patented encoding software that it says reduces dramatically the size of a PDF and other file types.

Even with broadband, we know that PDF docs are still a pain.

It seems the company had a profitable first year, generating £800K in sales using its vPDF software (see examples in the images we snagged from one of its website) to underpin a new document archiving and management service.

Its latest contract win is with the US DoD in December. It looks like for organizations that run heavy on the documentation side, better file compression is much wanted.

The founders, Greg Stobie and Lorne Campbell, liquidated their pensions and re-mortgaged their homes to start the business, turned down an offer from Microsoft early on, and are intent to run the 15-person strong business at speed with an eye on the US market.

View Crisp

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Why Too Early Mobile Social Startups Are Heading To The US

Europe has a reputation for being ahead of the US when it comes to mobile services but for mobile social networking ventures that have had some early success in Europe, the US is the place to be. Why? Because mobile network operators there are reportedly rolling out flat rate data plans faster than elsewhere, which startups hope will enable some quick growth.

Maybe mobile social networking is compatible with making money-- if you have a good few years to work at it, are able get brands like MTV to sign marketing deals, and are able to balance working with cellcos, while building up something off-deck, at least that how it sounds for Australian startup FunkySexyCool and Germany's GoFresh.

GoFresh is a white label mobile service provider that also runs its own wap site called itsmy.com. Five years old, self-funded, it employs 15 people full time. The company generates revenues by selling advertising on its own site, and collecting fees from the mobile network operators that use its platform.

It has also developed new software to better manage the ads and advertising sales aspect of the business.

We recently talked to Mikko Saarelainen who co-founded the company along with his brother and two other ex-Iobox employees. Right now what he's concerned with expanding penetration of the US market. He said that operators there have more wholeheartedly rolled out flat rate data models - key to growing the itsmy branded site.

The US market is also the current target for FunkySexyCool, another similarly-oriented venture, that has made some headway getting on-deck with operators in Germany and its home market Downunder. This one we read about in profile in the Australian edition of The Age. .

It has been in business for more than four years but "drawing traffic and building the brand" is still its focus. Although it is generating some revenues, the article says its raising capital for a push into the US after it put the foundation in place for greater volumes of users. Its founder said he's looking for growth there but also sees the US as providing the exit opportunity.

View GoFresh
View Funky Sexy Cool

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January 29, 2008

Cachelogic Investors Put Up $25M More and Other Fresh Euro Deals

7Digital, not to be confused with We7, has raised a £4.5M (about €6 M) reports techcrunch.

Cachelogic, which has been sniffing packets and moving content for five years now, has raised a $25M (about€17M) internal round reports paidcontent

Intershop co-founder and Demandware founder, Stephan Schambach has invested along with other business angels in emigo a vendor of easy to set up online shop packages, according to a report in Handelsblatt. emigo will compete we assume with Zlio and commercetools to name two recently funded rival types.

Posted at 01:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 28, 2008

Nokians and Trolls in €105M Deal and Other Fresh Euro Deals

Nokians and Trolls in €105 Deal Nokia has an announced an offer to buy publicly traded Trolltech for about €105M. The transaction has been widely reported. We found the press release fairly cryptic. So we turned to Bal Balaji, whose software company DeviceDriven develops products for the mobilephone industry, for some commentary on what impact the deal might have on the mobile OS competitive environment.

Balaji writes: " Nokia already has a significant investment in Linux. So I see this as a defensive measure as opposed to a vote of confidence for Linux as an OS for mobile phones. Is Nokia trying to protect itself against Android?"

With that comment in mind, if Nokia starts acquiring other Linux proponents like PurpleLabs (recently financed by Euro VC) or it buys A La Mobile, or one of the other Linux for mobile device vendors, then the strategy might become clearer.

Zubka's looking for another round of capital. And is talking up the riches to be made with online job referral applications.
Read - Exec Digital UK Site : News : Zubka unique recruitment - Web 2.0 referral recruitment - recommendation

Microbial Solutions raised £1.2M for waste water treatment. We're all for new technologies being applied to issues like what to do with polluted and dirty water, but this one had us feeling a bit queasy. It is about using toxic-and-metal-hungry bacteria and flushing the resulting so-called grey water back into the sewage system.

"Microbial Solutions uses a simple bioreactor ... containing a meshed plastic grid on which a variety of non-pathogenic bacteria are cultivated - each bacterial species feeds off different components of the metal working fluids, together ‘eating’ the polluting and toxic elements. The resulting grey water is disposed of to sewer, removing the need to transport to landfill, and the next batch of metal working fluid is added to repeat the process.
The technology has been successfully trialed with a leading car manufacturer, the firm said in a statement.
Read Tornado Insider - Microbial Solutions Ltd

Posted at 03:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Europe's Techies Want Into Our Ears

Swiss R&D Center, CSEM is showing a prototype of a heart rate monitor fitted into a earclip-type headphone called Pulsear. The PR says it is a Walkman brand integration. No bulky chest strap required. It is called the Pulsear and we assume it is available for licensing.

Meanwhile German designers have come up with ear drop in devices that play one song, one time. It is called Music Drop from Design Reactor. We're assuming this is more of a concept for design discussion as opposed to a licensing-ready solution.

Posted at 01:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 25, 2008

Startup Takes Pain Out of Coding for 700 Cellphone Types

Altaide blog has the news that Mobile Distillery, a startup from the Southern French city of Marseille, has raised €2M from Innoveris and Viveris Management. The two-year old company's software tools and directories make it easier to port mobile applications, mobile marketing campaigns, and mobile content for the myriad of handsets out there including Javaphone types, BREW phones, and the Android platform.
View Mobile Distillery

Posted at 05:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Angels Back German Woot Clone

Preisbock an ecommerce startup emerging from the Intershop crew in Jena said in a statement today it has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from ARGIV GmbH (an investment vehicle of one of Intershop's founders) and TowerVenture eG (a seed stage investment club established in July 2007).

If you know Woot, then you know what Preisbock is about: price specials on a different product each day that last as long as they're in stock. The startup launched last summer and claims 10K visitors a day.
Read Intershop Founders' New Ventures (alarm:clock euro)
View Preisbock

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January 24, 2008

Pacemaker for Nordic VCs

It is changed days in Europe if a consumer-oriented gadgetmaker can attract venture capital money. That was our first thought when Via Venture sent us the news that it had invested in Tonium, whose first product is a pocket-sized digital music mixer, called Pacemaker, targeted at DJs and wannabe DJs. It had positive reviews on several of the top gadget blogs but it is not shipping yet. Its website suggests it's taking orders first.

The Swedish company raised 23 SEK, about €2.4M from Nordic region VC funds, including new investor Via Venture Partners along with existing investors Industrifonden and Arvid Svensson and Ekstranda Media.

View Tonium

Posted at 10:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 23, 2008

Deals in the News: MoMail, Dibcom, Cember.Net, TheCloud, Alfresco, and ipaccess

News from the venture market sees Xing buying Turkish socnet Cember.net, TheCloud making a German acquisition, while Cisco adds to the syndicate of investors backing ip.access in the UK. Elsewhere, Alfresco raised capital, a Swedish mobile email startup tapped investors for a nice sized first round, and a new board member for Dibcom suggests an IPO is in the works.

XING AG acquires cember.net, Turkey’s leading online business Network. About the acquisition, Xing's CEO Lars Hinrichs said: We view Turkey as being one of Europe’s fastest growing national economies. As well as proving a profitable company, cember.net has the key advantage of already being an established brand within Turkey. "
Read - XING Corporate Information

The Cloud Make German Buy To add 5,000 Hotels Networks VC-baced wireless network provider TheCloud has acquired GlobalAirNet AG (Ganag), for an undisclosed amount. Ganag, based in Munich Germany, claims 5,000 Wi-Fi access points located in over 300 hotels. The UK-based company now has a footprint that covers Germany, Sweden,Denmark, Norway and The Netherlands.

In a statement TheCloud's CEO predicted that the mobile network operators will "continue to wrestle with poor performing data networks over the coming 12 to 18 months" to his firm's benefit.
Read - THE CLOUD ANNOUNCES STRATEGIC ACQUISITION IN GERMANY

Alfresco, an open source content management system provider, has raised $9M in a series C round led by SAP Ventures. Early investors Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund also participated. ZDNET queries SAP's involvement in the round, but it also had a stake in recently acquired MySQL, so it is not the first time.
Read - Alfresco Secures

Momail Taps Angels and Institutional Investors for First Round. Momail a mobile email platform provider has raised a first round of funding of SEK 35 million ($5.4M), reports PEHub. Investors include the Swedish 6th Pension Fund and Bonnier Invest, as well as individual investors from Sweden, England, Russia and South Africa.
Read -Private Equity HUB - Momail Raises First Round

Former CSR Exec on Dibcom Board: Seen as Pre-IPO MoveEETimes is reporting that mobile TV chip startup DiBcom, based in Palaiseau, France, has brought on board Glenn Collinson , a co-founder and former exec at Bluetooth chip group CSR to its board, and suggests that move "another indication of DiBcom's plans to go for an IPO or stock market flotation soon".
Read - EETIMES Collinson

Cisco Backs UK-based Small-sized Basestation Firm. Also from EE Times comes the news that Cisco has taken a stake for an undisclosed amount in femtocell startup ip.access (Cambridge, England).
Read - Cisco invests in femtocell pioneer ip.access

Posted at 07:52 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Global Mobile Roaming Startup Bags Big Round

We received the news today that United Mobile, a low-cost roaming mobile operator that markets its own SIM cards, has closed a $15M round of equity financing in a deal led by Accel Partners and Grazia Equity. The business angels involved in the financing are names regular readers will recognize: Morten Lund, Thomas Geitner, former global CTO of Vodafone, and Robert Zacconi, CEO of King.com.

We wrote about the first part of this fundraising last year in a post about the Lime Green sofa trend.

Posted at 11:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 22, 2008

Index Ventures Gets Growth Money

Index Ventures sent us the news that it has added a new €400M fund that can invest in so-called growth, or expansion phase, ventures. It has a dual focus, life science and tech, with plans to invest in 15 companies.

The fund is targetting entrepreneurs whose businesses are already generating quick growing sales and who want to grow the business more before doing an IPO or a trade sale.

Investment activity is directed by Index co-founder Giuseppe Zocco (left) and Dominique Vidal (right), previously CEO of Yahoo! Europe and co-founder of Kelkoo. He was with Paris-based Banexi before that. (Image source: Index Ventures)

Going straight from self-funding to a pre-IPO round, or a pre-trade sale round, has become more common in Europe in recent years. We can think of several examples in the French market particularly.

AGF Private Equity, acquired a minority stake in French dating site Meetic.com (IPO) and was able to get a relatively rapid return when the firm floated a year or so later, while 3i did well with Seloger.com (IPO), also in France.

US venture funds like Summit Partners have for several years been active in the growth sector in Europe. For example, it acquired a majority stake in the Samwer brothers Jamba venture back in 2003 for $40M and then did a dual track IPO/M&A strategy which led to the company being acquired in 2004 by Verisign for $273M.

It recently acquired a stake Vente Privée, the fast growing French private sale company.

Other VC firms that say they are active in the later stage European tech venture market and that have raised new funds since the post-bubble-downturn include Invision, Kennet and Iris Capital.

The fact that Index has now also entered this stage in addition to its early stage foucs, and was able to raise the fund quickly, suggests that limited partner types see plenty of opportunity in Europe these days.

Zocco said as much in a statement: “There is now a critical mass of companies that have the potential to be market leaders and make a global impact. With the growth fund, we have the ability to find and support these companies, helping them get to the next level.”
See also Index Ventures fund eyes maturing European tech | Special Coverage | Reuters
Index Sets Sights l Financial Times

Posted at 08:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

VC Money Piles Into UK Web Ventures: W7 and TouchLocal

The European market might have seen a dip in Web investments in 4Q07 as TechCrunch writes, but this quarter is looking like that might change. After reporting a flurry of deal announcements last week, we've got two more to report today.

=> We7, a UK-based music download service driven by advertising sales, has raised a $6M Series ‘A’ round led by musician turned investor Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures. Also joining was early stage British VC firm Eden Ventures.

The founders of We7 are John Taysom, chairman, and CEO Steve Purdham. This is not Purdham's first venture. He was also the founder of SurfControl, a publicly-traded firm that was acquired by Websense last year for about £204M (about $400M at the time).

After one year of trading We7 reports it has 90,000 registered download users and delivery of over one million free to download, ad-supported music files from its growing music catalogue of 80,000 tracks.

The companyappears to have some interesting advertising technology to support it, with some finely tuned demographic targetting. So far, it has run advertising trials with Microsoft, for Xbox 360, and campaigns for Sony Ericsson, Café Direct and Sicko, the Michael Moore film.

Joining the board is Eden Ventures, Charles Grimsdale, who co-founded music distribution service OD2 (along with Gabriel), in Nokia's hands since 2006, and is a co-founder of Eden Ventures.

=> Another UK firm, TouchLocal has raised £7M (about €9.4M or $13.6M) from Balderton. It is going for a local search service, one that combines a yellowpages kind of business model (charging local business for positioning in its pages) with a community of recommending/reviewing users.

The company was founded back in 1999 and recently went through a Web 2.0 makeover. The Guardian has a good analysis of its position in the market and TechCrunch UK lists several rivals in an article entitled Qype launches in France, as local reviews space hots up, mentioning Qype, Welovelocal, Tipped, and Trustedplaces.

Posted at 07:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 21, 2008

Telco Magnate Invests in NanoIdent

Austrian printed sensor startup Nanoident has raised new capital of an undisclosed amount from Istanbul-based MV Holding, an investment vehicle that was founded by Murat Vargi, a Forbes 2007 billionaire, and one of the founding shareholders of one of Europe's largest GSM operators.

We recently profiled Nanoident for more details about the company.

The new capital is to be used to develop and grow the business. Nanoident has built one of the first commercial fabs for printing semiconductor devices worldwide.

Vardi said in a statement: “MV Holding has always invested carefully and selectively. After an extensive review process, we are confident that NANOIDENT will provide a strong and sustainable ROI (return on investment), and look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with this innovative company.”

Posted at 05:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

European Angel Money Finds gBox

St. Gallen, Switzerland-based b-to-v sent us the news today that its investor circle is backing an early investment in Cupertino-based gBox, a digital music shopping enabler. The startup developed a widget that can be placed on blogs, personal websites, and socnet homepages (it lists myspace, friendster, and facebook on its website) to show your personal MP3 file wishlist.

The same widget enables members to buy music tracks listed on the wishlists for friends and family as gifts. (See TechCrunch review of gBox for more).

The plan is to add other types of gifts to the catalogue and to make some inroads into the European market, according to the announcement. It also said that it provides a revenue source for social media companies, so it must be able to support revenue sharing.

We don't normally cover US VC deals on this page but the news that gBox has a Euro connection throught its founders and now its investors. gBox is a spinoff of ecommerce service provider Navio, a Calif. based started led by former Brokat co-founder Stefan Roever.

The Brokat connection is what we assume enabled gBox to tap b-to-v for seed financing.

The deal was led by b-to-v member Michael Jansen, a co-founder of Brokat AG. He was CFO from 1994 until 2001, responsible for the arrangement of several venture capital transactions and the firms stellar IPOs (Neuer Markt and NASDAQ) and at one point it had a $6B mkt cap and $250M in sales, according to Roeever.

The company failed to weather the downturn and Jansen led the restructuring in 2001. On his b-to-v profile it says: "He restructured the company from 1,400 people to zero, by selling basically all assets to domestic and international investors." (See Members – About b-to-v )

Posted at 10:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 18, 2008

WAYN Backers Invest in German Travel Community and Other Fresh Deals

austriamicrosystems, a SWX traded semiconductor firm, and New Scale Technologies, of Vector, NY annouced the completion of a Series B round with the European chipcom making a $6M investment in exchange for a 25% minority share in the company. New Scale makes very tiny piezo motors (shown above) for cameraphone autofocus, electronic locks, and other applications.
Read - austriamicrosystems AG - Financial News

Deutsche Startups has the news that AdScale, a Germany-centric online ads service provider (based on auction-model) has raised new capital from early investors Holtzbrinck and European Founders Fund. It also recruited to the management team Matthias Pantke who drove TradeDoubler's business in the DACH region. Industry insider Oliver Thylmann recently reviewed AdScale and OpenAds (funding announcement earlier this week). Worth reading to learn more.
Read - OpenAds Getting

Tornado Insider is reporting a rare space-related VC funding deal. A Dutch/German real-time game engine company, iOpener, has raised capital from German venture capitalist Triangle. It looks like the startup aims to embed satellite nav system chips in racing cars and use its software to enable regular folks to join games and compare themselves with the professionals and "when an actual live event is going on" .
Read - ESA spin-off scores €4.1 million for real-world, yet virtual, gaming

Howzat Media, an investment vehicle of two British Internet entrepreneurs, who also invested in WAYN, an online travel community, has made its first investment in Germany, backing trivago, a two year old travel community that has reviews of holidays, accomodation, and destinations. Deutsche Startups has a report with details on other investors. And TechCrunch UK has some reporting on rumors about WAYN being acquired.
Read : HOWZAT media

Computer Business Review reports that Audiotube, an online music video portal, has acquired video encoding and playback products and technologies from CineFX, a UK-based software development company.

Posted at 12:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 17, 2008

SponsoredPost: Plugg Wants Your Pitches

The alarm:clock euro is a media sponsor of the upcoming Plugg conference. The March 19th conference in Brussels promises to be a chance for you to get up to speed on Web 2.0 in Europe.

Our first announcement in the run up to the one-day event is that the registration for European start-ups is open. Companies can now submit their profile sheet online to qualify for a chance to pitch at the conference.

Entries will be judged by a number of industry professionals and 20 of them will eventually get to pitch at the Plugg conference.

Deadline for registration is Friday the 8th of February.

Posted at 03:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Sun's Acquisition of MySQL - What The VCs Said

Yesterday Sun announced that it was acquiring open source database company at a valuation of $1B (€680M) in a deal that is expected to close later this year. In the meantime, one of its investors (see the full list here) Balderton Capital, formerly Benchmark Capital Europe, issued a statement, congratualting the firm, saying that it held about 15% of MySQL.

We checked in with Index Ventures this morning to see if it had a statement too. Danny Rimer - who counts MySQL as the first investment he did as a partner at Index - responded to our email writing that "it’s been exciting for us to watch the company grow as the leader in the open source industry. Now, with the ability to leverage SUN’s global distribution and enterprise support, we look forward to seeing MySQL technology spread even further around the world.”

He pointed out that Index invested in the $19.5 million Series B round in June 2003. Other Open Source companies that Index invested in over the years include: Trolltech, Zend, OPenads and Pentaho.

A comment he made on the European market is worth noting.

"Index believes we’re entering a really interesting time where the power of the European and global markets will now be felt. The startups of 5 to 10 years ago are entering strong growth phases," said Rimer.

Our only comment on the deal from the a:c euro's outsider point of view is that with currency rates the way the are these days, a billion dollar exit is not as sexy as a billion euro exit.

Posted at 02:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Wellington Raises New and Oversubscribed Tech Fund

Wellington Partners has raised a new technology fund of € 265M, which is €15M over target. Its last one was raised just as this new cycle was getting off to a slow start back in 2004.

In the meantime, the firm which invests across Europe, has had several portfolio firms acquired such as ImmobilienScout24 by Deutsche Telekom, while SAF and Xing.com made the IPO move.

Existing investors, LPs, came back for this one, which indicates that the venture firm is making money. The fact that it also brought in new LPs, such as GIC Special Investments, Pantheon Ventures and Skandia Liv Asset Management, suggests that the outlook is positive for the coming few years too.

Wellington Partners will open an office in London with Eric Archambeau (left) and Frank Böhnke (right), managing it.

Eric Archambeau said in a statement that the "new office in London will help us become even more accessible to entrepreneurs across Europe.”

Posted at 02:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Bessemer Invests in Russia and other Fresh Euro Deals

Q-blog is reporting that Enforta, a WIMAX broadband telecom operator active in Russia, raised $40M in a C round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, along with earlier investors Baring Vostok Capital Partners (BVCP), Sumitomo Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Kinkaa.de, an AJAX travel search site, has raised a seed investment from High Tech Gründerfonds, which sent us a note on the deal. The almost two year old site is available in a couple of languages already.

Sunmachine, a Munich-based startup that develops mini-heating and power generators to homeowners, is currently raising about €12M to ramp up production this year. It has raised an undisclosed amount of capital from BayBG Bayerische Beteiligungsgesellschaft as part of the round.

Sunmachine has patents on a generator that burns either gas or wood pellets and is based on a Sterling Motor, which produces heat and electricity for buildings of 280 m² or less. According to the website, a solar powered unit is in the works too.

The investor said in a statement that some 60 companies have signed up for distribution licenses in Germany and Europe. Delivery of 5,000 units are planned this year.

Posted at 01:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

FillFactory Alumni's Startup Goes Large

Cmosis, a semiconductor startup out of Belgium, has a seasoned team and some key patents for making very large imaging chips with large-sized pixels. It is freshly founded and has raised seed capital.

EE Times reported this week that Cmosis NV has raised €1.2M from Capital-E and the founders to fund its operations as it builds up a business developing image sensor products.

The founders are ex-FillFactory people, namely Guy Meynants, Jan Bogaerts, Tim Baeyens, Gerald Lepage and Lou Hermans.

We checked in with Guy Meynants (CEO) because we wrote about FillFactory several times in the past for other publications. Plus, it's memorable because it was one of the first venture-backed exits after the post bubble downturn chilled dealmaking in Europe for several years. The IMEC spinoff was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor for $100M in cash in June 2004.

As an aside to this discussion, another FillFactory alumni, Luc De May, its former CEO, is now with AsicAhead, a venture backed WIMAX chip startup, also based in Belgium.

Meynants said that Cmosis offers image sensor design services, as well as handling the manufacturing of chips for its customers who are mainly in Europe and Japan; typically companies creating new medical imaging (such as X-ray machines) and industrial vision products.

It is a different market than the one that Cypress is addressing with the CMOS image sensors tech that it acquired in the FillFactory deal, but an interesting one.

"X-ray machines use typically very large chips with large pixels," said Meynants. As such, they are hard to manufacture, but this startup has patents on processes that improves the yield and reduces the crosstalk between pixels.

View CMOSIS

Posted at 12:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 16, 2008

Euro VCs Report Flurry of Online Deals Today

Index Ventures and Atlas notified us with news of a few new online service and ad-related investments.

Atlas Ventures, as well as several UK business angels, are backing the founders of a new real estate portal for the UK market called Zoopla. Fred Destin, a general partner at Atlas Ventures, has a post in his blog on the startup with info about the founders and the service it provides. He also provides some rationale for the investment, saying that thhere is competition but Zoopla claims better tech, such as its algorithm for analysing data relating to home prices, economic trends and property characteristics in given geographic areas. Estimates are refined by the firm's staff, according to a statement it issued this week.

The venture has raised over £1.5M to date and has plans to raise additional capital as the business develops, it said in a statement.

Over in France, Criteo, which develops a web-based recommendation engine, has raised €7M in Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures, joined by earlier local investment firms. The press release says that Criteo's real-time personalized recommendations targeted at consumers is attracting more than 50M unique visitors from more than 4,000 ecommerce sites over the past year.

And in London (corrected: not the US as stated earlier), OpenAds, raised a €15M Series B round, led by Accel Partners. Earlier investors in the Series A round (which was led by Index Ventures) also participated, including Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. OpenAds is an open source ad server software firm which it says is used by 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages. The new capital is to be used for a hosted version of the product, according to the press release.

Posted at 11:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 15, 2008

Newly Funded Hello2morrow Keeps Java Coders on Track

mic AG, a listed German investment company specialized in early stage tech ventures, has taken a 25 percent stake in Hello2morrow, a software development toolmaker whose flagship product helps to avoid "structural erosion" on medium and large scale Java projects.

It has a long list of reference customers, some of which have now become reseller partners, which is a good sign. It has also been used in several open source distributions.

Two of the founders of this three year old venture, also founded ootec, which was acquired by the French Valtech group in 2000 and counts the likes of Siemens, BMW, and Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl as customers.

View Hello2morrow

Posted at 10:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

German Angels On Drugs 2.0

Two well-known German web business angels, Lukasz Gadowski (who founded spreadshirt) and Oliver Jung (an entrepreneur turned full time investor - he was an early backer of Xing and StudiVZ) have invested an undisclosed amount in apomio.de, a price comparison portal for medication and prescription drugs.

A quick look at the site shows that its got some Web 2.0 features like one-click price comparisons (to find the cheapest offer on a featured product), a search-cloud for quick links to popular medications (aspirin and other names for the over the counter pain medication seems to be popular), and a widget for calculating your BMI.

The new capital is meant to finance "community features".

In a statement, the new investors cited changes in the German regulatory environment as paving the way for more online drugstores. It did not mention, but we will, the fact that it is a proven market too. A pioneer in the field, DocMorris, was acquired last year by Celesio and is doing about €200M in annual sales these days.

Gadowski said in a statement that apomio is active in the "most dynamic and fastest growing market" out there.

Posted at 09:56 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 14, 2008

Monday Euro Deal Roundup

Renewable Energy World reports that Scottish and Southern Energy is to acquire Irish wind power company Airtricity for a total cash consideration of €1,826.5 million.

Dibcom, the French mobile TV chip startup, has raised some more capital from two Japanese investors. Clipperton Finance advised the startup on the deal.

Bucharest-based security software startup BitDefender gained new financial impetus in December with a €7M round from a syndicate that included Rumanian American Enterprise Fund (RAEF) and the Balkan Accession Fund (BAF) .

Fidelity Ventures announced that it led a $26M round of financing for MFG.com a global online marketplace for the manufacturing industry. Co-investing was the European Founders Fund (EFF). Last year MFG.com acquired sourcingparts.com, a Swiss dotcom survivor and rival.

Posted at 01:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

CrowdSpirit Seeking Capital For New Gadget Design Platform

French newspaper L'Express in a profile of CrowdSpirit, an ambitious web project out of Grenoble that aims to promote and launch new consumer electronics gadgets created by its community, is the news that the startup is looking to raise capital (See Fiche d’identité at end of article).

Gizmodo calls CrowdSpirit's crowdsourcing platform "gadgets-by-committe" in a review of one of the first products to win over members of the community.

The platform, which is still in beta, was co-founded by Lionel David (interviewed here in English) who draws parallels between what he wants to do and what platforms like Cambrian House and Sellaband (in Germany) are doing.

We're thinking that software and digital music have quite different supply chains and production cycles compared to consumer electronics manufacturing. It could be a long wait before contributors see some revenue-shares, at least from what this reporter learned about how long it takes to go from functional spec to selling products while working at jobs in the electronics industry.

But then again, maybe they've figured out how to shorten that process too. We don't know all the details of the venture's business model.

Posted at 01:14 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 11, 2008

Nao That's News: French Robot Firm Funded

First it was Nabaztag, now from France comes Nao. Move over Spyke which also interestingly has a French connection.

Alderbaran Robotics, a company developing small-sized humanoid robots, has raised €5M from CDC and iSource, two local venture capital firms, reports Neteco.

Its first product is Nao, a shapely WiFi robot, that the founders hope will impress at the next Robocup shootout. It is based on a Linux platform and scripted with Urbi, the programming language from another French startup we wrote about a while ago. Labs will get the first units off the production line, but the company plans to sell to the public by end of the year.

Posted at 04:22 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Peratech Acquires Eleksen Assets

(Image Source: Bagir)
Remember Eleksen? We wrote about its technology being used in foldable keyboards and ski-jackets with integrated iPod controls. The suit from Bagir above also exploited the tech.

Eleksen's assets have been acquired from insolvency administrators, reports EE Times . New owner is Peratech, also based in the UK.

Eleksen failed to get the financing it required subsequent to a reverse merger on AIM. While one of its pre-IPO backers made some money on the listing (see bottom of front page in this pdf) the company did not raise enough, apparently.

Peratech said that Eleksen's fabric keyboards are in production. It also recently signed a MoU with Keybo Technology license the tech.

Posted at 08:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

French Social Shopping News

Neteco is reporting that Vozavi.com has raised €750K for its social shopping platform. It is a rival to 3i-backed Twenga, which raised €2.4M in December.

Some numbers on its performance since launch in November 2006, are provided by Neteco, which the tech pub suggests are too bad considering the amount of competition it has, namely Ciao, Looneo, Twenga, Wikio Shopping and AcheterFacile.

Read Avis d'internautes : Vozavi.com lève 750 000 euros

Posted at 07:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

PoLight Looking For More Investors for Cameraphone Lenses

Norwegian optics component developer PoLight ASA, (fka Ignis Display AS) has brought in a SINTEF VC fund to its equity in a €500K deal. SINTEF now owns about 22 percent of the company.

The startup, which has 7-year history under the Ignis Display business, is developing autofocus lens components that can be used in cameraphones and other optical imaging systems.

A regulatory filing from Ignis suggests that PoLight is currently looking for further financial and strategic investors to go to the next level.

View - Ignis news

Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 10, 2008

Trivid Funded For DIY Music Video Service

Trivid GmbH, a German company that runs a web-based music video clip composition service called clipgenerator, has raised an undisclosed amount of VC from L-EigenkapitalAgentur part of L-Bank Baden-Württemberg (L-EA) and SEED.

Trivid has several patents, according to its web site, for its technology that lets users create short multimedia files to download or email afterwards.

We could see that several premium services are available for acquiring music file licenses. The files generated support playback on mobilephones, PC and TV networks. Judging from the press announcement, clipgenerator is just one of several services that this company aims to provide.

View Clipgenerator

Posted at 11:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Mindquarry Team Resurface At Swiss Software Co

Day Software, a content management software company, is the new employer of the founders of Mindquarry, a German open source collaborative software platform provider that had been funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures (we wrote about its insolvency earlier this week).

A December-dated announcement from Day says that Mindquarry founders: Alexander Klimetschek, Alexander Saar and Lars Trieloff, have joined Day's product development team and will bring their AJAX and social mediaknow how to the Swiss company.

Day does about Sfr 20M a year in sales. A dotcom bubble-era IPO gave this company a massive valuation (as the chart below shows). It survived the downturn and makes most of its turnover with services and support. It employs 110.

Posted at 10:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 09, 2008

German Genealogy Site On A Roll - New VC and New Capital

Hamburg-based OSN GmbH, the company behind Verwandt.de and several other language specific family-tree building sites, has raised a new round of finance led by Hasso Plattner Ventures. Early investor Neuhaus is also on board for the round. No disclosure on size, except that it is a "multi-million euro" expansion round.

Over 1.4 million families have started their family trees since the launch of the verwandt.de platform, the firm said in a statement, adding that it has a total of over 16 million profiles.

Its Verwandt.de was the first launched (its name means relations in German) and has been growing at quick rate, according to an article in Techcrunch.

We checked in a while ago with the founders to learn a bit more about growing an international web service like this. Sven Schmidt, one of the founders, replied.

Did you hire locally for international development?

We hired local, native-speakers as country managers for each country we entered so far. We are true believers in going truly local. It is not only about translating the site, it is about making users feel at home.

We have an own blog, an own forum, own customer service etc. for each country. And yes, we do have a local brand in each country (a unique URL).

Did you hire some word of mouth PR types or contract a SEO?

Lots of people ask us that. And they are always amazed when I tell them: We do everything in-house. PR, logo design, SEO etc.: It's all done by our employees...We think of them as core competences. Especially PR & SEO are very important to start-ups these days.

It is also a question of cost-efficiency. We are a tight start-up, we have seen the hard times from 2001 to 2003. So it is also about keeping costs under control.

Last, but not least it makes for a great culture. We have built a great, great team over the last two years (The same team is behind dialo.de and Dealjaeger.de).

Posted at 01:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 08, 2008

Microsoft Bids $1.2B For Norway's FAST

Microsoft Corp. has made an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA for about $1.2B. The board of FAST has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer. The price is a 42 percent premium to the Norwegian enterprise search company's closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to the announcement).

The company was doing about $165M in revenues.

View FAST news

Posted at 02:29 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

UK's Palringo Raises $5M - Mobile and PC Messaging

UK startup Palringo (fka Wireless Dynamics) sent us a note to say it has raised $5M in funding, bringing in new investors ePlanet Ventures and NTEC. They invest alongside existing investors Northstar Equity Investors, Prime Technology Ventures and Esther Finance.

Palringo, like several other recently funded startups, is enabling instant messaging and voice and picture messaging on cellphones (including Java phones) that circumvents the operators' SMS and MMS offerings (you still have to pay a data service, though). Its downloadable client supports ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN, and a few others.

View Palringo

Posted at 02:20 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Fresh Euro Deals - Mirifice, Inside Contactless

Inside Contactless , a near field communications chip and technology developer, added two more investors, closing its latest financing round. Now Motorola Ventures and HID Global (a secure ID companyand subsidiary ofAssa Abloy) are also shareholders.
Read - InsideContactless News
Read - First closing announcement news reported by a:c euro

Mirifice has raised a further £400K from South West Ventures fund in the UK. The Bath-based company sells software that monitors end user usage of their IPTV set-top boxes. Customers include Scientific Atlanta (a Cisco company), OpenTV, Tandberg, and Virgin Media. The startup raised £250K in June of last year in a first round of funding. [via Tornado Insider]

Mountain Super Angel, a publicly traded investment fund out of Switzerland, has acquired a stake Dresden's PublicSolution GmbH, which develops board games enhanced with an electronic console and RFID tech. No disclosure on deal size.
Read - Finanztreff.de
View - PublicSolution

And just to show that some early stage VCs can say no to further financing, Hasso Plattner Ventures portfolio company Mindquarry filed for insolvency this week. The collaboration software venture had announced several months ago that it would go open source in the face of being unable to raise further financing.

Posted at 02:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 07, 2008

French Startup Movea Raises €7.3M

Movea SA, an eight month old French startup that develops motion sensing technologies, has raised a first round of €7.3M from French VC fund I-Source Gestion and Belgium-based GIMV.

Co-investing is a Thomson SA subsidiary and the French research institute CEA (the startup is a spinoff of the CEA-LETI research institute).

Gyration makes a gyroscope-based wireless mouse that doesn't need to be on a desktop to do the point and click thing. It also makes a programmable remote that can be used with TVs, sound systems, and other electronic gadgets in the home. It was purchased from Thomson.

Movea’s technology is similar but based on a different and complementary set of sensors, that it claims can be used in motion-aware devices that are smaller, lighter weight, with prolonged battery life, and increased responsiveness to hand movements.
View Movea

Posted at 03:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 04, 2008

Swiss Pressure Sensor Company Acquired

Intersema Sensoric, a founder-driven pressure sensor company based in Switzerland, has been acquired by Nasdaq-traded Measurement Specialties for up to $47.4 net of cash. The Swiss company has been doing around $20M a year in revenues, employing 45, and was profitable.

Reuters posted a press release that says the the US acquirer bought the outstanding capital stock of Intersema for approximately $39.7 million in cash and notes, plus an additional $17.3 million if certain performance thresholds are achieved. MEAS acquired approximately $9.6 million in cash as part of the transaction. The transaction closed December 28, 2007.

Bevaix-based Intersema is a company that your alarm:clock euro reporter Valerie Thompson has been following for years as it was an innovator in MEMS tech. It was also a very thrifty company. In its early years it was selling to customers abroad via its website, for example, which is pretty rare for a startup, especially one that sells high-tech components.

Back in 2000, it delivered the pressure sensors to Victorinox for this Swiss Army Knife

Posted at 07:24 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Braggone Funded To Boost Efficiency in Flat Displays, Chips, and Solar Cells

Braggone, an Oulu-based company that has come up with a way to improve the way light is handled in flat panel displays, solar cells, and LEDs, among other things, has received a "multi-million dollar" amount of funding from Tekes, a state-backed organization.

The funding is meant to boost commercialization of its flat panel display and chip-targeted products, but Braggone is also promoting its coatings tech as a boon to photovoltaic manufacturers and manufacturers of bright LEDs, typically used in lighting applications e.g. automobile headlights and traffic lights.

Since the coating can be used as an alternative to chemical vapour deposition (CVD), or as an additional product improving step in fabs that already have CVD installed, the company has a good position to attract revenues sooner rather than later.

We think that the company's BizDev man, Paul Williams, has a pretty good cleantech pitch (increasingly bright LEDs are seen as a clean or green technology):

“Essentially, we are minimizing the optical loss in solar cells and modules..... We are capturing as much light as possible in the cells by taming the physics. With the new materials from Braggone not only do we have the capability to reduce the optical loss in the cell or module, but we can also improve the efficiency of electrical conversion within the cell. This has the real benefit to our technology users of driving down their production cost per Mw output.”

Braggone Receives Multi-Million Dollar Funding to Commercialize Nano-Engineered Polymer Technology for Semiconductor, Solar Panel and Flat Panel Display Manufacturing

TEKES, the Same Funding Agency That Backed Nokia, Invests in Optoelectronics Company for Materials That Can Be “Custom Tuned” for Application Needs

OULU, Finland (Business Wire EON/PRWEB ) January 3, 2008 -- Braggone, the optoelectronics materials company, has received multi-million dollar funding from TEKES (The National Technology Agency of Finland) to commercialize their polymer materials for worldwide commercialization. TEKES is the same funding agency behind Nokia’s dramatic success in the cell phone market.

We've had great success working in collaboration with chemical companies and equipment manufacturers to fine-tune and optimize the physical and application specific characteristics of these polymers
Semiconductor devices and flat panel displays are primary targets

Braggone’s proprietary material technology allows for custom tuning of the inorganic-organic polymer material properties to suit specific applications. These flexible yet stable materials coat or print onto substrates at greater efficiency, lower temperatures and higher yields. The company’s current materials products are applied in digital displays used in mobile phones and televisions, advanced semiconductors, digital cameras, photovoltaic panels, LEDs and memory for PCs and MP3 devices. The TEKES funding is specifically targeted for taking the materials production and sales from the lab to commercial scales. These materials are part of an intellectual property portfolio of 17 filed patents, four of which have already been granted.

The research for the semiconductor industry has resulted in a unique set of materials that are nano-engineered siloxane compounds for silicon containing anti-reflective coatings (ARCs).

“We’ve had great success working in collaboration with chemical companies and equipment manufacturers to fine-tune and optimize the physical and application specific characteristics of these polymers,” commented Dr. Yrjö Ojasaar, Braggone CEO. “Due to that collaboration and now with the additional funding from TEKES, we are on a rapid path to commercialization, as we can deliver PV manufacturers with increased performance and reduced costs all in one turnkey solution.”

Nano-engineered materials can also revolutionize solar cell and panel manufacturing

Out of this same polymer research, Braggone recently announced a new product line that greatly increases the efficiency of solar cells and allows manufacturing facilities to cost-effectively increase their capacity. The custom designed compounds can dramatically reduce reflection from glass and silicon, and therefore, deliver substantially more light to the active regions of the solar cell, resulting in higher efficiencies. Even when compared to materials such as silicon nitride, the Braggone materials can cut reflection by half and costs associated with deposition tools by even more than half. By incorporating Braggone’s unique materials into the manufacturing process, the costs of manufacturing solar cells can be dramatically reduced. Braggone tunes the optics of the cell by spray, slit, spin, or dip coating layers of molecularly tailored material, rather than having to use expensive chemical vapor deposition (CVD) tools.

Ojasaar added: “Our technology and materials for solar cells will make the dream of sub-one euro per peak watt manufacturing costs a reality. We can replace the CVD batch process, expensive capex, and expensive operating costs by simply spraying, slit or dip coating the anti-reflective and hydrogenation coatings in a rapid and cost-effective atmospheric in-line process.”

About Braggone

With offices located in Oulu, Finland, London, UK, and Hong Kong, SAR China, Braggone is an innovative technology company focused on the manufacturing of advanced optoelectronic and information electronic materials and components. Braggone’s portfolio of materials and processes are utilized to improve performance and facilitate production for various component and system structures. Through fundamental materials development and advanced process applications, Braggone works closely with its clients to increase their products’ performance in flat panel displays, semiconductors, LEDs and solar cells. Additional information can be found at www.braggone.com.

Posted at 07:02 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 03, 2008

Nokia-Siemens Gives Apertio Investors An Exit and other Fresh Euro Deals

Nokia Siemens has acquired Apertio, specialized in delivering fixed mobile convergence networking solutions, for $205M, reports Red Herring . The VC investors put in about $40M, according to the report. It lists quite a few backers, namely Deutsche Venture Capital, Tokarz, Eden Ventures, Add Partners, and Motorola Ventures.

Bluetooth marketing specialist OneMedia raised €700K from French business angels. The company is specialised in enterprise-sized"blue cell networks", useful for delivering advertising or content during a trade show, for example. It is permission-based and supports several types of reporting and feedback for the advertisers. [via Neteco.com"]

French jobs site that runs under F1rstEmploi.com raised a seed round of €500K from French business angels David Allouche, Salomon Himy and Harry Kahloun, reports Neteco. The startup is specialized in recruiting and placing freshly graduated candidates. It's using Dailymotion video clips and SMS, showing it knows how to meet its target market.

Another jobs-related website in the UK has attracted seed capital, namely Workhound. The £100K it raised came from private investors. The Workhound.co.uk job search site is in beta and launched in the 3rd quarter of 2007 and now lists more than 700,000 recruitment posts, the firm said in a statement. The site belongs to WorkDigital, a vertical search specialist.
Read announcement

Posted at 07:10 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 31, 2007

End of Year Dealmaking Roundup

Some December dealmaking news made its way to our Euro reporter on this last day of 2007.

The Swiss/US startup for video blogging, kyteTV, closed a $15M round led by Telefonica. More details in its PR here.

Limerick-based Powervation Ltd. a fabless semiconductor company specialized in power controllers for microprocessors used in high-performance computers and networking gear, announced on Dec 17th that it raised $10M in a round led jointly by Intel Capital and SEP, along with Venture Tech Alliance (CA, USA ) and a follow on investment from local investor Fourth Level Ventures.

Denmark's Seed Capital has made an initial investment in Danish software as a Service startup Actimizer A/S. The company is specialized in developing a web based application that boost the sales process. A built in dialer takes drives outbound call automation. It claims 1500 to-date, mainly in the home market.

Also out of Denmark is the news that SunFlake has patents on a new process for creating silicon-based solar that might be twice as efficient and cheaper to make than the ones on the market today. More on its seed investor's site.

Posted at 07:27 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 21, 2007

Fresh Euro Beta Financings and M&A Deals

Logitech Exits its Digital Pen Business. Anoto, the Swedish company that pioneered digital pen and paper, announced that UK-based Destiny is buying out one of its early licensees, Logitech. The Swiss peripheral manufacturer was an early adopter of Anoto's tech and an early strategic investor. Earlier this year Logitech sold its equity in Anoto. This deal with Destiny means that Logitech is out of the digital pen biz. No disclosure on the size of the transaction. (image source: Anoto press)
Read - Destiny Acquires Logitech's Digital Pen Based on Anoto Technology

Ericsson Buying In To Support IPTV. Ericsson has acquired Spanish IPTV consultancy HyC Group. Ericsson bought the HyC Group, a 110 employee-strong company, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is meant to strengthen Ericsson's position as systems integrator of IPTV solutions, it said in the press announcement. It also said that the HyC acquisition fits with its Tandberg Television, which is specailized in video compression technologies.
Read - Ericsson acquires HyC Group: Spanish IPTV consultancy and systems integration company

DailyMe.TV Financed For Self-Service Mobile Video. Berlin-based dailyme.tv, which is in beta, offers a self-service platform for mobilephone users to subscribe to video and podcasts. It has raised an undisclosed amount from local investors, according to its latest press release.

Right now the service is only available in Germany. The default content fits that market: German news from the local TV broadcasters, video blogs, and films. Users set up their subscriptions on the web and mobile device are updated wirelessly (either via GPRS, 3G, or WLAN). You chose what kind of content you want sent to the phone.

Despite the startup's inane name, we like the idea of being able to set up and forget about video clip subscriptions, in the same way you can with RSS feeds. And we also like that the user does not have find her cables to connect to the PC, or remember to do a download before going on the road, and no time wasting while waiting for the downloads.

The startup has a patent on what it calls Mediacast technology (no further details available on its site). Also mentioned in the PR was its apparently was its connectivity management software.

The firm plans to make money via premium service and advertising. It counts ARD (German TV station) and Nokia as partners. The user needs an N or E series Nokia handy, and a good sized SD card, at least 1GB. A flat rate high speed wireless service is also suggested by dailyme.tv.
Read - dailyme.tv press release

Creathor invests in aka-aki. Via Deutsche Startups comes the news that Creathor, a VC fund that was founded by one of the founders of Technologieholding (in other words one of the most experienced VCs in Germany) has made an early stage investment in this mobile startup which asks users to download a Java app so that they can use their Bluetooth radios as a radar to find other members of the socnet.

There are a few Euro startups trying to make a business out of this kind of thing, such as France's Mobiluck and imity. We wrote about them not being compatible with making money earlier this year, but maybe Creathor's know-how will show the way.

Read - Creathor investiert in aka-aki :: deutsche-startups.de

Mediapeers Snags T-Online Venture. Via Deutsche Startups comes the news that T-Online Ventures (which belongs to Deutsche Telekom) has invested in a platform for licensing and exchange of corporate and professional video called mediapeers.
Read - T-Online Venture investiert in mediapeers :: deutsche-startups.de

Posted at 11:02 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

NXP Acquires VC-Backed GloNav For Up To $110M

NXP Semiconductors' latest announcement says it is set to acquire GloNav Inc., a US-based maker of global positioning systems (GPS) and wireless chips for $85M in cash and a further $25M, contingent upon revenue and product development milestones over the next two years.

This would be a speedy exit for Atlantic Bridge Ventures, which has been backing GloNav since it was the spin out of Ceva last July. GloNav also in the meantime acquired RFDomus.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008, subject to regulatory approvals.

Posted at 09:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

SiliconLine Raises A Round

Silicon Line GmbH, a German fabless semiconductor company that is specialized in making VCSEL drivers and amplifiers used in gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel, and several other flavours of optical networking, has raised a Series A round of an undisclosed amount from Belgium-based Capital-E, which has close connections to IMEC, and Germany based Munich Venture Partners (MVP) which is close to the Fraunhofer Institute, as well as SAP and Swisscom.

Silicon Line's website reveals that it has been focussed on optical networking, but according to a statement from one of its new backers in regards to the funding, it will develop chips for portable devices too.

Its claim to fame is the ability to devleop a range of sophisticated analog designs on CMOS. Normally, says SiliconLine, those kind of chips are done in bipolar CMOS or compound semiconductors such as GaAs, both of which are more expensive and use the smaller-sized wafers.

The company was founded in 2005.

Fabless, Analog IC Provider Silicon Line Secures Funding to Pursue Fast-Growing Markets for Its Patented PHY Layer Chips

Posted at 06:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Zoomio Raises €5.5M for Marketing Software

Via Venture Partners wrote in to say it led a €5.5M round (DKK 37 million) in Danish multi-channel marketing software firm Zoomio.

Zoomio might have a name that sounds like some kind of Web 2.0 application, but it is actually an enterprise software vendor. Its web-based software help turn leads into customers in a call center, for example, and it can help manufacturers, or service providers, to get customers to opt-in to email marketing programs. Once the potential customers are receiving html emails, the sytem provides measurement and analysis details on things like success rate of a campaign, costs per conversion, and the like.

It also integrates into CRM apps like salesforce.com and Microsoft's offerings in that area. It has won a couple of awards at the annual Cebit show in Germany.

View Zoomio

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December 19, 2007

Tradus/QXL Board Agrees £946M Deal

Tradus plc issued a statement yesterday with the news that its board will recommend to shareholders to accept a cash offer from Naspers' subsidiary, MIH Internet BV, at a company valuation of £946M.

This is Money has some background on who the shareholders are, in a story entitled Dotcom Veteran Hits Jackpot.

Posted at 10:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 17, 2007

QXL To Be Bought For £750M and Other Fresh Euro Deals

Tradus (formerly QXL) to go to Naspers for £750M. Rumors about an acquisition of QXL have been circulating, with eBay named as a potential acquirer. But The Times is reporting that the online auction operator, which is big in Poland under the name Allegro, is being acquired for £750M by South Africa's Naspers. The report in the Times acknowledges that QXL had declined to comment for the article. (If you want to do the math on the multiple, see annual report published in March 2007 pdf)

The South African company has been buying up Internet properties in E.Europe and Russia. In October Naspers acquired Gadu Gadu, the leading Polish instant messaging provider. Earlier in the year we marvelled at the QXL share price, which was close to £500M then, and wrote about Gadu Gadu's intended IPO .

Atheros Acquire Finnish/US GPS Chipmaker for $56M. u-Nav Microelectronics announced that Atheros Communications, a publicly-traded wireless solutions provider is to pay $56M in cash and stocks for "the assets and certain liabilities" of the 6 year old company. u-Nav Microelectronics, a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company, develops GPS chip and some mobile location-based software and services to go with them.

Telcos Big on Video Blogging. We are a bit late with this one. NewTeeVee reported on Wednesday that the company behind Kyte.tv, whose video blogging platform supports mobilephone (java enabled phones) capture and playback, as well as the web support, has raised $5.6M from Spain's Telefonica. The report cites sources "close to the company". Another telco investor is Swisscom. Early investor was Atomico.
Read - Another $5.6 Million for Kyte.tv « NewTeeVee and Nokia Growth Partners.

Where all the foreign exchange students hang out. German startup Campux.com has raised an undisclosed amount of early financing, according to a PR it put out this week, for its university guides and local campus information platform, which includes social networking features for students. It came out the gates in several languages and says it aims to catalogue the world's unis.
Read - TechCrunch France review of Campux (in the comments you will find other similar ventures in Europe)
Read - Deutsche Startups' review
Review in English on Killer Startups

Posted at 01:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 14, 2007

Mangrove Capital Invests in Brands4Friends' €5M Round

Brands4friends, a German company exploiting a business model proven by Vente Privée in France, sent us the news today that it raised €5M from Mangrove Capital Partners, along with private investors. Founded just a few
months ago by Christian Heitmeyer, formerly of Delsey, and Constantin Bisanz, formerly founder of TruckScout24, the venture has apparently hit a market opportunity in Germany.

It claims 200K members have signed up to receive special offers on brand-named snowboards, running shoes, and jackets, typically overstocked items that the brands don't want to sell off on eBay (for example), at discounted prices.

Hans-Jürgen Schmitz is the Mangrove partner named as the dealmaker on this one.

View- brands4friends
---
Articles on alarm:clock euro about Vente Privée and the latest trend in European eCommerce.
Read - Exciting Commerce article on Brands4Friends launch
Read - Exciting Commerce compares Brands4Friends with Limango

Posted at 01:33 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 13, 2007

Wellington Invests in French Vacation Company

Wellington Partners has acquired a stake TravelHorizon Group in exchange for €10M in venture capital. The company is an online tour operator and claims to be market leader in ski vacations. It also offers other types of vacations via specialized booking websites for spa/wellness getaways, as well as European sea and resort vacations.

Wellington's Eric Archambeau is named as the dealmaker on this one. A quick search did not turn up information about when the TravelHorizon was founded, but based on the number of sites and the stated revenues for 2006, it is not an early stage venture. It is already generating annual sales of €27M and claims 130,000 active customers. It is based in Aix-en-Provence and operates a multi-lingual call center in Amsterdam.

Posted at 02:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 12, 2007

Austria's SensorDynamics Raises €25M Series B

SensorDynamics, a company that develops gas and motion sensor products, among other types of sensors used in automobiles, announced a Series B round of €25M ($37 million) [via PEHub].

Uwe Albrecht Managing Partner at Siemens Venture Capital said in a statement: "Since our initial investment, SensorDynamics has established itself as a prominent provider of sensing and wireless technology to the automotive and consumer industries. We are excited to take the company to the next stage with this new investment."

Posted at 07:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Clean Energy Stocks At A Peak?

The title of this post is derived from a quote attributed to Tom Murley, head of UK PE group HgCapital in eFinancial News. We've been hearing VCs complain about the high valuations of some alt energy startups at industry conferences, and we've marvelled ourselves at the rich valuations on solar energy companies on these pages, but private equity investors are now saying that these valuations are not sustainable. In a report drawn from a panel discussion on the topic of clean energy last week that was hosted by eFinancial News, Murley said, “We are at the peak of inflated expectations.”

Murley commented that stock prices are peaking and are not sustainable, giviing the example of wind farm companies. “We are seeing them trade at 48 times earnings against eight for large utilities.”

Anne Glover of Amadeus Capital Partners, is also quoted. “We are in a secular long-term trend. This business is not a bubble…” But she also said she could not defend all the values being put on clean energy businesses.

eFinancial News report

Posted at 04:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Microsoft Buy UK's Multimap

Microsoft Corp. has acquired Multimap, a venture-backed supplier of online mapping services to the likes of LastMinute.com and other online services. No disclosure on the size of the deal. According to Red Herring, Multimap raised about £3.3M in two rounds and its largest shareholder is the founder, Sean Phelan. The outside investors, according to RH, included Telewest and Infotech Enterprises. Multimap is doing about £12M in sales and was profitable, according to a November published report in FT.

Posted at 04:14 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 11, 2007

France's InsideContactless Attract Nokia Growth Partners

InsideContactless announced a Series C round of €25m ($38m) in a deal led by Nokia Growth Partners. The investment comes on the back of the firm achieving some milestones this year, such as the successful launch of its new MicroRead NFC (near field communication) platform and the delivery of 35 million MicroPass intelligent payment platforms for the US contactless payments market, according to the firm.

“This is more than a financial investment, this is about a strategic partnership with key players who are committed to building and driving the NFC eco-system,” said Rémy de Tonnac, CEO of INSIDE Contactless in the same statement.

He added that three years ago a similar strategic investment was made by Visa, which "brought the company to a leading position in the field of Contactless payment". He's hoping this deal with will lead to a similar success in the NFC market.

View InsideContactless

Posted at 07:24 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

UK's YooMedia Acquires Spanish Interactive TV Firm

YooMedia, which counted Sony as a backer, and did four dating acquisitions last year, according to PaidContent, has just acquired Spain's Fresh IT, an interactive TV company. No disclosure on the details of the deal. But there was some outside financing involved, according to ClickZ, and there will be a company name change to Mirada.
U.K.'s YooMedia to Acquire Spain's Fresh I.T. to Form Mirada - ClickZ

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LeWeb3 From The View of a VC- 3i's Daniel Waterhouse

We could not make it to Paris this week, but Daniel Waterhouse of 3i gave us his view of the first day of LeWeb3 2007, a two-day event in the French capital that attracted some 1700 participants this year.

"We arrived last night and hosted the speakers' dinner at our hotel. It is a great lineup with people like Mike Arrington, Jason Calcanis, and Kevin Rose…the Who's Who of the Web 2.0 world," said Waterhouse whose firm is one of this year's sponsors.

Compared to last year this one is even bigger and it is better organized, he reported. "Good content on the main stage was the main attraction," said Waterhouse, adding that he did sit in on a few startup pitches.

More than 30 ventures were scheduled to pitch today.

"I haven't seen anything that really blew me away, but I think that is a function of where we are at in the cycle. We have had two or three years of quick innovation. The pace of innovation is slowing now," he said.

We asked if that meant that the number of startups saying that they plan to build a - great product and a big digital audience and will worry about monetization later- was decreasing.

He replied, "There are still a lot of people talking like that."

Another aspect of being at this point in the cycle: "It is possible to step back and see the companies that have emerged -- and have a done a great job and have a real business," said Waterhouse.

What kind of businesses? "We want to invest in [online] businesses that are relatively close to a transaction."

He mentioned Twenga as an example, a comparison shopping business (funding by 3i and co-investors was announced on Friday). "The traffic acquisition model is well understood by merchants by now," said Waterhouse.

How do you keep track of all the companies you hear about at a show like LeWeb 3. "You don't. You get bombarded with information and some of it sticks."

Why did 3i sponsor the event [it was the only venture capital firm among a list of sponsors from the Internet and mobile sectors]? "We're very active with Internet investments and have done well with them: Seloger.com [IPO], Blue Lithium [acquired by Yahoo] and Fotolog [acquired by Hi-Media]. Recent investments are Fastbooking and DemandMedia. So we want to continue to support emerging venture in this sector so we can back the best, brightest, and biggest.

Some links to follow for coverage of LeWeb 3
IHT
Lunch over IP – Susan Kish and Bruno Guissani's running notes. The Philippe Stark one is good, especially his comments on the Kindle from Amazon.

Posted at 06:14 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 10, 2007

Fresh Euro Deals

France's Twenga Attracts 3i . Twenga, a comparison shopping site raised €2.6M from 3i to grow its one year old business. The multilingual engine, which is getting some heavy traffic (7 million visitors across its sites in November) will also get 3i's Daniel Waterhouse and Jean-David Chamboredon, "to help drive further growth and international expansion", along with the money.

Twenga differentiates itself by being multi-country (FR, DE, PL, IT, and UK) and by delivering volume of choice to its users. TechCrunch writes that Twenga's search results are returned "as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop."

Moniforce acquired by Oracle. The Dutch company has been selling web application performance software and is one of the fastest growing tech companies in The Netherlands in 2007. Its current CEO is a former Business Objects managing director. The founder is the Biz Dev EMEA manager. The deal size was undisclosed, as was any information about how the startup's management and founders will or will not be integrated into Oracle.
View Oracle's Moniforce Acquisition Pages

Clear2Pay Buys Diagram EDI. The acquisitive Belgian e-payments solution provider Clear2Pay has acquired Diagram for an undisclosed amount [via]. Clear2Pay raised about €15.5M last year. It employs 220 worldwide. Sales are growing at about 50 percent before this year's acquisitions.
Read- Earlier article in alarm:clock euro about Clear2Pay - Gone Global

Posted at 07:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 08, 2007

Windsim's Software Gets The Most Out of Windfarms

Late last month, Sarsia Seed, acquired a minority stake in WindSim AS. The startup, which develops simulation software used by wind farm designers and planners, has been in business for several years, but it is in a sweet spot now with sales inquiries coming from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

Recent customer wins are in China and Greece, for example.

This is a good niche to be in. The alarm:clock euro has a pet theory that the alt energy sector has the potential to consume in a big way innovative software, algorithms, embedded systems, and newfangled semiconductors. We'd like to profile more companies like in this category.

The operators of wind farms, photovoltaic energy suppliers, and biomass power companies, have huge valuations, that means they are flush with capital to invest to develop their infrastructure and grow their business. But not everyone she talks to agrees, so she's looking for a little vindication, as well as some good stories for the alarm:clock euro.
View Windsim

Posted at 07:31 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Red Herring 100 Competition Open Plus The French Connection

The organizers of the Red Herring 100 Europe are still accepting entries for the upcoming pitchfest in Malta (April 14 to 16). Every year the RH team selects 100 promising European companies, publishes profiles of them, and invites decision makers from the VC and investor community and executives from large public tech companies to come meet them.

If a company is selected it will be invited to present or exhibit its products at the elite event. Everyone, including the winners, pay an entrance fee, but there are no additional fees on top of that: to make your pitch, for example.

Details here. There is also a link provided to enter your startup.

While we were checking out the above details, we noticed Red Herring also has an event in France next month, called Red Herring France 2008 on January 27-29 in Lyon. It is a two-day event with speakers like Bluetooth gadget innovator Henri Seydoux and general partners from Partech, Ventech, 3i, Sofinnova, GRP, and Banexi. There is even a golfing event. Who knew you can golf in Lyon in the middle of winter?

Posted at 07:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 07, 2007

Mojowatch Europe - Streamezzo, Prague Hot, and Search Buzz

Here is the latest in our round up of European news and hot topics relevant to our readers.

Spam Killing Startup Funded in Germany.
Do you yearn for the days when spam meant a horrible tasting meat-like product, and not that messaging crap filling up our email folders? We do, so our attention was caught by an investment announcement from High-Tech Gründerfonds and Neuhaus Partners. The two have teamed up to finance antispameurope, a startup that said it needed outside capital to staff up in order to cope with customer demand. It is a hosted service, currently targetted at individual and corporate users. Oh, and it can actually charge money for its service.

US Media Specialist Providence Equity Invest in Ukrainian Cable TV blognation Russia says the deal represents the largest Western private equity investment in Ukraine. Providence Equity Partners, a media and communications private equity firm, agreed to invest over US$200 million in Volia Cable, a Ukrainian cable TV and Internet access provider. Volia’s network includes over 900,000 homes passed in four cities within Ukraine. Volia Cable is controlled by a private equity fund managed by SigmaBleyzer.

Disney Invests in Prague Location For Mobile Games You hear about US companies acquiring European VC-backed startups, eating them up so to speak, only to spit them out again. Here is one that is actually investing and building on a recent acquisition, namely its purchase of founder-funded Living Mobile made in 2005.
Read - Disney sets up world-class game design studio in Prague
Read - The mouse goes mobile

Streamezzo, the French startup specialized in software that enables "rich media" for mobilephones, has raised a new round of finance to the tune of €15M
Read - Altaide
Read - Neteco

Social search is the topic this week amongst Euro VCs that blog. Jason Ball's TechByte has the post which picks up on a discussion in Equity Kicker blog of some search startups VCs have their eyes on.

We followed some of the comments links on the VC blogs and came across Snagsta, which says its developing algorithms that fit the social search bill. It's original alpha site made us smile.

Mobile Advertising: Thoughts on Game Changes. But if the interest in search is all due to Google's super fantastic market capitalization, then some news and views from Cartagena Capital suggests that Google just moved the goal posts. Google is not a search company, points out one of its associated analysts. "It is a broker of advertising inventory. Google makes money by building inventory (i.e. white space on web, print and radio) and auctioning off inventory to advertisers. Search is merely the means to create a boundless amount of inventory and attract billions of eyeballs to it."

This is just one interesting point of view in its latest newsletter newsletter that digs into Google's mobile ambitions (you may need to bookmark that link for later perusal as the newsletter is not online yet). It is worthwhile reading and it is from a corporate finance boutique that, in our opinion, knows its way quite well around the mobile market.

Posted at 05:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 06, 2007

Glowria Goes To NetGem

Glowria, the French DVD rental and VOD startup, has been sold by its French VCs to Netgem, a vendor of hardware and software for "new" TV companies [via Altaide] The deal values the venture at up to €18.9M and is apparently being paid in shares. The shares are equivalent to about 14.4 percent of Netgem's stock. It's probably a good fit for Netgem, but we think it was a premature trade sale exit for the startup.

Read related posts on Glowria in alarm:clock euro Glowria Executes 10/06 and Glowria Raises07/07

Posted at 03:28 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Bubble-era Ventures Snaffle Up Late Stage Venture

Ever wondered how many companies funded during the bubble survived, how many thrived, and how many went out of business? SVB Financial Group has the numbers and the charts online now. The investment bank's latest research found that contrary to the commonly held belief that the bulk of private technology companies left over from the boom are on the verge of fizzling out, these companies that were "conceived during the 2000 bubble-era comprise one-third of all private technology companies today, and the bulk of them — 70 percent — have received fresh funding within the last three years.

Although a lot of investments were written down (a dramatic graph above demonstrates trends), there is still a "large percentage" playing a "significant role in investment portfolios and dominating technology merger and acquisition activity".

VC Ratings weighs in with an analysis from the LP point of view.

Posted at 06:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Panty Post - BeCheeky.com

How many online lingerie retailers do we need? There is Figleaves.com and there is Coco Ribbon's Panty Postman, as well as Blacksocks.com, which recently added men's undergarments. One more is the answer made obvious by BeCheeky.com's latest financing announcement. The two year old UK-based e-tailer, has raised funding from YFM Group and Internet-experienced business angels in a £630K round.

The outfit above is a "topseller" according to the BeCheeky website.
Read- Funding press rel.

Posted at 05:01 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 05, 2007

Aito Adds Creandum in Series A Round

Aito Technologies added Nordic early stage investor Creandum to its A round. The startup sells its software to mobile operators who use it to get real-time information about customer usage and uptake of new services via their desktop PC.

Rave reviews from pilot customers suggests to management that they are onto something good. In a statement the startup said that funding and support from Creandum and Conor will enable international market entry. We note that Aito has yet to provide detailed product information on its website.

Posted at 08:54 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Yes, YES... Oh.. YesForLove

Two of the founders of recently floated Seloger.com, the France-based real-estate classified site publisher, Denys Chalumeau and Amal Amar, have reinvested along with new investor 123Venture, in a €1.5M financing round YesForLove, a new cosmetics brand that is dedicated to enhancing sex, or as the French more eloquently say: dédiée à l'amour et à ses plaisirs.

The company's website has a line of basics, like condoms, but condoms that have a gold and black "designer" package and massage oils and lipsticks, but ones that are honey or biscuit flavoured, as well as some more exotic things like "libido-vitamines", and a hide and seek kit.

Posted at 06:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 04, 2007

Swedish-Maltese Gambling and Other Fresh Euro M&A

SE - Unibet Acquires Online Gambling Group In a £54M deal, Swedish investment firm Maria Invest AB has sold its online gambling interests in Malta-registered Maria Holdings Limited to Internet gambling group Unibet plc for SEK 705 million (approximately GBP 54 million). Unibet Group is active in Europe and provides services in 20 languages. The group is listed on the OMX Nordic Exchange in Stockholm.

CZ - Warburg Pincus Acquires Stake in Centrum.cz. Czechidea reports that Netcentrum which owns the second largest Czech portal Centrum.cz raised capital from Warburg Pincus, in a deal that is rumored to value the venture at about €100M. On the same topic, Thomson Financial published a report stating that the firms involved did not disclose details or terms, but that the co-founders Ondrej Tomek and Oldrich Bajer will retain minority stakes. It also said that existing shareholders in NetCentrum will reinvest part of the transaction proceeds in the company.

GB - GSI Commerce acquires Zendor.com Pennsylvania-based e-commerce solutions provider GSI Commerce has agreed to acquire Manchester-based Zendor.com for approximately $7.9M.

Posted at 02:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Russia's SUP Makes First Acquisition With LiveJournal Buy

Sister site the alarm:clock reports and provides some analysis of the deal. For a $30M deal, the coverage of the acquisition of LiveJournal (from SixApart) by Russian startup SUP has been outsized: Reuters published several reports, AP, AFP, Wired News and more. Not sure what drove the flow of digital ink, afterall both companies are privately owned. M&A between media and Web 2.0 ventures is not that unusual and it's not like the Russian buyer paid an inflated price, so it's curious.
Read - Anderw Paulson (wikipedia)

Posted at 04:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 03, 2007

Updated: German startup brokr sold on eBay

The other day we mentioned brokr in a post that rounded up some German online trading communities. A little while later, a sharp-eyed reader wrote in to say that in fact the venture was already up for sale... on eBay.
Update: It was acquired for €75K. Deutsche Startups has the details.

Posted at 12:14 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Inchron's Software Debugs Embedded Systems

Inchron, an embedded system debugging tool developer, has raised a new round of finance, bringing in two local venture firms in addition to early investor Hasso Plattner Ventures.

Its software works with the embedded systems you find in DVD players or washing machines, but its sweet spot appears to be automobiles, which typically have about 70 embedded systems per car.

The founders of Inchron saw that car manufacturers were facing an increasing number of product recalls because of run-time problems of the embedded systems, such as the ABS system, so it developed tools to test and find the bugs earlier in the design cycle.

Its early investor, HPV, has a good profile of the venture on its website. The a:c euro notes that a few other VCs in the region could emulate HPV on this type of thing.

Posted at 11:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

German Hardware Company Funded For International Growth

Pyramid Computer GmbH, which is a 20 year old company that makes appliance servers for software companies, as well as marketing its own iternity brand of appliances for data archiving compliance requirements, has raised expansion capital from eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners of Münster. The German company did not disclose the amount raised, saying only that it is a seven figure euro deal.

Posted at 11:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 01, 2007

Open Web Awards - Call for Nominations

The Open Web Awards are now open for nominations until December 6th. The alarm:clock network is very happy to be participating in this first annual multi-blog awards event focused on social networking sites. The contest is led by Mashable who has brought together about 30 other bloggers who will be holding an award ceremony in San Francisco in December.

Here are the categories:

+ Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
+ Applications and Widgets
+ Social News and Social Bookmarking
+ Social Search
+ Sports and Fitness
+ Photo Sharing
+ Video Sharing
+ Start Pages
+ Places and Events
+ Music
+ Social Shopping
+ Mobile
+ Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

Please send your nominations (name of company and category) to comments@thealarmclock.com

Posted at 11:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 30, 2007

Iris Capital Gives Oodrive Money To Grow SaaS Biz

Oodrive Technologies, a seven year old French venture specialized in remote backup, online file sharing and collaboration solutions, has raised €4M from Iris Capital [via]

Already way past breakeven, Oodrive Technologies, which is running on the SaaS model, has partnerships with France Telecom, Completel and FNAC. It's looking at acquisitions, such as the one it did last year when it bought Mayetic. It does about €4M in sales annually.

Posted at 07:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 28, 2007

Spotzer Takes on New Money On a Mission

Spotzer Media Group, the low-budget TV and video ad enabler, has acquired two more investors for a €10M financing round. It is not clear if this is a top up to the C round, announced earlier this year or something else. The new backers sound like a good match for the startup's business plan. It raised capital from Sierra Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif. to help it enter the US market, and European Directories, yellow page publisher active in nine countries, which will offer Spotzer's ads (in a pilot program) to local businesses through its European sales team.

newsobserver.com | Spotzer Media Raises Euro 10 Million From Sierra Ventures and European Directories
View - Earlier a:c euro coverage of Spotzer

Posted at 09:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 27, 2007

updated: SEP Leads €26M Kiala Deal

Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) informed us today that it led a €26M investment in Kiala, the Pan-European package delivery company founded and led by serial entrepreneur Denis Payre (photo of the stylish Euro founder above).

We've been covering Kiala's trajectory for several years and it is certainly on a growth track.

SEP was joined by several other investors, including funds related to La Poste and TPG (TNT Post Group). GP Bullhound advised Kiala on the round.

This post may be updated as we've requested more information from SEP about the investment, if it was a capital increase, or involved purchasing of a stake from an early shareholder.

Update: SEP has confirmed that investment is in a new share issue at higher valuation than the previous round. No further terms are being disclosed. The new capital is to be used to expand the business into further key European markets.

Read- Kiala Goes From Zero to Hero

Posted at 04:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Nanofreeze Adds New Seed Investor

We just confirmed with Northzone Ventures that Nanofreeze, has raised an additional $1M from Northzone and new inestor TeknoSeed AB. The augmented seed capital should enable it to get its first proof of concept prototype out of the lab.

The company develops semiconductor technology that it hopes will be the next generation thermoelectric element of choice. Nanofreeze is hoping to get its components into refrigerator compressors, electronics cooling systems, and into heat pumps that can extract energy from the engine of a car to power the electrical system. If it works this is tech wizardry at the cutting edge.
Read Earlier alarm:clock euro coverage of Nanofreeze

Posted at 01:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Prague's 1C Buys Moscow Games Studio From Akella

Prague-based 1C Publishing has acquired Akella’s “Sea Dog” in-house development studio, which specializes in XBox games. The acquired Moscow-based team has worked on titles like Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean and Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales.

Akella, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Moscow, is a leading developer, publisher and distributor ofcomputer games in Russia, CIS and Baltic countries. It has a large localization team too. Akella’s shareholders include Quadriga Capital and Intel Capital

1C’s newly acquired studio will develop a wide range of innovative titles for multiple game platforms. Through the deal Akella has also acquired the worldwide publishing rights to PT Boats: Knights of the Sea.

1C Publishing EU says it releases quality PC games from leading Russian and Central European developers through its global network of independent distribution partners.

View- 1C company

Posted at 08:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

eCommerce Pioneers See Potential in Shopping Site iliketotallyloveit

Malte Goesche, the co-founder and CEO, of a new kind of social shopping platform - think Digg combined with an amateur version of BoingBoing/Engadget, wrote in to point out we had neglected to cover iliketotallyloveit.com's early stage investment round.

Indeed we did miss the German deal and have to say it's due to lack of resources, rather than lack of interest on our part.

Because if we had seen the release and who the business angel investors were, two German eCommerce pioneers and a veteran venture capital professional, it would have snagged our attention.

Goesche said it was an introduction by a mutual colleague that introduced the startup to Intershop co-founder Stephan Schambach, who now heads up Demandware (see our where are they now piece for more info).

Schambach in turn brought in colleagues from Argiv GmbH, an investment vehicle that belongs to Karsten Schneider, who not only co-founded Intershop but also subsequently created photo publishing site Pixaco (which was acquired by HP), and Stefan Friese, a former venture capital professional who worked at Technologieholding/3i in Germany. They have invested an undisclosed amount in the venture.

Goesche says the beta has attracted a 4-digit number of product reviewers and raters to the site. He also confirmed that the links to online shops where the goods are available are not paid for links and there are no lead generation or performance-based payments going to his venture, nor the reviewers.

There have been plenty of positive reviews of the site by top blogs, like Mashable, and news sites, like Wired. And indeed we can see how users might be attracted to surfing the site to view new gadgets and find things they didn't know they wanted, but what we are wondering is will people continue to contribute to Web sites where all you get is kudos and no cash or cash equivalent for your efforts.

It's the same thing that goes on with sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, or Mister Wong, pointed out Goesche.

The revenue model is yet to be revealed.

View - iliketotallyloveit

Posted at 07:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Hedgies Invest in Baltic and E European Job Seekers Site

The jobs market in Eastern Europe is booming we read in eetimes Europe (Disclosure: the title is now one your alarm:clock euro reporter freelances for). So it is interesting to note a deal that one of our readers, Jüri Kaljundi in Tallinn, drew to our attention this morning.

Startup CV Market, which serves jobseekers and selected recruiters in the Baltic and Eastern European countries, has sold a majority stake to a consortium of investors at a valuation of about €9M (consortium is paying 75 percent paid now with 25% in three years).

The investors are Digital Sky Technologies, Bexley International Investments Limited, and one of the Tiger Global Management funds, according to Kaljundi, who is a small shareholder in a rival online recruitment venture.

He points out that the largest share of sales come from Estonia, and also listed several other investments made by Tiger Global in the region.

A quick search of news sources reveals that both Digital Sky Technologies and Tiger have been active as a team in the past year in buying and selling shares in privately owned tech startups on this side of the Atlantic. For example, an exit here and here and a recent investment here.

Read - Jüri Kaljundi blog

Posted at 06:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Maeglin Raises Capital To Acquire Ipracom For Mobile Data Exchange

France's Maeglin Software raised capital to acquire Ipracom, which develops peer to peer software for mobile and PC data exchange applications. Funded by grants until now, Maeglin appears to have tapped Ipracom's investors to enable the transaction.

Maeglin says it is a B2B startup that offers Fidelio, a barcode-driven mobile marketing service, and Pleex, which is a multimedia exchange application platform. It was founded in 2006.
Source: Maeglin Software : Maeglin Software accueille à son capital CDC Innovation, Innovacom, et CapDecisif - News-Eco

Posted at 06:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 26, 2007

Fuel Cell Startup Raises £2M

We heard from the backers of fuel cell components startup Bac2 that it has raised £2M of private funding from London Business Angels. Its ground breaking conductive polymer ‘Electrophen’ is seen as a key enabler of lighter and lower cost fuel cells. Its website says its ready to ship in prototype to production volume levels.

The latest funding round was led by London Seed Capital and London Business Angels who supported the continuing success of their original investment in 2006 by helping to raise this round.
View - Bac2

Posted at 03:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Alt Energy Consultancy Semplice Attracts Venture Finance

Semplice Energy Limited, a systems integrator of the green energy kind, has raised $1.23M from BIP Fund, a recently established Bahamas-based VC business. Semplice consults the likes of McDonalds, Tesco, and Mothercare on how these organizations can deploy new lighting solutions, or adopt cutting edge voltage and power management soluutions, even use wind power to save money and use renewable energy systems to reduce electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. It then manages the ensuing projects.

Due to our limited resources at the alarm:clock euro, we did not have time to determine if Semplice is actually devloping its own hardware, in addition to sourcing gear from third parties.

We figure that this startup will find plenty of potential customers. The news we read in our feeds and in news aggregators suggests that corporations are indeed looking at savings, but also the PR effect, and sustainability points they get from adopting greener energy strategies.

We know from another startup, Asset4 in Zug, Swtizerland, that stock market analysts are starting to rate publicly traded companies that can demonstrate sustainability in their operations more highly.

View Semplice

Semplice Energy Secures Investment Funding
Thursday November 22, 3:00 am ET
BIP Fund (I) Limited Partnership Invest in Semplice Energy for Continued Company Growth

READING, England, November 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Semplice Energy Limited, a leading provider of green energy solutions including advanced energy saving and renewable energy systems to reduce electricity consumption and CO2 emissions, today announced it has secured US$1.23 million in funding from BIP Fund (I) Limited Partnership, a Bahamas based venture capital business.

Semplice Energy has recently been expanding rapidly with a strong customer base including McDonald's, Mothercare, Tesco, The National Trust and The London Fire Brigade. The investment capital will be used to fund future company growth, drive industry initiatives and expand research and development activities.

David Johnson, investment adviser to BIP and a director of Semplice said "We are delighted to have made this investment. We are very impressed by Mark Truswell (Chief Executive Officer, Semplice Energy) and Natalie Barker (Founder and Chief Operations Officer, Semplice Energy) and what they have achieved already. We believe that their highly commercial approach and technical expertise will continue to give the company a competitive advantage." BIP is also well-placed to lead the syndication of further rounds of funding as necessary.

In addition, Semplice announces the appointment of Neeta Dalal as Chief Marketing Officer. Ms Dalal joins Semplice with 11 years of marketing experience including a series of positions with Informix, Documentum and EMC Corporation.

About BIP Fund (I) Limited Partnership:

BIP is a privately held business established in 2006. BIP focuses on investments in early stage and start up businesses across a number of sectors including financial services and technology. The directors are active investors working closely with management to build an in-depth understanding of their business so as to add maximum value.

David Johnson started his professional career as a lawyer in the City and the Far East, and has spent the last 10 years as an in-house commercial lawyer first at Virgin Group and then at Capital One.

About Semplice Energy:

Semplice Energy is a provider of technically advanced energy saving and renewable energy solutions to reduce electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. Based in Berkshire, UK, Semplice Energy was founded in 2005 by a team of environmentally conscious technology and corporate investment professionals. Through the team's passion for the environment and in depth technological expertise they are redefining the landscape of energy solutions.

Focusing on the key areas of energy consumption, Semplice Energy works with world class partners such as Steinel, Baldor, Fluoresave, Salicru, Schuco, NeoSave, Fortis Wind Energy, Zephyr and Atlantic Orient Canada. Customers of these energy saving and renewable energy products are seeing significant cost savings through improvements in efficiency, onsite electricity production and a reduction in CO2 output.

Semplice Energy is the trademark of Semplice Energy in the United Kingdom and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Posted at 06:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 25, 2007

Applied Materials Buy Italian Solar Cell Equipment Maker for €225M

Applied Materials has announced its second acquisition of a European solar cell processing equipment manufacturer. The US-based semiconductor equipment manufacturer said it is to acquire Baccini S.p.A., a supplier of equipment used in the manufacture of crystalline silicon photovoltaic wafers for €225 million (about $330M at today's currency exchange rates).

Founded way back in 1967 in Treviso, Italy, Baccini’s photovoltaic product line enables manufacturers to minimize the use of silicon material, which now represents more than 60% of solar cell manufacturing cost, the firm said in a statement. The Italian venture is led by founder Gisulfo Baccini.

In June of ths year we reported that Applied also bought a Swiss wafer slicing technology company for $475M. And according to Tech Confidential Behind the Money Blog it bought US based Applied Films Corp., a supplier of equipment for manufacturing flat-panel displays and solar cells last year.
Read - Applied Materials News
Read- Applied Materials takes Italy's Baccini

Posted at 07:16 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

South Africa's Synthasite Raises $5M from Luxury Label's Corporate VC Arm

Synthasite, an AJAX-based web site publishing tool provider, raised $5M from Compagnie Financière Richemont’s subsidiary, Columbus Venture Capital, based in Geneva. The startup plans to open its platform to third party developers next year, in order to allow them to create widgets, templates and plugins for the platform.

Richemont owns a portfolio of leading international brands and it wholly owns Columbus Venture Capital, which invests in the global branded consumer goods markets, information technology and digital media.

In a statement, the investor said that it believes that the luxury sector will benefit from enabling technologies in things like electronic retailing, channel e-commerce, data security and authentication.

Read - alarm:clock's profile of Synthasite
Read Synthasite Raises $5m Series ''A'' Round

Posted at 07:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 23, 2007

Warburg Pincus Invests in Spectraseis

Zurich-based Spectraseis announced this week hat it has raised Sfr 36M (US$ 32.5 Million) from Warburg Pincus in a deal that sees the investor acquiring a "significant minority stake" in the geographical surveying technology company.

It is active in a market that has proven to be lucrative for venture capital investors with some good sized exits this year.

The four year old company has developed an imaging and detection system to map oil and gas reservoirs more effectively, cleanly, and at lower costs than existing systems. Earlier investor, StatoilHydro Venture Capital maintains a stake in the company, together with Spectraseis' management team.

Your alarm:clock euro reporter first wrote about Spectraseis back in 2003 when co-founder and CEO Ross Newman had a prototype, some fresh R&D, and a pitch he was making to investors at the European Tech Tour and b-to-v's Investorenkreis conferences. (No links because back then we wrote subscription-only publications)

In the meantime, he attracted early investors, and today his company has customers like Petrobras, StatoilHydro, Pemex, as well as operators in the Middle East.

Warburg Pincus will get two board seats with the deal.
Hot Sector
The growth stage investor might be hoping that it will achieve another homerun in the oil and gas sector with this one, like it did earlier this year with ElectroMagnetic GeoServices (EMGS), which it floated in Oslo at €1.5B plus valuation.

We've been scraping together information on this year's largest VC-backed exits-- by hand, we might add because we don't have access to one of the well stocked databases, like VentureOne or MergerMarket, which are available for deeper pocketed press organizations -- and so far our research shows that two of the largest VC-backed exits are indeed in the same sector as Spectraseis, namely MTEM (a Scottish Equity Partners homerun) and the aforementioned EMGS.

Posted at 08:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 22, 2007

Tokiva Seeded For Chinese Mobile Services Biz

We just confirmed with early stage investment specialist Brains-To-Ventures AG 's Jan Bomholt that it, along with business angel William Bao Bean, are backing a seed round in Tokiva, a Chinese mobile communication platform company that provides services, such as discounted mobile calls. The deal size is not disclosed.

The company is based in Beijing, with headquarters in Toronto.

As we understand it, the first service it offers - still in beta - works similar to Jajah's original concept, where users enter into a Web form the calling number and the target number. Tokiva calls back the call initiator once the call is set up. It also supports mobile email and community, according to its website.

The venture was founded by Tong Li, CEO, and Qianfei Wang, who worked together previously in a company the two founded in Toronto, Jatheon Technologies, an enterprise search and compliance management company targeting the financial services sector.

Bao Bean is on the firm's advisory board and is a partner at Softbank China & India Holdings, an early stage venture capital firm.

So how did this Swiss-based investment organization get access to a deal so far abroad? The answer is its network, which has people living in the region, and its members that are willing to travel in order to make investments.

Bomholt said that b-to-v met Tokiva's founders during privateDC 2007, a one-week trip to China in early 2007 where 25 Chinese startups presented to the“b-to-v Investorenkreis” (the name of its club of active business angels).

He added that the club is planning to invest €80M over the next three years and that it has scheduled a comparable investment trip to Russia and the Ukraine in June 2008.
View Tokiva

View b-to-v

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November 21, 2007

Romanian eMail Server Software Company Sells Stake to VCs

Gecad Technologies, the company behind AXIGEN Mail Server software, has raised a first round of capital from Global Finance, the 3TS-Cisco Growth Fund III and several other undisclosed investors. The deal size was €2M and the founder, Radu Georgescu, retains 88.24% of shares post investment.[via ]

Earlier this month 3TS, which has been active in Eastern Europe for several years, announced Cisco as an LP in its third fund, which aims to invest growth capital in deal sizes up to €4M, targetting in small and medium-sized companies in technology, media and communications sectors.

Read Axigen Announces

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November 19, 2007

Scottish Equity Partners Invests in Skyscanner

SEP wrote in to say that it is backing the founders of Skyscanner to create a flight search engine that has the ambition of covering every commercial flight in the world. The deal size is £2.5M.

We met one of the founders of Skycanner on the Scottish Tech Tour, rather fittingly in the hanger of a museum that houses one of the Concorde's last year, and thought back then that it sounded like some pretty good algorithm work being done.

No doubt It would have to be some pretty strong IP for the team to be able to get SEP to make an investment in an Internet-oriented startup.

The flight databse is up to more than 180 airlines now and about 5,000 destinations. Skyscanner is headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland and also has an IT engineering base in Poland.
View Skyscanner

Posted at 12:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

VCs Cuts Out the Executive Search Middleman

Munich-based Wellington Partners put out a PR today announcing that it has "challenging jobs" for techies on its website at wellington-partners.com (don't forget the hyphen or you end up on a Canadian exec search firm's website).

The Pan European VC is using VentureLoop's technology, a jobs engine startup from Silicon Valley that has seen surprise success and take up amongst well-known VC firms. The a:c euro has heard it even surprised itself.

Other Euro VCs that use VentureLoop include Index Ventures and Atlas Venture.

Posted at 10:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Tech Tour Web Summit Review of Six Pitches

Here's some of what we heard and saw on Thursday at the European Tech Tour's Web & Communities Summit where selected companies were able to make their pitches for free to a roomful of investors from all over Europe. There are only six because the alarm:clock euro arrived late and only eyeballed that many.

We talked to pros from Silicon Valley Bank, SAP Ventures, Earlybird, Holtzbrinck, Wellington, Endeavour Vision, Sardis, and Highland Capital. There were others too but the alarm:clock did not get a chance to meet them.

Wikio co-founder Pierre Chappaz (above) demoed Wikio's news aggregation power, talking a bit about the relevance engine, but also about its revenue generation potential, which includes things like affiliate marketing, shopping channels, and advertising.

The a:c euro was skeptical at first about the content and power of the engine but we have been accessing Wikio lately and can report that it's French version has enough usage and content now to become a power-tool for us.

We expect to use the English version too, once it reaches the same level of development and usage as the French one. And it looks like Chappaz has the basics in place to turn the traffic growth, which he also demonstrated, into a moneymaker.

NEO- Stylish, young founding team developing smart algorithms (they call it a social discovery engine) for consumer-oriented online services. Insider nugget: if you have heard of httpool media network , then you'll be interested to know that its CEO Timotej Gala, has signed on as NEO's head up the online advertising and media operations at NEO. It comes out of Slovenia with German connections, targeting the high growth Eastern European market.

That is NEO's co-founder and CEO Andrej Nabergoj. This is not his first venture. And he's also got connections to httpool.

Xcerion - CEO Daniel Arthursson, gave a low key presentation, which belies this startup's disruptive proposition. He talked about the CloudOS concept his firm has in place. To be clear, he said, it is not a WebOS, rather the code executes inside the browser and taps about 20 percent of the host computer's OS.

Xcerion needs to attract developers to churn out XML apps for the platform and believes that big name software vendors will develop Xcerion versions of their software, or risk its ecosystem doing knockoffs. The company faces several challenges on the user takeup side, but also on getting developers to work on apps, plus there's competition and a lack of understanding (ours included) on what's the difference between a CloudOS and WebOS. But this is one startup and definitely an emerging market segment that we have to take a closer look at the alarm:clock euro.

Flashgames 24/7 - Founder Shazad Mohammed has speaking skills and chutzpah, along with an English accent that disarms North American ears (sounds like Amy Winehouse's). He would be a natural for a consumer-oriented pitchfest like DEMO, where dexterity with PowerPoint is a negative.

Although he was a bit over the top for the panel's moderator Morten Lund who criticized his financial projections, this young founder has built up a profitable casual games business that claims 7 million unique visitors a month, about $800K in turnover this year, with a half a million in profit expected, of which all but $120K gets invested back into the company. He's looking for venture capital to hire up, develop an MMO game or two, and to hire his own advertising sales team to 'cut out the middleman' to whom he is now paying 50 percent commissions for ads.

Goojet has not launched yet but we a saw demo of a user-friendly, and potentially useful new application. The interface reminds us of the Mac Book Pro. When it comes to software that claims to bridge the Internet applications and the mobilephone, it is unusual for it to look so friendly.

Goojet enables users to drag and drop applications, content, links, and messages from the web to your phone's memory. Although we could only see a simulated demo, the founder invited the audience to see it working on a mobilephone during the break. Goojet is meant for Javaphones, which is the largest of the installed base of application executable phones.

Insider's nugget: Goojet CEO Marc Rougier, founded and led Meiosys, which was acquired by IBM in 2004, and subsequently integrated into the US company's virtualization products, and Ludovic Le Moan, CTO, who also founded Anyware Technologies, a 70-person strong engineering company that developed the Joost backend.

COO is Guillaume Decugis held the same position at Musiwave, which was acquired by Openwave, which in turn is being acquired by Microsoft. The venture is backed by Elaia Partners and Partech.

Zyb - Stylish CEO and co-founder Tommy Ahlers made it clear that Zyb won't be offering its contact backup, calendering, and communication platform as a white label. He plans to keep this SyncML-enabled company independent, although he is looking for strategic investors. Despite insisting on promoting its own brand, several mobile network operators (such as home country operator TDC Mobile in Denmark, E-Plus in Germany and Smart Philippines) have signed on with Zyb. Ahlers said two global deals are in the works.

Posted at 07:23 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 17, 2007

Agenda Setter: Vente Privée Unconventionally Successful

Every year Silicon.com does a jury-vetted list of Agenda Setters in the IT world. While this year there were a few entrepreneurs from this side of the Atlantic that made the list (see below), the selection is typically dominated by CEO's of US-based businesses.

Maybe next year, we will see the French founders of Vente Privée make the list. There is no doubt it has a trend-setting ecommerce business model, what with all the copycats in its home market, but also in the US and other parts of Europe.

At the moment, the 7 year old company is an 'order of magnitude' larger than its closest competitor, with a turnover of some €300M annually, a fact that helped it win a special jury prize at this year's Audemars Piguet Changing Times Award for entrepreneurship.

There are a lot of things that are untypical about this venture. It has seven founders, for one. They were all wholesale jobbers who decided to follow CEO Jacques Antoine Granjean's idea to put their businesses online in 2001, according to COO Xavier Court who accepted the prize on Thursday night.

Its members-only track was also unconventional. We have not confirmed it with the founders, but as we hear it, the idea behind making it a members only site, a practise that is similar to the way catalogue mail order businesses encourage customer to recommend neighbours and friends, came about so that it could authenticate new shoppers and help reduce fraud.

The company also does everything in-house from photography and video production to email marketing and logistics.

Godet Cognac On Sale. The left link will show a short video trailer pitching the product. The right link reserves your order.

It's a bit like home shopping TV, with its limited number of items and time limit on prices, combined with the user-paced aspects of online shopping. Daily emails invite inform shoppers.

The Journal Du Net has an excellent photo reportage inside Vente Privée's headquarters here to see it all in action.

Court also talked to us about how the company builds its 'brand', once again in unorthodox ways. For example, Vente Privée just launched its own glossy women's fashion title. "It is not a catalogue, it's a beauty and fashion magazine," said Court. That's the cover of magazine, Rosebuzz, on the right there.

The startup also demonstrated 'a never say die attitude', according to the jury of the Changing Times Award.

Court tells it like this: After a couple of years online, sales had not taken off the way the founders had hoped and fixed costs were causing a cash burn that had three of the seven ready to call it quits. They could be making more money doing other things.

But they were outvoted and the business stayed open. In 2004 and 2005, sales skyrocketed and they have not looked back since. It was the advent of xDSL that turned things around, according to Court.

Related stories from alarm:clock euro
eCommerce Gurus From France
Summit Partners investment in Vente Privée
Euro eCommerce Trend

Selected Agenda Setters for 2007 From Silicon.com

Rorie DevineBetfair's CTO who recently became CEO and is expected to lead the company to an IPO

Charles DunstoneCarphone Warehouse CEO

Geelen and Pauwels

TomTom co-founders Pieter Geelen and Peter-Frans Pauwels : more than 10M units sold

JP Rangaswami

BT Global CIO

Trevor Baylis

The UK-based inventor of the wind up radio

Posted at 03:41 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 16, 2007

A Montreux Backdrop for European TechTour's Web Summit

In one of his rare posts on Tornado Insider, Jerome Mol, its founder, wrote about his participation in yesterday's European Tech Web Summit Event in Montreux. The alarm:clock euro was also there too. A quick review is in now online too.

Mol said that despite being distracted by the "fantastic views of the Evian mountain across Lake Geneva" he was able to consider the 20 or so companies that made their pitches to investors yesterday.

The Storied Chateau Chillon on Lac Leman ( which in typical Swiss fashion is also know as Lake of Geneva, Genfersee, and Lac de Genève)

He writes:
Interesting to note is that over half of the selected companies have been really capital efficient, getting to this stage with capital raised ranging from zero to €2 million. A total of 8 companies received between €2 million and €10 million: Mythings (€8.3 million), Refresh (€6 million), Seatwave (€8 million), Smeet (€6 million), Wazap (€9 million), Wifi (€4.6 million), Wengo (€6.5 million), Wikio (€5 million), and Xcerion (€9 million).

Just two companies pulled in more than €20 million to date: Truphone raised €21 million and Dailymotion secured a whopping €32 million

Most companies claim not to be looking for money...

That fact, in his mind, casts doubt on the aspirations of the ventures. He posits that without VC they might not reach mountain-high valuations.

The a:c euro suspects that if a founder is pitching at a Tech Tour event, he is there because is considering his options, how the business could to develop without VC, and how it could be developed with the right VC.

Mol currently heads up GPXS, a Blackberry productivity software developer. A Dutch serial entrepreneur - he sold his IT company Prolin to HP during the last venture cycle.

Update: Fred Desitin, a partner at Atlas Venture also wrote up his thoughts on the conference here.

Read - Hot European Web communities shine at Montreux investor fest

Posted at 11:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Musiwave Sold On To Microsoft

Sister site alarm:clock has the news that Microsoft is to acquire mobile music track provider Musiwave for $46M plus the assumption of about $4M in debt.

Musiwave, was a VC-backed French venture that was acquired by Openwave for $121M in September 2005. Apparently Openwave has been undergoing a turnaround and this sale was part of a plan to focus on 'core assets' of the business (see below).

Openwave did not do as well with its Eruopean acquisition as Verisign did with ringtone provider Jamba, which was also a VC-backed mobile sector venture, which it bought in 2004. In January of 2007, the US security and Interent technology firm sold a 51 percent stake to NewsCorp for $187.5M, according to moconews , a deal valuing the venture at $375M, a good $100M more than what it paid in 2004.

Openwave Executes Definitive Agreement with Microsoft

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© Business Wire 2005
2007-11-15 16:38:06 -

- Openwave Systems Inc. Mike Bishop, 650-480-4461 (Investor Relations) investor@openwave.com Vikki Herrera, 650-480-6753 (Public Relations) Vikki.Herrera@openwave.com Openwave Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:OPWV), today announced the execution of a definitive agreement for Microsoft to acquire Musiwave, a leading provider of mobile music entertainment services to operators and media companies, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Openwave.

"Musiwave's strong customer
relationships, superior quality of services, and leadership position in mobile music were attractive to Microsoft and contributed to the ultimate purchase price," said Robert Vrij, president, CEO and interim Chairman, Openwave. "As we committed to our investors, the divestiture of Musiwave was an important component of the plan developed by the Openwave Board and management team to focus on driving market leadership in the core assets of our business, including service management, messaging, client and location."

Financial Terms and Schedule

Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Microsoft will acquire Musiwave for $46 million in cash and assume net debt. As of September 30, 2007, Musiwave had a net debt of approximately $4 million. The transaction is expected to close following the completion of customary closing conditions including regulatory approval. Merrill Lynch & Co. served as exclusive financial advisor to Openwave in the transaction.

"Microsoft is committed to delivering connected entertainment experiences for all consumers, including the access to rich music content," said Pieter Knook, senior vice president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft. "With the acquisition of Musiwave, we are deepening our position in the mobile entertainment market with an innovative provider to help broadly deliver a breadth of music software and services."

About Musiwave

Musiwave is a leading provider of mobile music entertainment solutions, including software, marketing and content management, to operators and media companies worldwide. Musiwave provides mobile music entertainment services to 30 mobile operators in 25 countries and powers more than 20 full-track mobile music services. For more information, please visit www.musiwave.net.

About Openwave Systems

Openwave Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:OPWV) is one of the world's leading innovators of software applications and infrastructure designed to enable revenue-generating, personalized services, including merchandising and advertising, which converge the mobile and broadband experience across all of a user's devices.

As the communications industry intersects with the Internet, Openwave software enables service providers to converge services, increasing the value of their networks by accelerating time to market and reducing the cost and complexity associated with new service deployment. Openwave's unique product portfolio provides a complete range of service management, messaging, location and client technologies. Openwave is a global company headquartered in Redwood City, California.

Openwave is a trademark of Openwave Systems Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Posted at 08:32 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 14, 2007

Fresh French Venture Capital Investments

PolySpot Is Crawling The Enterprise
A French startup called PolySpot, which is specialized in enterprise search software has raised €1.2M from a local VC. Neteco says the six year old company competes with the likes of Exalead, Sinequa, Autonomy, FAST, and Google. If it has survived this long without outside funding and all this competition, it must have something going for it. The answer we think may lie in its its spidery ability to probe all kinds of files and systems. Its website says it handles shared servers, intranet, Electronic Document Management System (EDMS), Relational Database (RDBMS), proprietary databases, personal files, mail boxes, Web sites, search engine, on-line services, RSS feeds). And it is compatible with over 300 file formats. [via ]
View Polyspot

ShoeCommerce
Spartoo.com, a French shoe e-tailer, has raised €4.3M, according to Neteco. The investors are French VC funds who join after an earlier business ange round of €1.2M. It is doing about €4M in turnover and get 1.4M visitors per month, more than arch rival Sarenza, says Neteco.
Read - E-commerce : Spartoo lève 4,3 millions d'euros par Neteco.com

Digital Forms for Digital Pens
Kayentis, which has developed applications targetted at the health care, aerospace, and public sectors on top of the Anoto platform, has just raised € 6 million from Xange and Seventure.
[JDN and Blognation France]

Posted at 10:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 13, 2007

Lithuanian Startup GetJar Financed By Accel Partners, Moves To London

GetJar, which runs a WAP and web portal for downloading mobilephone and PDA applications, announced it has raised a Series A round with Accel Partners. The three year old venture was founded by Ilja Laurs, CEO, in Lithuania. It has enabled 100M downloads with a global user base.

With the investment it is moving its headquarters to London and two Accel partners, Heikki Makijarvi and Kevin Comolli, join the board.

View GetJar
Read press rel.

Posted at 06:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Eden Gets Into Huddle for $4M

Eden Ventures, the UK venture fund known for some making good returns in the music downloads and enterprise software markets, has led a Series A round for Huddle.net, a UK-based SaaS venture specialized in collaboration tools for project teams and co-workers.

It charges monthly subscription fees for access to the applications suites. Your alarm:clock euro reporter is suffering from sign-up and registration fatigue, and the demo wasn't very detailed about the kinds of applications available, so here are some links to reviews and analysis elsewhere:

Read - Huddle: MySpace for the enterprise (infoworld)
Read - Why Pay For a Web Conferencing Tool When You Can Build Your own (Collaboration blogs)
Read - Online Collaboration Tools (blogism)

Posted at 12:06 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

German Web Investment Roundup

We're catching up on recent early stage deals in Germany's Web world.

Adscale
German text and banner ad network startup, Adscale, has raised an undisclosed amount of early stage financing from Holtzbrinck Ventures, along with the European Founders Fund and business angels, Oliver Jung and Lukasz Gandowski.

Just selling and serving ads for all the web projects these four investors have would probably be enough to keep this startup in business for a while. For US readers, if you know Adbrite, then you will know what Adscale is like.

Adscale is currently selling text and banner ad campaigns that run on websites with 100 page impressions up to 500K page impressions a day. It launched in September 2007.

Weblin
The company's platform lets users create an avatar to surf the web together (formerly Zweitgeist which we covered a while ago) has received a strategic investment of an unidisclosed value from T-Online Venture fund. Its other investors include High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Swiss-based Mountain Partners.

Youmix
IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft (state-backed fund), along with seed stage investors Mountain Partners, Tiburon, T7M7 and Oliver Jung, and YMC, a content management system vendor out of Switzerland are providing financing for Youmix, a platform for bands and fans. Youmix launched "Project Famous" which offers every band that successfully invites 5K people to the platform (directly or through a Flash widget provided by Youmix) gets funding for their first record.
Looking at the logo - could it be a red sofa trend next?
Townster
We eyeballed a PR from this local search startup announcing it almost raised finance. That was a first.
[via deutsche-startups.de]

Posted at 06:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

From Ireland to Moscow - Fresh Euro M&A

Comstar United TeleSystems, a telecommunications operator in Russia and the CIS, said it has completed a 100% acquisition of Digital Telephone Networks South, reportedly the largest alternative telecommunications operator in the Southern Federal District of Russia, for a total cash consideration of about $167.4M.

Divx is to acquire German startup MainConcept for $22M plus a $6M earnout, according to several sources, such as newteevee. The Aachen-based company was founded in 1993 by CEO, Markus Moenig who was just 23 years old at the time. It is specialized in standards based video codecs and related technologies that it licenses to OEMs. He joins Divx as a senior VP. In its early days, MainConcept specialized in video editing software for the Amiga, OS/2, and Windows 95. It looks like this one has not raised any venture capital, at least we didn't find any disclosure of it on its website.

The alarm:clock euro notes that this is the second deal in the past month where a US buyer is acquiring compression tech IP in Europe. The other deal is Coding Technologies, which owned the IP on several audio compression technologies.

Iron Mountain bought Ireland's Datastroy, an Irish startup that does not appear to have raised any venture capital. It was a partner of Iron Mountain and specialized in doc shredding.

Posted at 05:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 12, 2007

Displaylink Raises Another $24M For Multi-Monitor Computing

New investor DAG Ventures, of Palo Alto, has led a Series C round for DisplayLink. It joins existing Euro VC firms Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit.

DisplayLink has developed components that enable display, PC, projector and PC accessory manufacturers to create USB-based products including universal laptop docks, adapters and monitors. The company has a longer list of customers since last we looked, including big name brands like LG, Ratoc, Samsung and Toshiba. It was this 'traction' that attracted the new investor and the new round

It has raised $51M to date.
View DisplayLink

Posted at 04:22 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Psylock Claims Password-killer

When it comes to biometric methods to secure office applications and networks, it's either fingerprints, voice prints, retina analysis, or other scannings of body bits. Now a Regensburg-based startup called Psylock is introducing a new method to the mix, it checks users typing cadence to make sure the folks logging in are indeed who they say they are.

The user enters a single sentence, rather than a password, and its software checks typing speed, rhythm, agility, corrective behaviour and use of shift keys, according to a report in SC Magazine.

Psylock's tech has already been implemented by the University of Ratisbona, according to its website.

The benefit of Psylock's wizardry is that it has the security of a biometric solution, but it not as expensive, and it removes the threat of shared passwords, according to SC Magazine. "It makes passwords obsolete," a company representative said in the same report.

The report from SC says it was one of five finalists chosen at a conference in London last week in London (Global Security Challenge, an annual competition).

View Psylock

Posted at 07:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

VC-Backed Coding Technologies Acquired By Dolby for $250M

Stockholm-based Coding Technologies, a ten year old developer of audio compression tech for mobilephone, digital radio, and Internet content is to be acquired by Dolby for $250M net of cash.

The Swedish/German company is behind several de-facto standards, points out EE Times, including aacPlus and MP3pro. It received early stage backing from CIMON, a Swedish early stage investor.

The a:c euro notes that Verdane, formerly Four Seasons Venture, lists Coding Technologies as a portfolio company too.
[via]

Read - EETimes.com - Dolby pays quarter billion dollars for Coding Technologies

Posted at 06:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 09, 2007

Mangrove and bmp Back Polish Site For Women

bmp Media Investors and Mangrove have invested an undisclosed amount in Republika Kobiet, the company behind a 'web 2.0 lifestyle portal' targeted at women and based in Poland. (We think that the site name means Women's Republic)

Two of the founders hail from print media and one from the financial portal category. The founders are Jan Dybczyński who was co-founder/CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Polska, owning the Elle and Marie Clare titles in Poland, and Katarzyna Montgomery, the former editor-in-chief of Viva! - a celebrity/people title.

The third founder is Piotr Wąsowski who was CEO of Bankier.pl, a now publicly traded Polish financial site.
[News tip from]
View Republika Kobiet

bmp AG: bmp and Mangrove to invest in "Repulic of Women"

Berlin, November 9th 2007

The agreement signed on November 8th provides Republika Kobiet Sp. z o.o. with backing of two international venture capital funds: bmp Media Investors, an affiliate of bmp AG and Mangrove II Investment managed by Mangrove Capital Partners.

The funds took in equal proportion a total of 35% of shares of Republika Kobiet.pl, whose aim is to build a web 2.0 lifestyle portal targeted at women. The Founders of the company are Jan Dybczyński – co-founder and many years’ CEO of Polish branch of world’s biggest publisher of women’s glossy magazines, Hachette Filipacchi Polska – publisher of, among others, Elle and Marie Clare, Katarzyna Montgomery – former editor-in-chief of fortnightly Viva! - a leader on the people magazines market and Piotr Wąsowski – co-creator of success of stock exchange company Bankier.pl – a leader among internet financial portals, where he was a vice-president and later CEO during 2003-2006.

"Soon we intend to launch Republika Kobiet.pl, an internet portal which thanks to making use of the advantages that internet has over the traditional media, will be an interactive and community-building equivalent of women magazines. Thanks to the combination of founders experience gained on both press an internet markets and using the support provided by bmp AG and Mangrove Capital Partners we would like to offer Polish women a place in the internet, a Republic, where they could build up their world and find information about the topics which interest them the most", says Katarzyna Montgomery – editor-in-chief and vice-president of Rpebublika Kobiet.

bmp AG has been investing in Poland since 1999. It is dually listed on both Polish and German stock exchange since 2004. bmp’s most important investments in Poland were Internet Data Systems – internet service provider for the public sector, Bankier.pl – a leader on the market of financial portals in Poland and, currently in the portfolio, K2 Internet – a leader of e-marketing in Poland, soon to be floated on the stock exchange and Nokaut.pl – prominent price comparison shopping engine in Polish internet.

Investment in Republika Kobiet.pl is the first one to be done in Poland by a fund managed by Mangrove Capital Partners. The Mangrove funds invest all over the world in technology companies, mostly in such sectors as communication, infrastructure, media or wireless technologies. Mangrove Capital Partners is best know for the fact of being the first institutional investor of Skype, contributing substantially to Skype’s taking the lead on internet communicators market.

"We took the decision to invest in Republika Kobiet because we strongly believe in good prospects ahead of dedicated portals with clearly defined, better-than-average target groups. An important factor was the vast experience that the founders have in the women media and internet industry", says Krzysztof Nowiński, member of the board of bmp Polska who was responsible for executing the transaction and will be the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Republika Kobiet.pl.

"We are happy about the 11th bmp’s investment in Poland. I’m confident that the aim of the Company to become number 1 on the market by 2009 is realistic, despite the competition from growing online activities of the publishing houses in Poland and other existing online initiatives", says Jens Spyrka, CEO of bmp Media Investors, which is the lead-investor in Republika Kobiet.

"Investment in Republika Kobiet is our first Polish investment and a second one in Central-Eastern Europe, after Quintura.com – a Russian internet search engine operator. It is part of our strategy to search for and invest in companies in early stages of their development which have the talent and potential to become global players. We will actively support the development of Republika Kobiet using our experience in managing technology and media companies", adds Hugo Mahieu, principal at Mangrove Capital Partners.

As a step in launching the portal, Republika Kobiet, together with TV4 has launched a webpage of a women-dedicated programme Mała Czarna, broadcast daily by TV4. Under www.malaczarna.republikakobiet.pl the internet users can share their opinions on the issues touched on in the programme which is hosted by Katarzyna Montgomery – editor-in-chief of Republika Kobiet.pl.

About bmp:
As an internationally operating private equity asset manager, bmp invests own resources directly into company participations and, at the same time, is engaged as a funds manager for funds of funds and as a private equity advisor. To its shareholdings, bmp supplies not only capital, but also 10 years of comprehensive know-how as a business developer. With the experience from more than 80 own shareholdings, 13 initial public offers, as well as more than 25 trade sales from the portfolio, bmp is among the most competent venture capital companies in Germany and Poland. The bmp Media Investors is a thematically specialised venture capital company under management of bmp, entering into shareholdings exclusively in the area of media, entertainment, and marketing services in Germany and Poland. Beside Republika Kobiet, the present portfolio of bmp Media Investors comprises nugg.ad AG in Berlin, Brand New World GmbH in Munich, gamigo AG in Rheine, Nokaut Sp.z.o.o. in Gynia, Shotgun Pictures GmbH in Stuttgart and Greenhanger GmbH in Berlin.

About Mangrove Capital Partners:
Mangrove Capital Partners "Mangrove" provides venture capital to entrepreneurs looking to build world class companies. Its mission is to help turn visions into realities by providing financing, thoughtful advice, relevant experience and deep industry relationships to our portfolio companies. Mangrove has invested in, among others, the following companies: Skype (www.skype.com), Lumension (www.lumension.com), Dialcom Networks (www.dialcom.com), Nimbuzz ( www.nimbuzz.com), Properazzi (www.properazzi.com), Seatwave (www.seatwave.com), Quintura ( www.quintura.com ) and Piczo (www.piczo.com).

For further information:

bmp AG

Corinna Riewe
Investor Relations

Schlüterstraße 38
10629 Berlin
Tel: +49 30 20 30 5-567
Fax: +49 30 20 30 5- 555
E-mail: criewe@bmp.com
Internet: www.bmp.com

This issue of Corporate News represents neither an offering nor a request for the tendering of bids for the purchase of securities – particularly not in the US and not in any countries or jurisdictions in which offers, requests for the tendering of bids for purchases or for sales would not be permitted without previous registration or approval in accordance with the stipulations of the respectively applicable securities regulations.

This issue of Corporate News represents neither an offer for the sale of individual proprietary shares nor a request for the submission of an offer for the purchase of individual shares; it is intended solely for information purposes.

Posted at 12:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

German Startup Financed For Mechanical Turk-like Business

The High Tech Gründerfonds let us know that it and two other investors have put in an undisclosed amount of capital into HumanGrid, a startup founded by husband and wife team, Alex and Angelika Linden, that aims to offer a platform for outsourcing small online jobs to workers.

If your familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, then you know what HumanGrid is about.

It has two differences from the US project, according to one of its backers, in that it aims at a "much higher renumeration for the clickworkers" than Mechanical Turk, and it offers automated quality control of the work done.

If Alex Linden's name seems familiar, it is because he was a long-time Gartner analyst. He's the person that came up with the Hype Cycle concept.

We take it that the crowdsourcing hype cycle is at a point where he believes it was worth giving up the corporate world for the riskier startup world.

Last month your a:c euro reporter made 14 cents on Mechanical Turk for four assignments. At the rate she completed the work, it will take her about 99 hours to have enough money to buy the latest Douglas Copeland novel on Amazon.com.

More on HumanGrid at Blognation Germany and on its homepage HumanGrid.

Posted at 10:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Early Stage Investors Back GreenHanger

Two early stage investors, bmp and b-to-v, are putting an undisclosed amount of capital into GreenHanger, a startup business that has developed a concept to replace metal coat hangers used in dry cleaners with cardboard ones. It might not be high tech, but it's an innovative idea out of Berlin.

The plan is to have 3M units in the market by this time next year.

The carrot to encourage the dry cleaning biz operators to switch is that the hangers are free. They are free because they are covered in advertising.
View GreenHanger

Posted at 10:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Mapsolute Acquired By Navteq for $40M

Back in June, the alarm:clock euro's reporter Valerie Thompson speculated that Mapsolute's press announcements indicated that a corporate finance event of some sort was in the works.

News this week confirmed that notion: the German developer of mapping and geo software is being acquired by digital map supplier Navteq Corp, according to GPS Business News

The deal means that Mapsolute's founders will increase their net worth by about $10M each. According to the aforementioned report, founders Alexander Wiegand and Thomas Golob held approximately 55% of the outstanding capital stock of MapSolute.

The two will continue to serve as Managing Directors of MapSolute, according to the same source. Headquartered in Frankfurt, MapSolute has 95 employees and several international offices.

Posted at 09:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 08, 2007

VC-Backed PC Security Software Company Sophos To Float in London

Sophos, a UK-based anti-virus and security software company, is planning to IPO on the London Stock Exchange, possibly before the end of the year, according to Reuters.

We balked at filling out the form on its website to read the announcement, so turned to FT Alphaville blog instead. It said the float is expected to raise about £100M and that Sophos could get a valuation of between £300M and £500M.

If Sophos goes out within that reported range, then it would be a robust valuation for a software company that is doing $167M in turnover in a category that does not lack for competition.

Its current VC backer is TA Associates.

Read - FT Alphaville » Sophos could raise £100m via float
Read - Hemscott report on Sophos

Posted at 11:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Buoyant IPO For VC-backed U-Blox

One week after its IPO on the Swiss Stock Exchange, GPS chipset maker u-blox is looking at a 30 percent gain on its issue price. Its valuation at IPO was SFr 374.6, and the transaction generated about SFr 155M in proceeds.

Among its backers are two venture funds, 3i and iGlobe Partners. The company was founded in 1997 and is a university spinoff (ETH Zurich).

See UBXN on SWX

Posted at 10:05 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 07, 2007

Capital Trickles to France's eCommerce Innovators

Ever since Vente Privée, which sells home-shopping channel-like products on the web, raised capital from Summit Partners at a stellar valuation, we've been keeping an eye on French eCommerce innovators. A couple of deals this week to report along those lines.

Neteven
Six months after it raised a €1M early stage round, Neteven, received €650K from France's economic development organization OSEO to be use for R&D. [source Neteco]

The startup has developed a platform for merchants that enables them to list and sell their products on major ecommerce sites like Amazon, Abebooks, and eBay, along with leading homegrown sites like PriceMinister and Alapage.

It has some nice pixel art on its website and an animated transaction flow diagram to describe its platform. Looks like eBoy work?

MAISMOINSCHER.COM...

After struggling to raise capital for several months to improve its service by delivering purchases to customers faster and with more precision timewise than the competition, maismoincher.com raised €300K from a regional private equity fund.

The Toulouse-based company sells white goods, appliances, and more recently furniture over its website, and has been in business since 1999. (source Neteco)

It's hard to believe that a family-owned company that employs 40 and has grown turnover from zero to €26M without outside financing, in a very difficult segment of the eCommerce market, had a hard time convincing the French venture community to finance such an investment.

But there you go. It had actually been targetting €1M. We snagged that background info from this Decideurs.tv interview on vpod.tv, with additional input from midenews.

Maybe the Hébrards should have taken this unit, which sells at just €82, with them when making the rounds of Paris VCs.

Posted at 05:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

See More Seanodes

Back in March, storage industry trade publication Byte and Switch profiled Seanodes, but the startup's execs wouldn't disclose reference customer names.

Even after the reporter obviously spent time researching its claim that Seanodes has a new twist on enterprise storage and virtualization, the startup itself came off as lacking in credibility.

In the meantime, the five year old startup has revealed one customer name, the French Nuclear Agency (CEA).

It recently raised $6.5M from local French venture firms, in a deal that was closed a few months ago, and led by 123Venture and GALIA Gestion. Early investor is Elaia Partners which has had a few hits in the French tech sector in the past.

The jargon for this one is SAN NAS Virtualization appliances - Also sells middleware to go with it. Flavour is Linux.

Read Byteandswitch deal news
Read Byteandswitch Seanodes profile

Posted at 03:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 06, 2007

Ireland's S3 Acquires Portuguese VC-backed Acacia Semiconductor

Irish electronics firm S3 has acquired a Portuguese technology business called Acacia Semiconductor for an undisclosed sum. Shareholders that stand to benefit from the acquisition are Change Partners, ISQ Capital and PME-FSCR. Change Partners is an venture capital company in Portugal. ISQ Capital is the venture capital arm of the ISQ Group, one of the largest engineering services firms in Portugal. PME Investimentos manages investment funds specialized in high tech.
Read- Silicon Republic
Read- details on the rationale and the deal in context of recent chip M&A eetimes

Posted at 11:05 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 05, 2007

Swiss Memory Innovator Raises $25M Series C

Innovative Silicon Inc, a Lausanne born now US-based developer of ultra-dense intellectual property for making a new kind of random access memory chip announced today that Wellington Partners Venture Capital has joined with all existing investors (Index, Austin Ventures, Highland Capital, Auriga, and chipmaker Soitec) to lead a $25M Series C round of investment in the company.

Recent 'multi-million dollar deals' with leading DRAM maker, Hynix, and microprocessor giant AMD, are what convinced Bart Markus, general partner at Wellington Partners, to sign on.
View Innovative Silicon

Posted at 05:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Wheels Up on Kiwi Startup's Ambient Noise Killing Tech

The Eclipse jet might be gracing the latest issue of Brummel, but it is the Airbus380 that has Europe's tech trendsetters talking. (You'll hear more about in an upcoming series of articles here)

It's pretty hard to resist the carbon neutral trend afoot here so the A380 seems a better eco-bet. In the sense that you can pack between 600 and 800 travellers into one plane, as opposed to flying yourself around in an Eclipse.

Plus there's the lux factor, if the way Singapore Airlines has kitted its first class suites is anything to go by.

If the airliners turn out to be popular long term, then it's good news for a small VC-backed New Zealand based startup called Phitek, which develops noise-cancellation technology for the headphones built into every seat in the super-sized airliners.

Phitek just saw its revenues jump to NZD16M (€8.5M) this year as its OEM partners start to pay out upon the delivery of the planes after several delays, writes Stuff.co.nz

What makes Phitek even more interesting from our point of view is that the Airbus and aviation application is the smaller, niche app, it's actually targetting MP3 players and mobilephones next.

Killing ambient noise on an airplane, train, or at the gym, is a dream feature, although you probably wouldn't want to be wearing Phitek's earbuds in both ears when jogging curbside.

Read - Phitek gets lift from the Airbus A380 - New Zealand's source for technology news on Stuff.co.nz
See Brummel magazine in full lux format

Posted at 07:21 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 01, 2007

ex-DMA Design Dev Team Gets Seed Financing for Tag Games

Two former leading lights from DMA Design (part of Rockstar North/Take Two Interactive) the company behind Grand Theft Auto and State of Emergency, have raised seed financing for their one and a half year old mobile games company in Dundee Scotland. From its PR, the company is signing mobile operators and publishers targetting that market at speed.

Tag Games Limited raised capital from Scottish technology entrepreneur Bill Dobbie (founded Iomart among other ventures in ICT/telecoms) and the Scottish Enterprise Seed Fund.

Founders are Paul Farley, managing director, Jamie Bryan, creative director, and both former DMAers, along with Robert Henning (tech director). They funded the business to this point.

The founder and former CEO of DMA Design is now heading up RealTime Worlds, the hot - it just won a couple of BAFTAs - Scottish games company funded by US VC New Enterprise Associates.
[via]

Posted at 10:18 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

A Peek At Valuations And Other Signals From The FastBooking Deal

French online hotel reservation platform vendor, FastBooking, has sold a 62 percent stake in the venture to 3i and Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners (EdRIP) in a growth capital deal.

The announcement gives us a peek into returns for its first VC backer. It also reveals FastBooking's valuation, which is now at €45M.

Founded in 2000, this French venture survived the boom and bust tech cycle, as well as the September 11th travel downturn, and now claims 3500+ client hotels worldwide with over 2 million hotel room nights booked through its platform this year.

For early stage investor, Iris Capital, it is an exit that delivered a 3.3 times money multiple.

The new investors are adding a board member from one of 3i's past French Internet portfolio companies, namely Amal Amar of Seloger.com, the online real estate ads company, which floated not long after 3i invested. It has a current valuation of €769M on Euronext. That would be about double its IPO valuation, if memory serves.

3i's Jean-David Chamboredon said in a prepared statement: “In 7 years, FastBooking has built an outstanding platform for hoteliers. Additionally, the internet user is starting to recognize the economic benefits of booking directly via hotel websites. Our role will be to support the growth and the success of FastBooking over the next 3 to 4 years.”
View FastBooking

Posted at 07:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 31, 2007

Danish Search Merger and Other Fresh Euro Tech M&A -

Today we have a roundup of some the past week's M&A deals relevant to a:c euro readers...

Danish Search Merger
SurfRay, a Copenhagen based enterprise search software company has acquired Mondosoft, an 11 year old dual-headquartered company in DK and US. Last year Surfray acquired Speed of Mind, another Nordic startup. The team from VC-backed Mondosoft will remain intact and join SurfRay, the firms said in a press release.
View Mondosoft

Sage
Accountancy software group Sage, which now has a mkt cap of more than £3B, has acquired UK payroll specialized software company KCS Global for £20M. The management, led by managing director Alan Snell, and VC firm Northern Venture Managers benefit from the deal.
Read Announcement

Autonomy Acquires
Autonomy, currently the second largest software firm in the UK by mkt cap after Sage, said it is acquiring Belfast-based Meridio for about $25M. The target, which delivers software to military organizations was VC-backed by ACT Venture Capital (majority) and Polaris (US-based).
Read Computerwire story

Polymer Vision Rolls Up Manufacturer
Polymer Vision, a rollable display manufacturer that is a spinout of Philips, said yesterday it acquired its UK-based manufacturing sub-contractor, Innos, for an undisclosed amount. The press release also said that Telecom Italia Mobile is its first big customer as it the telco plans a wireless ebook reader and service.
Read EETimes article on the deal has details of the fab and the flagship product
Read our article on PV's latest financing round

Posted at 05:02 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 30, 2007

Fatfoogoo Signs Series A Round

Fatfoogoo, the Austrian startup that runs a marketplace to auction virtual items for getting ahead in popular role-playing games, has raised an undisclosed amount in a Series A round led by Austria’s Gamma Capital Partners (gcp), along with existing seed investors marchsixteen LLC (Toto Wolff), Azzurro Investment (Christian Lutz) and Michael Krammer (new CEO at Orange Austria).

So far the site is offering items from the likes of World of Warcraft, Second Life, and EVE Online, eight games in all.

The capital will give it a chance to go for a piece of the 'booming market for trading virtual assets and services', said Martin Herdina in an email to the alarm:clock euro.

The deal is the first investment out of GCP’s Gamma III fund. Corrected text follows. GCP manages a total of €70m in three funds.

Posted at 10:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 29, 2007

Semiconductor Design Cycle Wizard

German startup Process Relations has raised €700K from the HighTech Gründerfonds, and co-investors, to commercialize a software application that enables semiconductor and MEMS device developers to track and document and integrate data along the entire design cycle: from idea to experimental to test stage, including the final integration into the fab process system.

It's targeting a 'pain point', we'd say. And it gives the following as an example. When an engineer leaves a development project, his expertise and memory of who did what, when, why, and how goes with him. And when a new engineer joins the team he/she will be overwhelmed with too much unstructured data.

Based on this reporter's experience in the electronics industry, an application like this has potential beyond chipcos. The trick is making it palatable for engineers to take the time to use it.
View Process Relations

Posted at 06:54 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Critical Links Raises $5.7M - Edge Hardware

Critical Links said Friday it raised a $5.7M Series A round from InovCapital, Change Partners and ASK/ISQ Capital. The Portugal-based company develops networking equipment for a range of small to medium sized businesses. The boxes offer support for routing, connectivity, Wifi support, VOIP and telephony management, automatic backup, and storage. It spun off from a software engineering services company called Critical Software in early 2006. The parent company, which has offices in Portugal and in key markets abroad, has been supporting its early stage development.

The question as always with this kind of hardware is: can it be installed and configured and maintained at a cost that is in proportion to the price paid for the gear. We are hoping to update this post with answers to this question and several others we posed to the founders by email.
View Critical Links

Posted at 06:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Looneo's Social Shopping Play Gets €2M

Looneo has raised €2M for its consumer electronics product review aggregator [via].

Blognation France has an overview of the online service.
Read - Social Shopping Looneo
View Looneo

Posted at 06:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 25, 2007

From Austria : Semiconductor 2.0

The title is the post is the trademarked tag-line of Austrian startup, NanoIdent. Unlike a lot of 2.0 startups this reporter has looked at over the past two years, this one feel like it is the beginning of something new.

The four year old Austrian company is specialized in developing and manufacturing printed semiconductors using organic and inorganic materials. It's already generating sales of single digit millions, mainly in customer-financed product development projects – not trials -- and it has visibility on ticking that figure up to a two digit million one next year.

The Linz-based startup has its own fab. It is not an indulgence, it is a necessity, according to Klaus G Schroeter, co-founder and CEO. "Our blue-chip customers won't abandon their old platforms for something new unless they can see that what we offer can be produced in volume," said Schroeter.

The recently completed fab in Austria is able to produce some 40K square meters of wafer chip surface a year (a phrase that is a throwback to silicon semiconductors).

This is what printable semiconductors from this startup look like

NanoIdent is working with companies in the diagnostics, biometrics, and industrial sensor markets in a classic OEM model.
Low cash burn

The company's co-founding duo is a scientific innovator, Franz Padinger, and an experienced entrepreneur, Klaus G. Schroeter. Padinger sold his last startup, QSEL, which developed the solar cell technology to Konarka Technologies, which is a well-funded startup based in the US.

Before teaming up with Padinger, he founded BioID AG, a biometrics company specialized in simultaneous recognition of face, voice and lip movements and employed 80. It was acquired by a publicly traded company.

Your a:c euro reporter first researched the company back in 2005 and since then it has gone from prototype of one type of optical sensor to being able to offer several kinds of sensors, including diagnostic sensors (for DNA-based blood tests, for example), as well as the handheld reader technology to go with them.

A lab on a chip or handheld diagnostics product

It has done this on a remarkably small amount of invested capital, some €12.5M including debt. It is currently raising €10M in equity financing and hopes to attract family offices or high net worth individuals to the round.

Talent Seeks The Edge
Nanoident employs about 65 scientists and specialized researchers from 12 different nations. "Recruiting talent from around the world is not that difficult. Everyone wants to be on the forefront … to be part of the first company to produce sensors and sensor systems in printed semiconductors," said Schroeter.

The Austrian venture recently moved the headquarters of its diagnostic business unit, BioIdent, to California with a Sand Hill Rd address.

A mobile phone concept with a biometric sensor from NanoIdent
View Nanoident

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Kelkoo's Co-Founder Chappaz To Finance Best Two Minute Video Pitch

On his blog, Pierre Chappaz, a Kelkoo co-founder and former Netvibes co-CEO, has launched a competition for "Internet startups". The team that sends in the best two minute video pitch will get financed. Deadline is Nov 23. It'll help if you can speak French so you can understand his criteria which he's posted here . [via]

Posted at 06:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Audiotube Music Video on Demand

Audiotube is a new pop music destination site, featuring music videos on demand. The company behind it has raised seed financing from private investors Chris Blackwell, a music and media entrepreneur, Michael Flatley, entertainer and entrepreneur, and corpfin advisory firm Montrose Partners, all in the UK.

With offices in London and Spain, Audiotube was founded in January of this year by Karsten Becker, CTO and Scott deMercado, CEO.

Earlier in his carrier, deMercado was a member of the team coaching heavyweight boxing champion, Lennox Lewis' team - he did strategic planning for all the boxer's major fights. It's a background he'll be able to apply to in the heavyweight battle to win over an audience and compete with rivals.

He also has more recent experience, with Visual Media, where he worked as a bizdev, managing relationships between the company and media producers in industry, government and education.

One of Audiotube's revenue strategies is to work with record labels to offer their clips to its audience to drive traffic back to the label sites to "monetize".

The model and the media mix sounds a bit like Musicbrigrade's over in Stockholm which claims to be the largest European digital music site operator after iTunes. But there is probably room in the market for several more indpendent music sites.

View Audiotube

Posted at 06:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 24, 2007

Mind The Gap: US versus Euro VCs Investment Trend

The latest CalibreOne Index, which tracks deals in the US and Europe (including Israel), reveals a widening gap in third quarter between us and Europe in terms of amount invested in startups.

There has always been a disparity between the two regions, with the US typical investing around two or three multiple of what is invested in Europe.

But this past quarter the gap widened. The US went from investing 2.6 times in the first quarter, to 4.7 times in the second, upt to 5.1 times the total amount invested in third. And this desptie some hefty-sized VC rounds in Europe like Viagogo $30M and $27M for Ubiquisys and $27M for Dibcom, $34M for DailyMotion and $22M for Nemerix in the quarter.

The ratio of the total number of investments remains somewhat similar, so what that means is that US firms are raising more capital per round.

It could be that there are several startups that are European in origin and are now categorized as US ventures because of the Delaware-flip thing that a lot of VC-backed startups here do. An example of a European startup that is now categorized as a US one in action is Oanda, which actually raised the largest round in the US index at $100M. One of its founders is still based here in Zurich, for example.

But that kind of thing doesn't change the fact that US ventures raise more money, especially if yours is competing for market share with a US-based one that raised four five times as much capital.

We'll be opening another pack of Red Bull to keep us alert as we keep score here on the sidelines to see if Europe's leaner scrappier techcos can pull out ahead of their richer rivals.

CalibreOne is an executive search firm with a flair for VC-backed startups. Its site is CalibreOne.com

Posted at 10:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 23, 2007

Ekinops raises €20M and Other Fresh Euro Deals

Ekinops, a French optical networking startup has raised €20M from French VCs in its second round of financing. A number of new customer wins from telecommunications carriers in North America and in Europe is what attracted investors to the deal. Clipperton advised the company on its fundraising.
View Ekinops

Pond Ventures, the early stage UK venture firm best known for semiconductor deals, has made a 7-figure investment in TIOTI, which is a portal around TV programs available on the Internet. It indexes more than 75,000 television shows and offers more than 500,000 individual episodes for download. (Techcrunch UK got the scoop from Pond earlier than the rest of us. )

Iris Capital out of Paris has led a new round in Canadian startup Bluestreak, a $20 million Series D financing round. Blognation France notes that it shares an investor in common with a French rival, Streamezzo. The deal was announced a week or so ago.
View Bluestreak announcement

And finally, ink communications offers up one of its Top Ten lists. This time it's the Top Ten Men of Etre 2007 (ink is a PR company specialized in tech and media).

Posted at 07:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 22, 2007

Irish Startup To Speed Trading in London

An Irish startup's whose algorithms reduce IP network latency and lost data packets will be used to speed trading on the London Stock Exchange. The technology has been used by Cisco in its pricey Telepresence videoconferencing gear. LSE is to deploy VC-backed Corvil’s TradElect platform, writes Silicon Republic here.

Posted at 08:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

Fast German Tech Companies

The German press has been reporting this year's Fast 50 Technology ranking. The list has a lot of software, digital games, and solar companies near the top with names we recognize because they have either raised money on the stock market (YOC, Delticom, Qcells, Conergy), been acquired (Zanox, one of the largest M&A deals in tech ventures in Germany in the past year), or attracted VC money (mobileobjects, Netviewer, Datango), in the past year or so. And there is one whose founder was one of our a:c euro puzzler winners (Questico).

A couple of the ones that we haven't covered yet (and that fit our tech beat) are listed here:

komdat.com GmbH in Munich, which was number one with 7785% growth. It is an eCommerce agency (SEO, tracking, online marketing etc.)

CipSoft GmbH founded in 2001 in Regensburg with a 3064% growth rate thanks to its popular MMORG games.

Bigpoint GmbH in Hamburg is growing fast on the back of a browser games business and portal.

The ranking is based on turnover growth rates over the past five years. The Deloitte Fast Technology list is here

Posted at 07:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 19, 2007

Fresh Deals: Sic Processing, M&A For Eastern European Games, and more.

+ Globes is reporting that Oberon Media Inc. has acquired Kenjitsu, an outsourcing studio in St Petersburg, and Kiev-based Friends Games, developer of Magic Match: The Genie's Journey. The paper, which speculates that the venture is bulking up for an IPO, said that the size of the transaction was not disclosed, but its sources said the transaction was worth $20 million.
Read - Globes [online] - Oberon Media buys two European companies

+ Tornado Insider is reporting that SiC Processing completed a €53 million financing round. It said that almost a year after the postponement of its IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, German cleantech company SiC Processing has found other sources of funding.
Read - Tornado Insider - News - SiC Processing completes €53 million financing round

+ Sister site alarm:clock reports that Finland's Recoil Games has been funded.
Read - Gamemaker Watch

Posted at 07:13 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 18, 2007

Ambient Backs European Dogster Clone

Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), the investment vehicle of several of co-founding Skype engineers, is backing United Dogs & Cats, a SocNet for European pet-owners. They took a 15 percent stake and will fund the launch of four new language versions of the company's two websites, in addition to English and Estonian.

The formula has proven popular in the US, with Dogster and Catster being the communities of interest for pet-owners that are probably best-known. After we posted this, we saw that Mashable has some numbers on the US site and trends.
Read - Mashable
Read - United Dogs blog

Posted at 06:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Bug Killer Device Startup Raises Second Round

AirInSpace, a developer of devices that ‘catch and kill’ infectious bacteria and viruses, has raised $8.5M (€6M) in a Series “B” round of financing, according to Aelios Finance blog.

This is more of a medtech deal and not really our beat, but a lot of our readers spend time in airplanes, so we figure this startup's products have a human interest appeal.

The five year old company has three different types of mobile units, but its technology - whose roots reach back to the Russian space program -- can also be used in airplanes to filter out nasty germs, it said in a statement.

Investors are French fund manager Matignon Technologies II FCPR and French private bank Oddo AM (through FCPI Générations Futures)

Read - AirinSpace Raises (aelios blog)
View the AirinSpace Video with some cool footage from Space history

Posted at 06:51 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 17, 2007

SAP To Buy India's Yasu - Business Rules Software Acquisition

SAP AG is buying Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software based in India that is privately owned and employs 120. CIO online said that SAP characterized the deal, which was due to be announced Wednesday, as a "fill in" acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The size of the transaction was not disclosed.
SAP Buys BPM Vendor to Boost NetWeaver - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

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DEMO Sidelines: Instant Competitive Intelligence

We go to conferences as much for the content as for the people you meet on the sidelines, and in this respect DEMO in Munich didn't disappoint. We met up with people from several interesting startups, picked up some news too, in addition to the ones on stage and in the exhibition pavillion.

MyTV.de in Relaunch
Frank Didsuzleit (image right), founder of Internet broadcast guide mytv.de, told us over lunch that he's relaunched the company after the partial takeover with Gruner+Jahr fell through earlier this year, causing the previous incarnation of the venture to go into insolvency.

The software has been refined and he's sticking to the original plan to deliver consumers a guide to what's on in the Internet video channels, including streaming, clips, and iptv.

Didszuleit was a co-founder of United Domains, which is now the domain name portfolio tool inside United Internet, Germany's multi-billion euro Internet giant. He's also heading up DomsXL, a domain name broker.

MyTV.de and GoGooRoo
You can always get some instant 'competitive intelligence' at these kinds of conferences. We asked several professionals that invest in digital media in Europe about Didsuzleit's chances with mytv.de.

One offered up the name GoGooRoo as a rival and contender for the spot at the top of the Internet video guides heap.

CommerceTools
We also met CommerceTools founder Dirk Hoerig (image left). In the past year, the Software as a Service launched and it is now enabling a couple of brand-names to sell directly to consumers via their websites.

The market niche that Hoerig's firm is targeting is still quite untapped, a piece of intelligence that we picked up a few months ago here , see answer to question four and five.

Its revenue model, transaction-based, gives it a good selling point, as well as the founding team's experience selling related products in a previous life.

Our instant due diligence with investors on the sidelines offered up rivals in the UK such as Venda, and Demandware in the US, but
Hoerig has this reporter believing he just might be able to grab some market share ahead of them in his target markets.

Demandware, is one that the a:c euro already knew about (see post ). It is a venture led by a co-founder and former exec at Intershop, the once high profile ecommerce software firm out of Germany that reached an incredible valuation during the bubble, survived the downturn, and is growing again in this new cycle.

Venda evolved from MAID, a publicly traded online database provider, and is doing well in the 'bricks and clicks' ecommerce niche, retailers that are developing new, more integrated eShops. A year ago, Venda raised capital from Swedish private equity firm Investor Growth Capital.

Read - Wagner finds $20m for US drive - Times Online

Posted at 03:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Specialized ERP Firm Gets New Owner

IRIUM, a French software provider of ERP solutions for the heavy machinery industries, has been acquired by a new management team and Occam Capital. The size of the transaction is not disclosed.

Irium's software business generates about €13M a year and is used by distributors, renters & importers of machines, and equipment manufacturer. The new finance and owners plan to develop the growth and development of the company in international markets.
View Irium

Posted at 02:05 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

DEMO Germany: International Teams, Laser Pointers, And No PowerPoint

At DEMO's first manifestation in Europe in Munich this week, rules like no ties and no powerpoint rule made the pitchfest a little more dynamic than we're used to here. (Computerwoche slide show here).

At the end of the day the DEMO gods, based on best presentation, were FRING, an Israel-based VOIP over mobile startup, as well as Vyro Games (Irish US), IDENT (German startup with working sensors and software that reads gestures) and Stagespace (SocNet/Virtual World).

Voting for the DEMO gods was by the audience using laser pointers at the end of each of the day's sessions. (As the day wore on, the a:c euro noticed that the crowd started to amuse itself by not turning off the lasers after the voting, continuing to pointing them randomly on the screen. Funny that.)

Several startups, including Vyro Games, an Irish/US startup whose Bluetooth gadget could become the Wii for the over-30 stressed out generation, and Red Square Ventures, whose software for mobilephones makes them into music track mashup machines via the ringtone feature, were invited to come back to Demo in Germany, after doing the San Diego DEMO event earlier this year. (Photos at number 17 and 18 in aforementioned slide show).

These two told the alarm:clock euro that the PR, investor contacts, and instant recognition the US event brings is worth the relatively steep investment in time to prepare and money to participate. It was too soon to tell about the European event, despite a good turnout of the region's VC, with Atlas, Earlybird, Neuhaus, Partech, TVM, Target Partners, and HighTech Grunderfonds on hand, they said.

The story goes that DEMO enabled Skype and Six Apart (owns Technorati MovableType Typepad), as well as quite a few other household names to raise capital from investors at the show.

Some twenty companies demonstrated yesterday their mobile, web, and enterprise software innovations. About half the ventures were from Israel, and the rest a mix of Irish, Canadian, Spanish, German, and Russian. IDG seems committed to the event as next year's DEMO Germany is already set for mid-October.

View a partial list of demonstrators here

Posted at 09:23 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 15, 2007

Neuhaus Invests in Fishlabs- 3D Mobile Games

Neuhaus Partners reach across town to invest in Hamburg-based Fishlabs, a three year old mobilephone games developer. The startup raised an undisclosed amount in its first round of finance.

The company is looking to extend its reach from mobile to online, making the games accessible to players that have a cellular data flat rate plan. The games run on Java and Brew phones.
View Fishlabs

Posted at 03:56 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Big Big Euro Software Deals - Impact on Startups

Your a:c euro reporter asked a few regular readers for comment on the impact of the large-sized M&A transaction underway among three of Europe's largest tech companies, the thinking being that it isn't great news for startups that are ready to exit (be acquired by those larger Euro companies), mainly because it means fewer potential buyers. But several readers she contacted disagreed. Read on to see who said what.

At the beginning of the last week, the news broke that SAP made a €4.8M bid for Business Objects, merging two of the region's largest software companies, in a mega-sized deal for Europe.

Billion Euro Deals
Two other large deals in the works are Nokia buying Navteq $8.8B, and TomTom's €2.5B bid for TeleAtlas of Germany (its revenues were about €265M). That is a total of €16.1B being invested by European tech heavy-weights.

M&A activity of this size could mean that there is less appetite to acquire fast moving startups - because the big players will be busy integrating their businesses. It also means a net smaller number of potential buyers.

But Marc Brandsma, of corporate finance boutique Chausson Finance in Paris, and is also a seed investor in startup Netvibes, diagreed.

View From France
"We believe that big deals such as these put the market in motion. Smaller players switch to acquisition mode, and the effect down the line is reaching the startups. More fluidity means more opportunities for startups," said Brandsma.

German Market Viewpoint
In agreement with Brandsma was also Rüdiger Fajen ofConsus Partner in Frankfurt am Main, "The more liquidity there is in the market, the better it is for startups," wrote Fajen whose company typically does M&A advisory on mid-sized deals in Germany, it advises hedge funds on German stocks, and it will also assist tech startups on capital raising (which is how we got to know Consus in the first place).

Liquidity influences the activity of venture capital investors, suggested Faen. "If there are no visible exit opportunities through IPO or acquisitions, VCs start to fear they will not have an exit opportunity and invest less," said Fajen.

When investment bankers talk about liquidity, they are talking about money moving between buyers and sellers in a market.

Fajen also mentioned something that we've witnessed before. He calls it the competition effect. At the alarm:clock we might describe it as fear-induced M&A.

"If large companies are buying, mid-sized companies also start to think how they can defend themselves better and faster against their large competitors, which in turn means they themselves look for acquisitions to help them accelerate their development," wrote Fajen.

"So more movement on the large side of the market is usually also good news for the smaller companies," said the Frankfurt-based investment banker.

It can even be seen in the SAP/BO transaction itself, suggested Fajen: "If Oracle hadn't bought Hyperion, which would have been a perfect match for SAP, they probably wouldn't have paid such a high price for Business Objects."

UK and Pan European Viewpoint
Make it three for three against one was Jean Michel Deligny, founder and managing director of Go4Venture, which is specialized in early stage technology corporate finance in the UK and Europe.

He sees the growth in deal size as a positive, a sign of healthy ambition, and good news for startups. "We now have a handful of European players who not only have the cash, but the will, to become aggressive consolidators of their respective spaces. In short startups are not simply stuck with US buyers, for some there are credible buyers at their doorsteps."

The dealmaking shows that European techs have now a level of "ambition and understanding of what it takes to be successful," wrote Deligny whose company has been advising technology firms throughout the boom, bust, and current recovery.

"This is true for the SAP and Nokia [types of companies] in Europe but also smaller startups," said Deligny.

We still think that startups should break out another pack of Red Bull and stay focused on getting big enough to float. But if an M&A exit is desired, the corporate finance advisors believe there is reason to be optimistic.

In fact, in the days that we put this report together, United Internet, the German web portal, online advertising, and ISP giant, announced it had raised (through debt) €500M for acquisitions, further reinforcing their statements about continued liquidity.

Software Sector Viewpoint
And finally, over at Tech It Easy blog, whose authors are close to the entrepreneurial ground in Paris (its originator Jeremy Fain is an ISV business development office at Microsoft's IDEES unit) see the SAP/Business Objects deal as unleashing some new movement in the startup economy. It will likely add some new business angels and experienced startup founders to the market, he posits.

Anyone saying [losing] France’s #2 software vendor is bad for France doesn’t know how it’s been like to work at BO recently.

Speak with anyone at Business Objects and you couldn’t avoid talking acquisition by Oracle or SAP or IBM right away, usually the first or second sentence ... the company is 17 years old so it’s likely most stocks have vested and employees will either join other startups to ‘do it again’ (good for startups), start their own software companies (even better for the economy), or, for the wealthiest, become business angels …

Read - Notes on Business Objects acquisition by SAP « Tech IT Easy

Posted at 07:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 14, 2007

Buoyant IPO For Germany's Centrotherm Photovoltaics

In the first IPO on the Prime Standard in Frankfurt since the summer holidays, Centrotherm Photovoltaics, illustrates that demand for shares in the solar cell/solar silicon sector is still robust.

Its share price climbed 30 percent on its first day of trading on Friday. Mkt cap on first day of trading €640M.

The flotation created a couple more multi-millionaires in the region, as the majority shareholders post-IPO are the company's executives (through their founder investment vehicles).

View -centrotherm photovoltaics AG
Read - Erfolgreiches Börsendebut (finanztreff)

Posted at 06:42 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 12, 2007

VC-backed Swiss GPS Startup To IPO

VC-backed u-blox Holding AG said it is planning an IPO on the SWX. The banks have been mandated but the financial details are not available yet, except that it will be a mix of new and old shares sold.

This is an interesting one because it is one of the few Swiss university spinoff companies in the IT/telecoms sector here that has made it to a size big enough to float without getting acquired beforehand.

u-blox was founded ten years ago by team that came out of the ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It has kept a low-profile in the business press, but has released a steady stream of GPS receiver products over the years. It has about 5M units in the field.

It supplies products for both the US GPS network and for the future, repeatedly delayed, European one called Galileo.

Its backers include 3i and iGlobe Partners, Zug-based Partners Group, which is a fund of fund manager that does occasional direct investments, as well as two Swiss banks.

The company generated SFr 54.4M last year with a net profit of SFr 7.4 million. Sales are up for the first six months of this year by 69% compared to the same period last year.

u-blox has appointed Credit Suisse as Sole Global Coordinator and Bookrunner, Zürcher Kantonalbank as Co-Manager and Helvea SA as Selling Agent for the upcoming IPO.

Read Give Me My Location Now, Right Now
View u-blox

Posted at 03:45 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 11, 2007

Ulteo Financed To Launch Virtualized Desktop and SaaS platform

Ulteo's new virtualized desktop service is taking shape, and so is the company by the same name.

After initially self-financing, Ulteo has raised €400K from private investors, including Daniel Zumino, who is a long time French business angel. For example, he was an early investor in VistaPrint, an online business-card printing company, which went on to raise capital from Sofinnova and Highland Capital Partners, among others, and is now a $1.8B company traded on Nasdaq.

Another early investor and advisor is Alain Revah who brings experience in startups in the US. He contacted Duval by email when he learned that the "Linux legend" had parted ways with Mandriva and was going to start a new project, they've been working together since. (We reported Ulteo's formation here.)

Revah convinced Duval to bring in a CEO, Thierry Koehrlen, who was most recently at Intalio, a VC-backed open source business process management startup in Silicon Valley.

Below you will see a screen shot of Ulteo running access to Adobe Illustrator, that Duval sent through, and pick up what else was said in our interview with the founding team this past week by Skype and by phone.

Koehrlen was also an early investor in Duval's last venture Mandrakesoft, an emerging Linux distribution at the time, which eventually became Mandriva. (See recent post on Mandriva).

"I immediately wanted to be an advisor for Gael when he started the project in early 2006. I got hooked and decided to accept the CEO position that they offered me," said Koehrlen.

In Koehrlen's view Ulteo has all the "key attributes" of a high potential startup. He listed them: it has a "serial entrepreneur founding team, a big vision with multiple potential revenue streams, and structural market trends with lots of players that have a vested interest in helping Ulteo succeed".

Timely Concept
Ulteo offers broadband users access to a desktop pre-loaded with applications and components, via the browser.

Duval said: "We want to simplify the user's experience on the PC, so we plan to offer as many software applications as we possibly can. You can choose and use them without needing to install them. Just click and run. And work or have fun!"

The way it sounds to us (we didn't get to try it yet) is that it is an alternative to, but also can be a complement to, your current PC installation.

Revah believes that users struggle in the face of multiple hardware configurations, OSes, and software vendors. "Ulteo is trying to simplify and reduce hardware/software friction," he suggested.

This reporter is not up to speed on desktop virtualization, but the idea to offer a mass market of users access to productivity applications through a browser, or alternatively a thin client, has been in the tech world for some time.

In the enterprise market, software as a service (SaaS) companies, like salesforce.com, have found a model, as Citrix did before that with a proprietary client.

Consumers in the meantime are getting used to accessing email, blogging tools, and some of the new Web 2.0 personal productivity tools via hosted applications.

In a sign that there is interest in something more, Duval said that 14K people have already registered to give it a try when it goes to public beta. He made made a point of saying that Ulteo is still open for registrations.

An earlier alarm:clock euro article mentioned Ulteo in the context of Nivio, a Swiss/Indian venture, but the founding team corrected us on that view, saying that "the technology is closer to virtualization rather than to any of the so-called webOS companies".

They point to Moka5, a Silicon Valley venture that raised $15M in VC this summer, as being in the same category (see sister site alarm:clock's report here).

Some of the advantages that Ulteo says it can offer is that users do not have worry about viruses, updates, and backups. Users could also try out new applications without downloading hazards, like spyware.

The disadvantage of not having your apps on your hard drive is that you cannot use them when you lose your Internet access. Duval's response: "Our approach is to offer both a system within the web browser and a virtualized system under Windows (for offline mode). We have a very efficient virtual machine."

The whole thing will sync automaticallywhen a connection is re-established, he said.

It sounds ambitious but the current private testing phase will go some way to proving whether or not the systesm that Ulteo's team has put together using equipment from various suppliers can handle the load.

So how much will it cost? "We’ll offer a free version loaded with enough apps to get started. As for premium apps it will depend on the result of our talks with various software publishers and what kind of deal they offer for SAAS mode," said Duval.

The company has 12 developers and is looking to hire more, talented ones that have expertise in Windows servers, Unix/Linux, said Duval. A marketing talent is also on its list of wants.

The next stage of development is to establish a board and raise more capital. Duval hopes to bring together "a good mix of funds and companies, such as hardware makers.

Duval and Revah described other R&D projects in the works that they don't want to see written here. We think it is safe to say that Ulteo is more than a single-product startup.
View - Ulteo
Thank-you for the interview. And thanks for reading the alarm:clock euro.

Posted at 01:41 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 10, 2007

Founders Sell Stake in Katshing Online Mobile Telephony Retailer

Swedish online retailer Katshing Netsales, whose website's tagline is Katshing - the Swedish Mobile King, has signed over a 20% stake to private equity firm Ledstiernan in a deal that values the four year old and profitable company at about €3.3M.

Anders Phil, founder of Katshing, said in a statement: "The Internet is the most effective and at the same time the most transparent and brutal marketing channel there is .. if you don't continually deliver added value and quality you lose business".

The company, which was self-financed until now, must be doing some of that right because it expects sales to grow by 130% this year to about €13M, and the trend in the last two years is 95% growth. The firm saids its goal is to continue to grow both in Sweden and elsewhere.

Ledstiernan invests in Katshing Netsales

Posted at 03:51 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Google Buys Finnish Startup Jaiku

Before your alarm:clock euro could finish researching a profile of Jaiku, a Finnish startup offering a short messaging (or micro-blogging) platform that works on mobilephones, it has been acquired by Google.

Popular among some of our readers and particularly in Scandinavia, Jaiku was founded in early 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen.

The startup was operating under the freemium business model, but it was acquired before it launched premium services.

Read - Goog buy twitter rival (alarm:clock)

Posted at 06:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 09, 2007

Chipcon Founder Starts Up Energy-Sipping Semiconductor Co.

EETimes has the scoop that Geir Forre, who was co-founder and CEO of Chipcon, the low-power radio frequency (ZigBee) startup out of Norway, acquired by Texas Instruments less than two years ago for $200M, is heading a team to form Energy Micro AS, which will develop "energy friendly" microcontrollers.

When the Texas Instruments deal went through, we recall, Chipcon's founders and management owned about half the shares in the company. The rest were owned by investors.

The plan is to self-fund for the first two years, then raise outside capital, according to the eetimes report.

As you can see from our illustration, the team is in formation, with some interesting jobs on offer.

View - Energy Micro
Read - EETimes.com - Norwegian startup targets energy friendly micros

Posted at 01:59 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 08, 2007

Mojowatch : DxO, Meetic, and Proximic

Our Mojowatch search of newswires and online publication this weekend, reveals several insights into how three European tech ventures are getting their products into the US market and capturing some so-called mindshare to boot.

Mojo won

Lady-killing accountants and Simoncini on Meetic's Go to US strategy:
BW has a report on French dating site company Meetic. Its lede is almost like and ad for the wonders of online dating using Meetic, describing as it does how the site turned a shy, brainy French student into a lady-killing tax accountant (That is the first time your a:c euro reporter has been able to put those two words 'lady-killing' next to 'tax accountant' ... another stereotype busted.)

It begins: "When Etienne joined the Meetic online dating site nearly three years ago, he was a shy, 22-year-old business student at one of France's prestigious grandes écoles universities. Now he's a tax adviser at an auditing firm in Luxembourg—and an accomplished ladies' man".

He estimates he dated 40 women..and has met "industrial quantities of girls", enabling him to refine his repeatable 'technique'..

The article has some discussion of Meetic's 'technique' too: manages multiple brands and targets multiple segments (teens, over 40, marriage-minded and the like). Rather than fold acquisitions into its brands, it leaves them be.

Growth rate in profits of 69% versus 20% by Match.com in 1H07.

Meetic's strategy for US market penetration is 'meet Europeans', rather than a pitch that would put it head to head with US market leaders. "We're ambitious, but we're not fools," Simoncini told BW. "If a few million Americans meet Europeans through our site, that will suffice."

FYI, there were 14K people online at 7am this Monday morning in the German version of Meetic, according to its site meter.

DxO Digital Photo Mojo
The private equity-backed French photo editing software company is getting some coverage from the pro photo trade press for the release of its latest version, but also Wired blogs, gave it positive coverage. (It is backed by Apax - see our earlier report.)

We don't know what "demosaicing" means, but it seems to be a 'technique' this software company has mastered. It might not users ladykillers, but from what the reviews say the software has some potential to do a little competition-killing, at least in the niches that it has defined for itself.

Interesting to note is that one publication uses DxO's software to run tests on the quality of new camera optics products, which is a smart way for a software company to get some so-called mindshare in its target market.
Read - Eat it RAW with DxO
Read - Lens Test Sigma (popphoto)
Read - Giving Digital Photos a Polish With Optics Pro (technewsworld)

Proximic Smart Text Analysis
In a sign that there is pent-up market demand for good content 'monetization' adware, despite the growing number of solutions already on the market, several online publications picked up on the launch of Proximic in the US.

The San Jose Mercury News did some research and found that European VC-backed Proximic, is seen as having has some GoogleAds threatening technology.

The thing is it is potentially threatening (note the SJ newspaper's question mark at the end of its headline). We say potentially because when we scooted over to Proximic's site to get the publisher's widget, the version that lets you earn money is billed as "coming soon".

If it was availabe, we'd be trying it right now. What Proximic does have is a widget that you can download to roll-related articles, product catalogues, for example, from other sites on the Web that fit with your content.

Alternatively, if you have an ecommerce site or online service and want to generate a potential new stream of visitors, you have the chance to add your feeds to the Proximic source database.

For content only sites, it is about syndication and not yet about earning new ad income. We'll be watching Proximic for the ads widget though.

Read - Tiny Startup to Rival Google?

Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 05, 2007

Varsavsky Positioning FON To Reach Growth Targets

Back in July we watched a video interview of Martin Varsavsky by Lukasz Gadowski, the founder of Spreadshirt and business angel in Germany. What stayed in our mind aftewards was the notion that Varsavsky might know a lot about entrerpeneurship, but he has a really, really long way to go with the FON venture.

He said that FON was expecting to have 300k hotspots by the end of 2007, going on to explain that for the Wifi business to be viable, he still needed 2,700,000 more.

We replayed that portion of the clip to make sure we got it right. Yes, he said the goal is 3M. It seemed like an an over-ambitious plan, given that it took 18 months to get 300k spots online.

And based on our outsider's view of FON's marketing model, we figured it would only enable it to go so far.

It would probably take a heck of a lot of more money and effort to achieve the targets, maybe more time and money than his investors would tolerate.

But this week he surprised us. First we read in Blognation France that FON had signed a deal with Neuf Cegetel in Paris that could help it triple the FON footprint there, and yesterday Spark, the UK PR company, sent us a link to Varsavsky's announcement on his blog of a deal with BT in the UK (which was a first, by the way, the first time we got a blog link from a startup's PR company instead of a document).

There, he writes that "ever since we started building FON, the largest WiFi community in the world, I have been explaining how FON is great for telcos and ISPs".

He may say that he has been pitching but from what we heard and read, the telcos and ISPs were not catching.

We think these two partnerships are important for FON, while GigaOm is querying the potential costs to the startup to benefit from the BT deal. And Ovum market analyst, in its daily news analysis which we get by email, was not impressed, seeing little threat to the status quo.

BT provides some insight in a FAQ explaining what its subscribers get out of it and how it works [via aforementioned GigaOm post's comments].

Meanwhile in Varsavsky' blog there was a bathetic postscript in the comments following the founder's statement on BT's foresight in doing the deal with FON. Someone worried that the startup's image will be tarnished by teaming with BT. Outside the UK, BT has an image of being innovative, which we've seen evidence of, but inside the UK, it is still seen, apparently, as the slow lumbering incumbent.

All we know is that our July impression of the chances that FON had to reach its growth targets has evolved. As of now, the game is looking a little bit different.

Posted at 09:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 04, 2007

eBay Acquires Germany's Afterbuy

eBay announced today that it acquired Via-Online GmbH, the company behind Afterbuy.com, which enable professional trading on eBay.de and other online marketplaces. No disclosure on the size of the deal.

The startup was founded by Alfons Denzler and Markus Walber who launched Afterbuy in 2002. According to one of its press clippings they grew the business without outside investors. By this summer, up to €4M worth of goods a day were being sold by 39,000 people using its applications with eBay, according to its press pages.

Read Press Release

Posted at 07:12 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Dassault Buy French Startup Seemage

News this week that we got reminded to report when we looked at Codor Blog for an earlier post is that Dassault, one of Europe's largest tech companies in terms of market cap, has acquired Seemage.

We don't have any insight into the size of the transaction, but there is a good write up from an industrial software market perspective in Design News.
Read - Seemage blog report

Posted at 08:10 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 01, 2007

Fidlock's Addictive Fasteners Financed

The High Tech Grunderfonds let us know that it has invested in FIDLOCK, a startup that makes magnetic fasteners for bags and outdoor gear.

We checked its website and it is the first time we've heard someone say that a magnetic closure could produce a "highly addictive opening experience". But then again, the addictive thing is maybe not as strange as it sounds. We have been in meetings where colleagues drove us nuts playing with the velcro closure on their notebook covers.

View- Fidlock

Posted at 06:42 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Mojowatch: Cubic Telecom, Nitrosell, Sxoop, and LouderVoice

An article in the Irish Independent says that some the country's Cork-based startups in the mobile and web markets, are getting some buzz internationally. We checked that claim and you'll find our results in our latest mojowatch.eu report below.

Pat Phelan’s Cubic Telecom, whose service names you may recognize Roam4Free and now MaxRoam, aims to eliminate the high cost of mobile roaming charges. It is in the news these days with a new cellphone offer that has caught the imagination of the international press.

Read - A cell phone without borders | CNET News.com
Read - Nothing But The V-Thang « GigaOM
Read - San Jose Mercury News - Takahashi: Navigating telecom fees

Nitrosell was also mentioned. It is three years old and is specialized in the bricks and clicks-type of eCommerce software. It doesn't have a lot of recent press coverage - mainly because it only works with a Microsoft platform and isn't targeted at consumers.

Besides, buzz isn't everything, not by a long shot. This one has some executives involved in it that know a thing or two about selling software globally. As The independent says its "board reads like a who’s who of the Irish software industry including former Horizon chief Charles Garvey (CEO)" and Iona co-founder Colin Newman (who is a non-executive director).

In addition, there is Sxoop Technologies, the company behind the Pixenate application, an online photo editor. It has a consumer-oriented service for photo-sharing sites and printing websites. We couldn't find much mojo on this one either.

But we wouldn't discount it just yet. Sxoop is integrating its tool into some big name social networking sites, and more importantly, according to its blog, it is generating revenues and making sales.

Argolon Solutions was also mentioned. The company behind LouderVoice, a web-based aggregator of online reviews going for the product and service review 'long tail'. It's still early stage but from what its blog says, and at least one other source, it is achieving some interesting results for the folks that are using it and that kind of thing is more important than getting mentioned here, or there.

Read - Is Cork our new tech capital? (the independent)

Posted at 04:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 28, 2007

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 | 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 | TrackBack | Permalink

September 26, 2007

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 | 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 | 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 | TrackBack | Permalink

September 25, 2007

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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | TrackBack | Permalink

September 18, 2007

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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 inve