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June 11, 2009

Cambridge's AlertMe Raises £8M For Home Energy Savings Offer

We have posted previously on startups that seek to tip off home owners where they are wasting energy and racking up a bill. It seems like a lay-up given the combination of high costs, home-owners who are hurting financially, and green guilt. Just yesterday, VantagePoint led a $30M round in Boulder, CO-based Tendril Networks, which sells technology that provides 2-way dialogue between utilities or retailers and customers.

Now Europe is getting into the action as Cambridge-based AlertMe has raised £8M ($13M) in Series B funding from Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET Venture Partners and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Alertme throws some snappy stats at us, like home energy accounts for a full 1/4 of energy usage in Europe and that AlertMe users can save up to 1/4 of their monthly home energy expense, paying for itself within a year.

Alertme says that it now has sold 15K units to customers and he no real competitors in Europe. It sells through channel partners such as utilities.

The URL is strong enough to be worth something - in fact the company was founded back in 2006 and appears to have gotten started with more of a home security angle.

View - site

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Estonia's United Dogs and Cats Raises €480K

Estonia's United Dogs and Cats has raised €480K in VC funding from individual investor Raivo Hein (buyer and seller of various businesses), the state-owned Estonian Development Fund and Ambient Sound Investments (co-founders of Skype who had previously seeded the startup with €170,000 of funding in 2008.) The company says they have 200K registered users, which does not sound like much for a site that is localized in 10+ languages but these things can grow quickly if they have an enthusiastic base.

View - site

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January 19, 2009

Paris' B2B Video's Kewego Raises $4.7M Euros

Paris-based Kewego raised $6.2M from Banexi Venture Partners and CDC Entreprises. The startup sells online video management and monetization solutions B2B to large media companies - mostly in Europe.

Kewego boasts that it also did more than 5.4M Euros in revenues - a 60% growth between 2007 and 2008. Moreover, it predicts it will be profitable on a full year basis in fiscal 2009, it currently has a 50 person head-count.

View - site

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July 07, 2008

Swiss FlauntR Bought By FotoDesk. Balaji Takes The Helm of FotoDesk

Bal Balaji, CEO of Swiss-based FlauntR, gets in touch to say that his startup FlauntR has been acquired by FotoDesk. FlauntR is an online photo editor. FlauntR.com has tools for editing, styling, and adding text to photos, creating social networking profile pictures, and mobile photos. fFauntR integrates with other photo services like Flickr and Picasa.

In an interview last July, Balaji told us: "Calling flauntR a Photoshop-killer is flattering but inaccurate. Photoshop is a power tool for professionals with a steep learning curve and 600 dollar price-tag to match. FlauntR is a free online creative suite for image editing with one-click effects aimed at consumers."

Hinting that this deal might be coming, Balaji also told us: "flauntR has begun raising a round of funding as backup for the funding provided by DeviceDriven. We have to admit that there are signals of interest in acquiring the company. This is primarily due to its unique position in the digital imaging value chain. So we are also taking an immediate exit possibility seriously."

FotoDesk had also acquired ColorPlaza in June 2008. It does online photo finishing in the European consumer market and was founded in 1999.

Balaji tells us that he has been named CEO of Fotodesk so congrats are due to him and his team.

Read the full interview here.

View - site

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June 13, 2008

Barcelona's Migoa Real Estate Listings Raises Further €1M

We understand that the Spanish real estate market caught fire over the past few years but like the US market has fallen off a cliff. So its curious to see a real estate site for Spain (with plans for Germany) get funded. Barcelona's Migoa (site name is Nuroa) says it has raised more than €1M from Spanish VC firm, Highgrowth Partners.

This estate on the Spanish island of Mallorca is selling for 125M euros. 17 bedrooms, two pools, a helicopter pad and an ancient castle of course.

The startup celebrates its new funding round

The site allows visitors to search for Spanish and German market property listings and for sellers to list their properties for free. It makes a living via ad sales.

Founded in October 2007, Migoa had raised more than €1M from angels and the government. In addition to its real estate listings, the company has aspirations to launch further vertical search sites in the future.

A bit of friendly feedback for the Migoa team on their marketing message - "like Google but for property" just doesn't fly.

View - site

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January 07, 2008

Roundup of German Web M&A Above $100M

Over at Deutsche Startups is a list of last year's most significant online-related M&A deals. We hightlight four from that list that came in above the $100M mark.

The largest publicly announced deal was the Deutsche Telekom takeover of Immobilienscout24, a deal that valued 66.2% of the venture at €360M. Deutsche Startups said that media companies Springer, Holtzbrinck and Burda had also been interested in acquiring the online real estate sites.

Second on the list was the Zanox takeover by Springer, a deal that valued the affiliate marketing specialist at up to €215M.

At third place was the Boursorama acquisition of stock market information provider OnVista (which was publicly traded. A valuation of about €140M is tagged to that one.

And the fourth M&A transaction above $100M is social networking site StudiVZ's acquisition by media company Holtzbrinck. The angel-backed company was valued at €85M, about $125M with today's exchange rate.

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November 30, 2007

Mojowatch euro: e-trading is back, early stage euro vc is not, and Other News

Reported widely this week is news that Gigle Semiconductor raised $20M. Find coverage at eetimes(a freelance market of your a:c euro reporter) and lightreading.com

Referencement.com, a French online web marketing specialist with global connections and a mkt cap of €29M announced two acquisitions this week, buying a 100% stake in Agorad, an independent interactive media agency, and Daooda an ad network. Agorad and Daooda have been acquired from their managers and founders, Dimitri Ducourtieux and Michaël Amar who join Referencement new media div.

The IHT's Victoria Shannon reports on Web startups and VC trends from a Red Herring event in Budapest. It is her end-user targeted column so the companies she highlighted are consumer-oriented, e.g. momail and jooce.

Stock Trading Back Online in Europa. BW has a feature on the resurgence in online trading of the consumer kind in Europe. Last few paras describe an opportunity for startups, providing information and "advice". The return of individual investors to e-trading has not escaped the notice German entrepreneurs at brokr and stockjaeger and sharewise , as reported by Blognation Germany.

LPs slightly more optimistic about European early stage investing, reads the headline on an AltAssets survey report this week here. We saw it and were already planning how to spend the bonus income as interest in European tech venture news climbs and site traffic climbs to match it.

Managed to miss that word "slightly" in the title on first reading. What the article says is that the current view on European venture is somewhere between 'neutral' and 'marginally negative', and the amount of money flowing to European VC at the early stage is stagnating at about €4.1B invested annually. There are not enough Euro VCs that match the criteria for LPs to invest, it says. But the researchers did say they expect more activity in Europe from deep-pocketed US investors.

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November 01, 2007

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

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October 10, 2007

flauntR Founder On Competing With Adobe and Low-cost Startups

Today we have a QandA with Bal Balaji, currently heading up online photo editing site flauntr.com, and founder of the company that developed it, DeviceDriven.

Regular readers will recognize his name as the founder and former CTO of mobile software firm Surfkitchen, and because he's won our puzzler contest a couple of times by now.

Read on to find out what happened when he launched the web-based image editor a week or so ago, how he's proven his concept of 'affordable startups', and why this entrepreneur won't tell you which mobilephone is the best - we've tried to get him to give us advice on the topic to no avail.

The following is based on a demo and interview in Zurich with follow up by email.

We read that the one-click wizardry that flauntr offers is an Adobe Photoshop "killer" (source Killer Startups review). It is not the first time you've created something to challenge Adobe, right?

Right, I founded SurfKitchen which competes against Adobe in the on-device-portal space. SurfKitchen continues to hold its ground. As a result I know quite a few “great” people at Adobe. But that does not preclude hand-to-hand combat in the marketplace.

Calling flauntR a Photoshop-killer is flattering but inaccurate. Photoshop is a power tool for professionals with a steep learning curve and 600 dollar price-tag to match. FlauntR is a free online creative suite for image editing with one-click effects aimed at consumers.

You told us that the tool had 5000 users register in the first two days. You didn't put out a press release or get written about in TechCrunch or Slashdot, so how did the word get out?

Last week was amazing. Within a week flauntR moved from 250 to 200,000 results in Google. Adobe featured flauntR on their flex.org showcase. flauntR was also the editors pick on the Yahoo gallery.

It all started with some small, quality bloggers who covered flauntR in great detail. One of them called “DemoGirl” even did a screen cast.

Within hours it was in German, French, Italian, Portugese, Romanian, Spanish and even Chinese blogs. We guess it is the quality of the posts by the bloggers which delivered the numbers.

How will you generate revenues?

Image editing will always remain free for consumers, we will not have a "freemium model". Printing, which we will launch prior to Christmas is a key revenue stream. There are other equally significant revenue streams which we would rather not disclose.

On the KillerStartups site, our vote was that FlauntR would get acquired. The majority of other readers at that point in time voted that it would receive VC funding. Any comments?

flauntR has begun raising a round of funding as backup for the funding provided by DeviceDriven. We have to admit that there are signals of interest in acquiring the company. This is primarily due to its unique position in the digital imaging value chain. So we are also taking an immediate exit possibility seriously.

What kind of integration to the bigname social networks and photo sharing sites do you have, and why?

At present flauntR supports only flickr. flauntR will be integrated with 16 photo sharing sites and social networks within 2007. This is because flauntR’s image editing capabilities are complementary to photo sharing and social network sites.

You said that flauntR was developed by DeviceDriven, your software design services company based in India. How long did it take your team to develop it?

We have been at it for about 6 months. It is all built in Trivandrum which happens to have a 20,000 strong developer community. It is considered by National Geographic to be among the 50 places of a lifetime.

How much did it cost?
To date we have invested close to 400K USD on development and infrastructure. We have built significantly more than we have launched.

Guess that proves your conept of an affordable startup. What was the biggest challenge?

Biggest challenge in the past: Parking our convergent P2P network project called cloudHub before starting on flauntR.

Then the biggest challenge was to get the UI right. Making things easy is difficult, and requires extensive user testing and re-design. The UI will continue to remain a challenge, especially since we shall be launching 7 more applications in 2-3 week intervals over the coming months.

Seven? Please confirm that.

Yes. Additional products like photostylR and photoeditR. These are not feature releases but standalone applications.

Can you name some of DeviceDriven's other customers and what the team's strengths are?
DeviceDriven is solely focused on on-device application development. We have done over 200 projects for the big names like Qualcomm, Nokia, BenQ and Siemens, and start-ups like RealEyes3D, flyTxt and Colibria. [This is the reason he won't endorse a particular phone manufacturer].

Our key differentiator is our deep knowledge of mobile device platforms and UI design. I think flauntR has made good use in particular of the UI design skill set.

---
Thanks for the interview. And thanks for reading the alarm:clock euro.

Posted at 10:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 25, 2007

Lithuania's One.lt Buys Stake in Russian Facebook Clone

Lithuanian social network business One.lt (aka Forticom) has bouight a 25% stake in Odnoklassniki.ru, a Russian Facebook type of site for an undisclosed amount. Launched in March 2006, Odnoklassniki.ru claims 4M registered users.

Read - CNews via PaidContent

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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

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September 20, 2007

Trigami Financed To Get More Bloggers To Write About Clients' Products

Swiss startup Trigami has raised capital from active Swiss and German business angels, including Peter Schuepbach (who also invested XING, studiVZ, plazes, Hitflip, Smava, and kyte.tv) and several other names regular readers will recognize [via Trigami founder Remo Uhrek's corporate blog].

The startup's proposal to bloggers is write honest reviews and get paid by Trigami. Launched just a few months ago, Trigami has about 300 clients and about 8 times that number of bloggers on its roster, according to its homepage.

Several local ecommerce and online services businesses are listed as clients of Trigami, namely Blacksocks AG, Exsila, Hitflip, and Plazes. You will note the overlap with Trigami's backers' portfolio - a case of the business angels bringing more than just capital to the venture.

Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 18, 2007

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)

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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

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September 05, 2007

France's Digitick Raises €8M For e-Ticketing

Marseille-based Digitick, a French e-ticketing startup, has raised an €8M B-round from new investors Partech, with Jean-Marc Patouillaud and Philippe Crochet on the deal, as well as CIC and High Co Venture. They joined early investor SFR Development for this round.

The deal was brokered by Clipperton Finance's Paris team, who wrote in to tell us of the transaction. The French tech press says the new money is for European expansion.

We notice that Digitick gets good reviews from its customers (in various online forum). It enables concert goers to order, pay, and download-to-print event tickets (uses barcodes). The codes can also be sent to your mobile.

The e-ticketing market in Europe is highly fragmented and there are some substantially large-sized, old-style ticketing companies dominating the various regional markets. It's a good - but tough - market for a startup to address.
Read - Digitick lève 8 millions d’euros (LesInfos)

Posted at 06:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 22, 2007

Early Stage Money: Gamersprofile and Jobleads.de

The alarm:clock euro's reporter, Valerie Thompson, is still trying to get caught up with the news that flowed during her summer vacation, as well as interviews with Kevin Lomax, Misys founder, and Nick Ogden, Worldpay, founder. In the meantime, she has a couple of early stage news from Germany to report.

The HighTech Gruenderfonds has invested in Jobleads, which is launching a job and referral platform for executive types. It is in beta and only in German for the time being but HTGF sees a "scalable" business that has a good founding team. Two of the founders are former investment bankers and its chief techie hails from OpenText, the Canadian enterprise software company.

A Blognation Germany review of the startup suggests its competitors are Zubka and H3. There's also Experteer, which targets your better paid jobs too. It's also German and backed by BV Capital and Wellington. According to Clemens von Bergmann of the HTGF who let us know about the deal by email: "It is kind of like the Zubka model in the UK but much better," he wrote.

Read - Jobleads first round
View Jobleads

Munich-based GamersClub, which recently launched a social network called gamersprofile.de, raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Mountain Partners (an investment company majority-owned by former smartcard entrepreneur Cornelius Boersch) and Tiburon (an investment vehicle that belongs to getmobile.de founders Tim Schwenke and Daniel Wild).
gründerszene » Gründer-Rückblick - Interessante Themen der letzten Woche (Gruenderszene)

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August 12, 2007

JumpTV and Getupdated Do Some M&A

Canadian Internet TV broadcaster JumpTV says it has acquired web only cycling sport broadcaster Cycling TV based in the UK for about $5, reports dmwmedia.com. Just last month the London and Toronto listed company also bought XOS Technologies Inc., for $60.25 million in cash and 3 million retention warrants for employees

Sweden's Getupdated, an Internet marketing and SEO company, is expanding internationally with several acquisitions. It announced last week its purchase of Florida-based eTrafficJams. No disclosure on the size of the deal. Earlier this year, Getupdated acquired French search engine marketer OptiWORDS.

The acquisitive Swedish company is owned by Eastpoint, which is listed on OMX in Sweden.

Read - Internet Marketing Company Getupdated Officially Acquires American EtrafficJams

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August 10, 2007

Diino's Internet Desktop Play Gets Swisscom Money

The Swedish company behind Diino, an online storage, email, file sharing, and other hosted services, attracted a €2.3M investment from Swisscom earlier this month. The deal gave the Swiss telco a 25% stake in the venture. Early investor, Novestra, a Swedish publicly traded investment firm, retains a 52% stake in the venture.

Diino has about 120K user who get 2GB of free storage space, and the use of a lot of useful applications too, like backup, email pooling, blogging, and photosharing. Its implemented some ultra-security features (and claims more than a dozen patents). The service requires the user to download the Diino client (it can be run from a USB stick for users that want or have to use public PCs). There's mobile phone support too.

Diino is run by Bytek Systems AB which was founded in 1998. Its CEO is Dani Duroj who was appointed back in 2004. Before that he was CEO of XTP Online AB and GroceryPartner.com.

Swisscom is buying itself some front row seats at startups that provide services that may help the telco go beyond being a carrier and mobile services provider. It usually invests a relatively small amount in startups like this.

Other recent startup participations by Swisscom include Kyte.tv (broadcast yourself), which after raising capital from Holtzbrinck in Germany and Swisscom, also took on money from Nokia Growth Partners in June, CoComment (blog widget) and Whisher (Wifi home network sharing ) in Spain.

Posted at 04:59 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 20, 2007

German Gov't Gives $165M To Developers Of Search Engine Theseus

Only in Europe would a government decide to compete with Google. The German government is investing $165M in a multimedia search project called Theseus. It will initially fund Siemens, SAP, Deutsche Thomson and EMPOLIS with later funding going to smaller businesses.

As Marketing Pilgrim points out, Isn't there a conflict of interest here if the EU is both a competitor to Google and a watchdog?

Read - AP report

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June 29, 2007

Job Search Engine Jobindex List With The Nordic Exchange

Jobindex has listed on OMX: The Nordic Exchange at First North. Jobindex is a search engine, which says it provides people with access to more than 500 job exchanges and private companies' recruitment pages in Denmark. Jobindex has more than 10.000 job ads daily and 40K people have posted their CV on the website.

The tiny exchange says that Jobindex is the ninth company to start trading at First North in Denmark this year.

Read - announcement

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June 12, 2007

Germany's Mapsolute With Double Digit Growth

Mapsolute GmbH, the company behind Map24.com, is on an upward sales trajectory. It announced its sixth year of "continuous growth" with revenues up by 40% in the first quarter. It's unusual for a startup to announce its figures like this so we figure Mapsolute's owners are looking for a corporate finance event.

In an interview with Focus last year, the co-founder, 38 year old, Alexander Wiegand said that the firm is profitable and was doing about €10M in revenues. And that takeover offers are coming in at a fair clip. The startup employs about 60.

For once we're writing about a product from a startup that we actually use and for quite some time. Its route planner is great - it's got a clean way to deliver a lot of data, fast, tight design, and the company frequently updates its product with features you want.

Wiegand describes why his firm has been successful surviving in a market with some big names in it: steady revenues from customers like Daimler Chrysler and IBM, as well an internationalization strategy via direct and strategic partnerships with "successful players in the business of cartography in seven different countries". He said that its fourth subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil is heading for a positive ROI in its first year.
Read - Internet Routenplaner (focus)
View Mapsolute's latest PR

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June 07, 2007

The Shipping News Meets Web 2.0 And Makes Money

Mashing up its own wireless data network that exploits a ubiquitous radio protocol in ships and Google maps is the business of Vesseltracker.com. This early stage company is based in port city Hamburg (the sentence "Hamburg ist eine Hafenstadt" still echoes from that first German language lesson).

According to Deutschestartups blog, so far 150 companies have acquired a subscription to its shipping news service for €41 a month each. Target customers are logistics, parcel delivery companies, and ports-related businesses.

For people like us that live in a landlocked country in the middle of Europe, eyeballing traffic in places like Riga, Straits of Gibraltar, Gdansk and even the Elbe is tantalizing, as are the photos of laden cargoships and tankers with names like Crystal Emerald, Smaland, and the Dutch Aquamarine, but Vesseltracker isn't for those of us with a yearning for the high seas- or is it?

According to the same source, some 6000 users have signed up for the free version of Vesseltracker and have uploaded photos of 30K ships. That's a thousand more readers than have signed up for the alarm:clock's daily email digest!

View Vesseltracker
Read Deutschestartups

Posted at 06:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 17, 2007

Former Tradedoublers Create Spotify

We've got the scoop today on Spotify, a new digital music venture from Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon whose track record in online affiliate marketing offers up a couple of hundred million reasons to be dubbed famous founders in our book.

Ek (pictured left) was founder and CEO of Swedish startup Advertigo, a contextual online advertising startup, which was acquired TradeDoubler, in 2006 (AOL recently tried to buy Tradedoubler for $900M in cash- the Swedish company's mkt cap is about €600M at the moment).

He also stepped into roles recently at Stardoll and Tradera (acquired by eBay in 2006), while Lorentzon (pictured right) was a co-founder of TradeDoubler. He also worked at Cell Ventures, AltaVista and Telia in the past.

We pursued the founders after hearing about Spotify and reading some early reviews by pre-beta launch users because it’s P2P, like Kazaa was, but it’s legal, aiming to pay its way with advertising.

Lorentzon told us via an email interview that Spotify is a streaming service with a client that delivers social and recommendation features.

It is not a competitor to iTunes, it’s “more about providing a compelling alternative to piracy”, he said.

The development work began in August 2006 and the two launched a private beta last month. Spotify is based in Luxembourg, the tax-friendly home of a growing number of European businesses, but most of its employees are in Sweden, the UK and Romania. “We plan on opening two additional offices in Europe this year,” said Lorentzon.

Spotify's R&D team in action -and the amazing coding gloves.

We wanted some skinny on the tech: compression algorithms, protocol wizardry, as well as features of the client software users are required to download (size, functions, OS compatibility etc), but Lorentzon would only say that the startup has developed a “number of proprietary technologies specifically focusing on making the streaming process cheaper, better and more secure”.

We also asked if Spotify sees attracting enough users as its biggest challenge, and Lorentzon’s response almost made us spill a cup of coffee: he said the biggest challenge his firm has is achieving its “goal of indexing all of the world's music”.

That's a towering ambition and we will keep an eye on it. In the meantime what about getting users: “We're confident that a well thought through product, with compelling user benefits will always reach high numbers of users - particularly as music has such wide appeal. We're actively sourcing content for the player.”

The date for a commercial launch is still open. “We would like to launch later this year, but have not yet set a firm date,” Lorentzon said.

The company is financed by the two founders. “We're not in a position where we need another round of financing as it is viable for us to continue to self-fund the company,” he said. But he is not rejecting outside investors totally. “Obviously though we're looking carefully at the market conditions and having relevant conversations where appropriate.”

We always ask entrepreneurs we interview about other startups they think are interesting. Lorentzon answered: “I'm 100% focused on Spotify right now. I'm really interested in the software and renewable energy sectors but have yet to find anything that catches my eye.”

That means that he’s joining the ranks of folks like the Samwer brothers (European Founders Fund) and the other famous founders we cover that invest at least some of their wealth in startups and tech. With venture capital fundraising in Europe occurring at a relatively low rate, that’s a bit of good news for founders in the region.

Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 23, 2007

More Zopa Clones For Germany Smava and One2Money

The spreading of the Zopa clones has likely been hindered by regulatory and infrastructure issues, but it's catching on now. We mentioned Boober.nl last week, and this week we read about One2Money and Smava in Exciting Commerce blog.

We were talking to James Alexander the UK CEO of Zopa and co-founder on the phone a few weeks ago about the importance of being first. Is there such a thing as first mover advantage anymore?

He replied in the affirmative, and talked about the founders' experience at Egg, how it helped with starting up Zopa, and how lessons learned in the early days taught them what to avoid.

Alexander noted that credit checks and "a few other kinds checks" are critical, and that the first wave of borrowers are not necessarily the most desirable ones. He didn't give other examples on the record, why should he help the competition avoid expensive mistakes, afterall.

The German ecommerce blog says that the Smava crew counts the co-founder of Datango Alexander Artope (see our recent post about Datango below) is working on Smava, along with Bernd Hades (formerly of Econa), Jörg Rheinboldt (formerly of eBay), Eckart Vierkant (Ex-ECC) and Sebastian Rieschel (formerly of Jamba)."

It has a famous angel investor, Stefan Glänzer (who invested in last.fm - among other startups - and was a co-founder of Ricardo.de).

One2Money counts as at least one of its backers Patrio Plus, a shareholding company, whose portfolio currently includes 10tacle Studios (which recently floated), Pintango, and Happybet. It will be working with an unnamed German bank.

Neither of the startup teams have launched their services yet, so there's we are not linking today.
Read -Zopa Raises $12.9M More And Hires New CEO (alarm:clock)
Read- HPV chooses Datango (a:c euro)
Read - Smava Weiterer Social Lending... (exciting commerce)

Posted at 11:05 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 25, 2007

Siemens To Buy UGS For $3.5B And Other Fresh Euro Deals

Investments
+ UK Cellcrypt has raised $3.1M from Synergis Technologies (secure voice encryption for Symbian mobiles)
+FRANCE Brainsonic has raised an undisclosed amount from AXA Private Equity (corporate WebTV hosting and rich media consulting)
+ UK Over at the alarm:clock, our US colleagues report that MarketClusters has raised €3M in a round led by NewMedia Spark (market intelligence)
M&A
+ GERMANY Bloomberg reports Siemens Will Pay the Private Equity backers $3.5B for money-losing UGS. ( engineering and software company). Siemens also plans to float its subsidiary VDO Automotive

Posted at 02:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Brainsonic Funded For Corporate TV Play

AXA Private Equity has taken a stake in corporate TV and audiocast enabler Brainsonic for an undisclosed amount. The French company said the capital will be used to invest in infrastructure and expand its already international corporate customer base. It is active in France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands and Switzerland and lists customers, such as ABN Amro, Adobe Systems, Alcatel, Borland, Caisse Centrale de Fortis, GEAC, Groupe CCR-CommerzBank, Hewlett Packard, IBM, IDC, La Poste, and Meetic.

IBM France's Software TV portal is powered by Brainsonic

Brainsonic has two revenue streams, a consulting and video-making business, and a hosting business. We expect that the hosting biz is where AXA sees growth and scalability, not the delivery of camermen and consultants. IBM and Microsoft in France to deliver info, tutorials, and promo videos about their products. It seems to be a Flash specialist.
Read - AXA press rel.

Posted at 09:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 04, 2007

German Online Real Estate Biz Wants €500M Valuation

The German business press is reporting that several, but not all of the, shareholders of an online real estate portal, called Immobilienscout24, have given a mandate to an investment bank to find a buyer for their stake in the venture.

Dow Jones is reporting speculation that the firm could be valued at €500M -- based on valuation metrics of comparable online real estate sites in other European countries, namely France's Seloger.com (€400M market cap) and the UK's Rightmove (£480M).

Read - ImmobilienScout24 bringt Aareal mind 150 Mio EUR Gewinn - Kreise (FAZ)

Posted at 03:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

December 21, 2006

Update : Google - Endoxon Price Tag €25M -

We reported this week Google's acquisition of parts of Endoxon, a Swiss software company specialized in mapping solutions. Word is that the price was SFr 35M (approx €25M) as reported by business daily Cash - whose source is known to us (and who said it was closer to SFr40M). The Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger also cited the Cash report.

The acquisition was mainly about the people. Some 50 Endoxon employees are expected to move over to the Google Maps and Google Earth product line, bringing their geo-software engineering skills, as well as knowledge of how to negotiate data integration deals in the highly fragmented markets beyond the US.

Read - Google kauft Luzerner Kartenfirma (tages anzeiger)

Posted at 07:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 29, 2006

Plazes Network Networks With Google Maps

Over at Plazes blog we read today that it has teamed up with the folks at Google Earth to integrate their users' location data into its maps. We wrote about Plazes a while ago when it attracted some angel investors. We still are trying to figure out what the pain point is that this firm's software solves but we'll let it slide - the techies of this world seem to love it.

Fact is mobilephone companies have tons of data about where users are and they are not doing anything with it - they are not adding services that let you see where your friends or kids are located, or where the next Starbucks is, and they do not seem to be heading in that direction either, so Plazes is jumping in with an alternative solution, at least for Internet users.

This video from Handelsblatt.com, part of series, has an interview with Plazes's mastermind Stefan Kellner. If you understand German, it's good.

Read -Locate Me Startup Gets Funded (the a:c euro)

Posted at 01:14 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 20, 2006

French Online Real Estate Ads To IPO

An IPO is imminent for Seloger.com Groupe (formerly Poliris), the Paris-based company behind online real estate ads sites Seloger.com and Immostreet.com. The float will be on Euronext and it's slated for December 1. The company hopes to sell around €197M worth of shares, a little less than half of which will be new shares.The mid-bookbuilding share price gives it an implied valuation of around €390M.

About half the company's share will be in free float. If successful, it will mean a realization, at least on paper as it was not disclosed who is selling shares in the offering, for some of its VC backers, such as 3i, which acquired 34 percent of company for €60M a year ago.

Seloger.com Has Added Some Web 2.0ish Price Comparison Features This Year
Read - Castles of France.com (the alarm:clock)

Posted at 10:43 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 15, 2006

Nordic VC Backs Polar Rose's Visual Search Innovation

Malmö, Sweden-based Polar Rose has raised a nice sized Series A round of $5.1 m (€4 m, SEK 37 m) from Nordic Venture Partners to make a business out of its facial recognition technology applied to searching and identifying images on the Web.

Details on the firm's commercial service are sketchy. But knowing Nordic Venture Partners from interviews over the years and recent conversations with its partners, the company is meant to make money and it is being built for a global market.

What we know so far is that it's software can do some three-dimensional processing of images (3D extrusion) and applies cutting-edge facial recognition algorithms. This combined with labeling and input from users - to sort and add context to images -- is the basis of the service.

Here's what Polar Rose tells potential users:

Polar Rose works with any public photo. No matter if you're using flickr, 23, Kodak gallery, or any other website, Polar Rose lets you discover people in pictures. Learn who people are, and help improve results by tagging pictures together with other users.

Read - Euro Rivals For Riya (a:c euro)

Posted at 06:29 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

November 14, 2006

Vpod.tv Launch Overwhelming

Paris and Madrid-based vpod.tv launched this week. The venture backed video publishing startup had the enviable issue of too many visitors and users wishing to sign up. The site performance was strained despite having its own content distribution network, according to its blog. Update: vpod.tv's CEO corrected our impression about the CDN - they have a deal with a CDN provider that they will announce soon.

It's available in 8 languages and offers video sharing at the moment, but we know the founders have more in store, that is if the demo we saw a couple of months back in Paris makes it into production.

There are already 1200 or so videos uploaded for public consumption and if you click the Entrepreneur tag in the cloud on the right, you'll find many of the people we've been writing about here at the a:c euro.
Read - France's vpod.tv taps varsavsky (a:c euro)

Posted at 12:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 31, 2006

Dutch Startup With Online English Chinese Translations

Dutch entrepreneur, Marius van Bergen, has launched Chinglish to provide machine translation of Chinese and English, reports Reuters.

The founder uses the word Chinglish not in the same way that we use words like Genglish or Spanglish to signify speech that combines words from German and English or Spanish and English, rather he says he is trying to link English and Chinese linguistically in the site name.

If there is real money to be made over the long term in having a popular web site around translation, then we think that the founder is probably onto a good thing.

We notice a distinct uptick in friends and family learning Chinese because they find it helps at work. And courses in Zurich for example, teach Chinese courses in English even if it is a mainly German-speaking group of students.

And if the translations are as good as press reports suggest, then it will also likely be popular with Chinese users too.
Its PR says it is venture-backed but we don't have more information than that to hand.

Read - Lost in translation: Chinglish.com steps into fray (reuters)

Posted at 07:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 26, 2006

eBuddy Raises €5M (Yet) Another Messaging Site

Nimbuzz, Miyowa, and now eBuddy are tapping Europe's VCs in the hopes of making it to the big time. The Netherlands-based eBuddy said today it raised €5M from Lowland Capital Partners in what looks like a first round. Lowland is a two partner Dutch firm, one that the a:c euro has not come across before.

eBuddy offers web and cellphone-based instant messaging. It claims 35M users worldwide. If it is accurate, that's an astounding number of users.

Read - eBuddy Secures 5 Million Euro in Series A Funding (press rel.)

Posted at 12:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 25, 2006

IPO Buzz For Germany's Asknet

Reuters quotes an unnamed source that an IPO is in the works for Asknet, the German online software distribution platform provider. The report said Asknet declined to comment on the rumour. It's on a growth path and an IPO would be reasonable to expect. It also has sales and operating data and some market analysis.

The bookbuilder's analyst said Asknet should be valued at 15 times earnings - with losses on the book well that might be tricky.

Asknet is backed by AdAstra and two other German funds, as well as Softbank.

Due to heavy investment, particularly in the key U.S. market, Asknet would make a loss this year but was likely to break even in 2007 and reach an operating margin of above 20 percent in 2008, Hasler said.

Asknet shares ought to be valued at around 15 times 2008 earnings, Hasler said. At Tuesday's close, Digital River was priced at just over 20 times projected 2008 earnings, according to Reuters Estimates.

Asknet, which had revenues of 35 million euros ($44 million) in 2005 and made an operating loss of 1.2 million euros, has increased its workforce to 117 this year from 66 at end-2005.

Read Software download firm Asknet eyes Nov IPO-source (Reuters.com)
Read Softbank Invests In Asknet's Japanese Market Expansion Archives(the a:c euro)

Posted at 02:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 23, 2006

Online Tire Vendor To Raise €38M In IPO

VC-backed Delticom, the German tire ecommerce company, plans to float this week on the Prime Standard in Germany. The IPO is expected to raise about €38M, if it goes out in the middle of the bookbuilding range. The companies implied valuation will be €131M. If demand is strong, old shareholders will sell about €14M worth of shares (including greenshoe).

This seems like a fairly low valuation for a company that did €129M in sales last year with a 60 percent growth rate. Maybe it was a relatively narrow margin that brought it down: its pre-tax profit was €5.6M.

Founded in 1999, this one has been very much a founder driven company, despite it raising €3M in 2000 in venture capital from DVC (Deutsche Venture Capital) back in 2000. The two founders plan to remain major shareholders post-IPO. DVC owns 10 percent of the company's shares. The founders together own about 78 percent.
Read - Price range for Delticom shares fixed between 33 and 45 EUR (euro adhoc)
Read - Delticom Mulls IPO (a:c euro)

Posted at 06:24 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

October 18, 2006

eCourier - Parcel Delivery In Color

Logispring, a specialized venture firm backed by TNT, the parcel post and logistics giant, as well as Booz Hamilton, has invested £2 million in eCourier, a two year old express parcel and post delivery startup to fund its international expansion.
The company was founded by Tom Allason, CEO, and Jay Bregman, who is the first CTO we've seen that's done time a Harvard Law School, as well as Dartmouth and the London School of Economics.

Allason writes that while working at a shipping firm, "courier-related stress routinely surpassed that of managing trading vessels and new-building projects" - which doesn't say a lot for eCourier's rivals.

The firm's founders have basically put the whole customer-courier interaction thing online, from order entry to courier allocation, route definition, tracking, alerting, and payment and it delivers it all up in a what looks like a state of the art web service.

If the demo reflects how the service really works then it's taking good advantage of self-service and artificial intelligence tech.

Couriers Gets Optimized Routing and Traffic Info In Real Time

It makes the DHL and FedEx's once innovative and pioneering parcel delivery gadgetry look old-fashioned, kind of like watching black and white TV.

Couriers Are Equipped With Nifty PDAs - But Give Them A Touch Screen - It's Too Easy To Lose a Stylus

Read - Logispring invests in eCourier, London’s most innovative same-day courier company(press rel.)

Posted at 11:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 29, 2006

Spain's Amadeus Acquires VC-backed TravelTainment

Amadeus, the travel booking and ticketing giant, has received approval from the cartel authorities to acquire Aachen, Germany-based TravelTainment, a VC-backed application service and content provider, in order to help its customers better serve travellers seeking offers via the Internet. No disclosure on the price paid.

TravelTainment, which employs about 85 people, is poised to expand its position across Europe. Being part of Amadeus will allow the company to achieve this goal even faster, said exiting VC and board member Hans Schreck a general partner at TVM Capital of Munich in a statement.

Founded in 2000, TravelTainment has developed an Internet booking engine that uses unique “fuzzy logic” software technology to find suitable alternative travel offers. It has been working with Amadeus for more than a year in a strategic partnership.

Posted at 01:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 12, 2006

Raumobil's New Platform For Wannabe Logistics Providers

Earlier this month Raumobil, a German startup running an onlie platform for buying and selling storage space, transport, and lodgings for consumers and businesses, raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing from the High Tech Gründerfonds.

With the new money it will be developing its mobilephone software that enables heavy-users to buy and sell in real time, plan routes, and calculate travel times.

The Raumobil plaform lets users offer to share a ride, pick up eBay items, or rent out their hobby rooms for storage, for example. It can also be used by small and medium-sized transporters, hotels, couriers, or storage providers to post ads to sell excess capacity.

Right now the platform is oriented towards the German market, but judging by the list of countries in its search form, its planning on marketing the platform internationally.

In an interview with VDI, the founders say that the service is free throughout its pilot beta launch but will charge between € 1 to €1.50 per transaction. The moblie function will be sold as a yearly subscription for around €25 a year.

The company is the brainchild of Michael Böttger and Oliver Wolf, two former product developers from Germany's popular Web.de portal who self-funded the development until September.

Posted at 09:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

September 04, 2006

German TV Loads Up Online Video Communities

Looks like the folks behind Myvideo.de are going the strategic investor route, instead of raising venture capital. Reports coming out of Germany today say that ProSiebenSat.1, a German TV broadcaster, has taken a 30 percent stake in online video publishing site Myvideo.de, a German YouTube clone, with an option to acquire 100 percent in the future.

The plan is to use Myvideo as a source for user generated TV content, says DWDL.

Bloomberg said the deal was meant to make Pro7 less dependent on "volatile" advertising revenues, without explaining how the TV broadcaster is going to generate revenues with myvideo.de. The news agency also said that Pro7's shares climbed by 3 percent on the news.

It's not the first TV station, to take a piece of an online video community, according to DWDL, a rival broadcaster RTL, led the way with a stake in Clipfish.

Interestingly, this leaves SevenLoad, which some of alarm:clock's readers say is the better of the German online video community properties, as the only one to not have received investment from either VCs or strategic investors.

We think that Pro7 should have bought it due to the similarity of their brand-names. Seriously, we don't know the details of traffic and usage of the video sites to compare, at this point in time, but sevenload is certainly the best looking site, in our opinion, and it's offering things like APIs for third party website integration.

Sevenload was founded in 2005, is backed by angel investors, and as we understand it, it generates sales by offering its video platform as a white label service to third parties.
Update: Fred Desitn, a partner at Atlas Ventures, has some thoughts on why this was a good deal for Myvideo.de in his blog.
Read - YouTube clone shuns VC and gets investment from ProSiebenSat1 (Fred Destin blog)
Read - Myvideo Seeks Network Effect and VC (a:c euro)
Read - DWDL.de - Nach RTL hat jetzt auch ProSiebenSat.1 seinen eigenen "YouTube"-Klon
Read ProSiebenSat.1 Buys 30% in Video Web Site MyVideo.de (Bloomberg)

Posted at 01:12 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 31, 2006

Angels Back Hitflip's Cross Border Ambition And Growth At Home

Hitflip, an online DVD and CD trading exchange, turned down venture capital offers this summer in favour of raising capital from a syndicate of angel investors. The one year old firm, which employs 20 in Cologne, did not disclose the amount raised, but told us that it was a single digit million euro amount, enough to fund its expansion into Austria and the UK, to invest in scaling up its platform, and to take a bigger chunk of eBay Germany's DVD and CD business.

We interviewed by email Hitflip's 26 year old co-founder and CEO, Jan Miczaika (he's on the right here), about Hitflip's digital media swapping platform. Read on to find out what Hitflip is all about, its growth plans, and who its backers are.

He describes Hitflip as a website "rich with data, recommendations, and other peoples' opinions for finding and discussing new media products".

When a user "finds something interesting, press one button, and you receive the products hassle-free and without being afraid of ripoffs". The price is "almost free," he said, adding that listing an item on the exchange is free. When a trade takes place, the receiver of the item pays 99 Euro cents. The sellers' items are valued and exchanged based on a points system.

Hitflip's traffic puts it ahead of competing online service providers in its niche, both those that rent DVDs and those that provide an exchange platform, says Alexa, while Nielsen shows similar numbers for both DVD rental startup Amanga [now owned by Glowria] and Hitflip, Miczaika added.

To grow quickly now Hitflip will have to beat eBay in the pre-owned digital media niche in the German market. Miczaika says that eBay has 90,000 listings at any one time in the DVD area. His firm has about 45,000 titles.

The challenge is convincing those that would normally sell on eBay or similar auctions sites to use Hitflip's trading platform instead.

The idea of an online trading platform is not obvious to most consumers. "When someone wants a DVD or CD, normally one wonders where to get the best price for a DVD, probably Amazon or eBay. Trading is a latent demand, not something one actively looks for," said Miczaika.

He sees the new eBay Express service as validating his firm's alternative approach, that it shows that "eBay recognizes that the auction/fixed time model is not right for everyone".

But Hitflip will also have to do better with the number of sellers and buyers that find each other. "More of [eBay's] transactions close, but we are getting there. A key point is that it is not always to the benefit of the consumer to simply close the transaction regardless of the closing price" said Miczaika

In addition to directing his team's growing the market in Germany, Miczaika is launching in two other European markets, hoping to have at least one new country online by October.

He's looking at potential acquisition targets, but said that he would ideally like to acquire a "complete team with deep local expertise and networks", not necessarily one that is already running a similar company on another technical platform.

"We are tracking a number of possible acquisition targets. What we would be buying is traction [an installed base of users or customers]. But I don't really think buying another platform makes sense for us right now. Getting
consumers to migrate from one community platform to another is hard. So while we are open for discussion, what we are looking at is finding complete teams for new countries," he said.

Miczaika is counting on his private backers to face some of these challenges. He's already had help from Oliver Samwer, formerly of Jamba and Alando, with the marketing controlling system.

Some of the others, mainly successful tech entrepreneurs that made their fortunes either floating their technology ventures, or selling them in so-called trade sales, include Bernd M. Michael, the former European CEO and now advisor to Grey, the second largest advertising agency in Germany, Hans-Ruedi Heeb, a co-founder and early CEO of Esmertec, a developer of mobilephone software, Peter Schüpbach, CEO of Genevalogic, Gerrit Schumann, founder of element 5, an ecommerce software firm acquired by Digital River and Lukasz Gadowski, founder of Spreadshirt. Two companies, brains-to-venture, the corporate finance boutique and Net AG also took minor stakes.

Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 21, 2006

Web 2.0 And The Mom Reality Check

Over at the fairly new Dead 2.0 blog, its skeptic-in-chief is running some of the "consumer Internet" terminology -- terms such as wiki, RSS, and social networking -- by his Mom, who is not exactly an Internet newbie, to see if she actually feels driven to use these online services (once she's discovered what they are). And we've linked to the results.

It's worth reading if you are a person whose eyes light up at the sound of "consumer" and "internet" used in conjuction the way our eyes light up at a big piece of Black Forest cake.

One of the site commenters said that maybe his Mom is not the right demographic for his questions - maybe it should be "kid brother" or "little sister".

But then again kids don't give a thought to what this stuff is called, they just want it, or use it, if they're friends are into it, as a post on Bebo's popularity on the Irish blog, Free Roaming, makes pretty clear.

Read - Bebo (free roaming blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats Social Networking (dead 2.0 blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats RSS (dead 2.0 blog)
Read - Ask Skeptics Mom Whats A Wiki (dead 2.0 blog)

Posted at 05:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 18, 2006

Index Ventures Backs StubHub Clone

Index Ventures has not confirmed it yet, but Red Herring says that it has invested in Viagogo, which is running an online platform for German and British consumers to buy and sell sports event, music, and concert tickets that they alread own.

Marketwatch calls it an online ticket scalping business and points out that StubHub in the US has been doing it in the US market for six years.

After reading the reports and taking a look at the site, we can say that the investors are following a tried and true formula of importing a US online business to Europe. But this time they got two of the US entrepreneurs responsible for StarHub, Eric Baker and Christopher Miller, to actually come here and try to re-do in Europe what they did in the US.

And the board that has been appointed should give Viagogo some credibility in the online world (and business press), such as famous founders Fabrice Grinda, who recently sold his mobile ringtone startup Zingy, and Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com, as well as Yahoo's Dave Katz who heads up the online giant's sports and entertainment media group.

Red Herring describes the transaction-based business model here:

So how does Viagogo work? Suppose there’s a ticket on sale for $100. The buyer will pay $110 to purchase the ticket, factoring in a 10 percent commission to Viagogo. The seller receives $85, thanks to a 15 percent commission on the other end. But Viagogo doesn’t just sit back and collect its profit; the company actually takes care of the shipping labels itself, tracks the package, and holds the entirety of the payment until the deal goes through.

Read - Ticket Hub Launches in UK (Red Herring)
Read - Online ticket scalping comes to Europe (marketwatch)

Posted at 07:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

August 10, 2006

Tracking The French Online Video Market

We were in Paris yesterday, not to take DaVinci Code city tour, but we did get a feel for the online market and came back thinking that France's has to be one of the most vibrant consumer Internet markets in Europe right now.

Think about it - there's a whole generation that grew up with the text-based minitel terminal in their home. The thing entrepreneurs in this age group are the most keen on is the online video publishing category - the buzz around youtube.com also contributes, no doubt.

To help makes sense of it we're keeping an eye on the Tvnomics Reborn blog, the French site that is tracking the emerging category.

The List of French Online Video Publishers And Their TVnomics Reborn Ranking (mid July)

One of the things it started to do is rank the video publishing sites based on adoption, hype (aka newsflow), audience, and b2b moves. Since some of the sites, such as vpod.tv are still pre-launch the comparisons are not going to be valid on every criteria, nevertheless it's worth taking a look at.

TVnomics Reborn: TV 2.0 Ranking - 31 mai (tvnomics reborn blog)
TVnomics Ranking mid July (tvnomics reborn blog)

Posted at 06:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 16, 2006

Accel's Euro Fund Backs British eBay Used Car Powerseller

Autoquake, an eBay powerseller specialized in used cars, has raised $6M in VC from Accel's European fund, according to The Times of London.

Autoquake assists sellers in listing autos on the online auction site by taking photographs of each vehicle and writing up descriptions and specs.

The service has been getting free publicity by helping England's celebrity's hawk their used vehicles, such as famous footballer David Beckham's first trophy car (the BMW show here) on eBay - which sold for £6M.

The investment manager from Accel that closed the deal is Judy Gibbons, reports the British paper. An ex-Microsoft UK executive, Gibbons joined Accel early this year -- she has been busy getting her message out to entrepreneurs by speaking on panels and podiums at investors events and making investments in online services. We hear she was also responsible for leading the latest round in the Scottish company behind the WeeMee personal avatar service. The WeeMees are available through popular portals and chat services such as the MSN portals in Europe.

Read -Beckham car firm wins $6m (The Times)

Posted at 08:21 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Spreadshirt's User Generated Shop

Spreadshirt, one of the hottest non-venture-backed ecommerce startups to come out of Germany since the bubble burst, has built a successful and profitable business for customized T-shirts online.

Now it has opened a trendy shop in Berlin. We asked founder Lukasz Gadowski, what that is all about?

Our goal with the store is it, to give spreadshirt partners more exposure and open up a new sales channel. Basicaly bringing user gernerated content offline.

In other words, the store, which is called Derby, will sell some of the more popular T-shirts designed by Spreadshirts customers. And if successful the high-street shop concept will be rolled out in other locations.

Posted at 06:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 10, 2006

Japanese Investor Goes Strategic On HabboHotel

Sulake Corporation, the company behind the Habbohotel, the animated chat service for teens, has taken on an investment from Movida Group - a joint venture by SoftBank BB Corp. and Asian Groove, it said today in a statement issued by 3i (an earlier investor).

The Finnish company received €6M to expand the Habbo characters, as well as merchandise and mobile games into the Japanese market and other East Asian countries. Movida said it will take a hands on approach and help Sulake make a success of its online businesses in the Asia region.

Posted at 05:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

July 06, 2006

Blogs Do The Due Diligence On Metacafe

Metacafe, a video sharing portal, has announced raising $15M, bringing in new investor Accel to join existing investor Benchmark Capital. The VCs are investing from their European funds.

One thing about the advent of blogs, venture capital investors get a lot of free due diligence work, unfortunately for them it comes after the deal's been done. ( We noted the phenomenon when Index and co. announced investing in FON and we're seeing it now with this deal.)

The criticism is mainly to do with questioning the need to fund another video sharing site, the quality and unoriginality of the content (video clips), and the level of smut.

Read - Video Sharing Site Gets (paid content)
Read -
Metacafe Gets $15 Million in Funding as Movie Sex Scenes (first adopter)
Read - Metacafe Gets $15 million for Video-Sharing Site (mashable)

Posted at 04:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 26, 2006

Stardoll's Series B Brings In Sequoia

Four months after announcing that it raised a €4M first round with Index Ventures, Stardoll, an online celebrity-look-alike doll dressup site, has raised €5M more bringing in big name VC firm Sequoia Captial to join its earlier backer.

Index Ventures told the alarm:clock euro that the new capital will be used for "developing additional content and features for Stardoll.com, and also for marketing and business development."

Stardoll said it will be launching the MeDoll feature, which lets users to "create a personalized doll whom they can dress with merchandise from a virtual store. In addition to increasing revenues from user payments, this new feature also creates opportunities for marketing partnerships with fashion, retail and media."

Sequoia's Mark Kvamme likes the target market:

“We were impressed with the exponential growth of Stardoll.com and sheer number of young people moving online to enjoy this pastime... Stardoll’s team has developed a close relationship with its online international community and is well-positioned to continue attracting the growing interest of a highly motivated and creative demographic.”

Read - Online Paperdolls Capture (a:c euro)

Posted at 03:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 24, 2006

France's vpod.tv Taps Varsavsky Investment

vpod.tv announced in its blog that FON founder Martin Varsavsky has invested an undisclosed amount in the online video publishing-on-demand company. In May, the startup announced that Innovacom had committed $5M to its first round of financing.

As a result of the Varsavsky investment, the Spanish vpod.tv R&D team will move into offices in the same building as FON in Madrid. Besides running FON and writing plots for screenplays, Varsavsky has also taken seed round stakes in Netvibes, an RSS and personal homepage software developer, and Wikio, a French news search and ranking software startup.

Read - Martin Varsavsky joins vpod.tv as an angel investor (vpod.tv blog)
Read -vpod.tv Founder On The Business of Online Video (alarm:clock euro)
Read - FON Founder Plots World Of Warcraft: The Movie (alarm:clock euro)

Posted at 06:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Tim Draper Adds To Zopa's Growth Cash

Unquote has the scoop today that Zopa, an online borrowing and lending exchange, has added $5M in funding from Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the Rowland Family, to back its expansion into the US market and build up its UK business.

The startup recently announced raising $15M from new investor Bessemer Venture Partners, which joined Benchmark Capital and Wellington Partners, its first round investors.

Read- Zopa gains additional $5m backing for transatlantic launch (Unquote News published by Incisive Media)
Read - London's Zopa Takes €15M (alarm:clock)

Posted at 06:25 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Who Is Eutube, er Europe's Youtube

Updated: If you are looking for the European Union's new Eutube site, find it here.

Several startups are aiming to emulate the success of YouTube in Europe. It's early days to start calling winners but we wanted to get a handle on the development so far.

We picked four whose names have reached the alarm:clock euro's ears, and ran them through Alexa (which tracks users of the Alexa IE toolbar) and Urlfan (which tracks blog mentions) and it looks like Dailymotion, which comes out of Paris, has the lead. It probably helps that it has been online the longest. Time will tell if it keeps the pole position.

Dailymotion
Urlfan says ranks 359 out of 1,844,043 sites

Sevenload.de
Urlfan says ranks 8218 out of 1,844,043 sites

Myvideo.de
Urlfan says ranks 17817 out of 1,844,043 sites

vpod.tv
Urlfan says ranks 27367 out of 1,844,043 sites

Posted at 12:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 19, 2006

Unsubscribe_me.com

Germany's home to a neat idea in the form of meldebox.de, a website set up for consumers to cancel subscriptions to telephone, insurance, banking, loyalty cards, and credit card services, as well as changing address and contact info about themselves in various databases.

If you translate the German, it's called register.de, but we think unsubscribe_me.com is apt too.
The project is funded via advertising and integrating meldebox functionality into other platforms.

Although it's mainly targeted at people that are moving house, there is a need in general for this kind of online service. It was developed by netTraders GmbH, a Bonn-based startup, specialized in online and database applications.

Sometimes it feels like you've checked-in to the Eagles' Hotel California when you sign up for some of services...

"You can checkout any time you like, / but you can never leave!"

Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 15, 2006

Swedish Online Storage With A Difference

Sweden's Storegate, an online backup and storage provider, has raised an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Industrifonden. To get that VC on board, three year old Storegate has to have something that makes it stand out from the large number of competitors in this category.

One thing that it does differently, besides selling directly, it sells to: banks, telcos, and insurance companies, who in turn market and/or promote the service to their customers.

Another thing that looks useful is support for sharing and backing up mobilephone contact lists and multimedia files.

Read -Industrifonden supports Storegate (tornado insider)

Posted at 11:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 11, 2006

Indian-German Seekport Seeks IPO

The German press is reporting that online search company Seekport, founded two and half years ago, is to list on the AIM in the next six months, with plans to list on Nasdaq subsequently.

The success of the floatation of Chinese search portal Baidu is apparently giving current shareholders confidence, according to press reports.

Seekport was founded by former Infospace executive, Joachim Kreibich, in December 2003. It runs a consumer oriented search portal and delivers white label search solutions to the likes of lastminute.com and publisher IDG. Seekport's sales are reportedly €7.5M last year with €14M forecast this year. It operates in Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia.

One third of Seekport is held by Aftek Infosys, an Indian IT firm. It was Aftek that originally announced the plans for a float.
Read - Deutsch-indische Suchmaschine soll an die Nasdaq (Der Spiegel)
Read - Seekport plans NASDAQ listing in 12 months (moneycontrol)

Posted at 09:48 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 09, 2006

The Bunker For Your Sensitive Data

We might all be dead but the web site will still be running. A British company which offers secure web hosting located in top secret, radiation-proof bomb shelters has raised $1M in what it is calling a pre-IPO round.

The Bunker Secure Hosting has raised £1M from Foresight Venture Partners. They acquired 20 percent of the company. The deal was announced last month. We just found out about it today.

The Bunker acquired a refurbished nuclear proof bomb shelter back in 2004 that had been the object of about £100M worth of refurbishment for data storage, as well as a few other sites. Its got some of the original Apache SSL authors on managing its technical team.
Read -Foresight Invests in High Security IT Data Fortresses (newsblaze)

Posted at 03:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 08, 2006

Poll Result: OpenBC and LinkedIn Best For Biz Networking

The location of an online biz does matter somewhat when it comes to online business networking, it seems. Our readers say that the best business networking site for Europeans is OpenBC, followed by US-based LinkedIn.

Posted at 07:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

June 06, 2006

HabboHotel's Sales To Reach $77M This Year

We've been wondering what kind of sales HabboHotel generates. Now we have an idea as Index Venture's Danny Rimer is quoted in an NY Times/IHT piece saying that the animated chat room, where members of the community buy virtual furniture and clothes for their avatars, is on track for sales of $77M this year.

He's quoted in a feature about Microsoft's willingness to exchange IP with VC-backed startups in Europe.
Read- Microsoft to Announce Ventures in Europe

Posted at 07:11 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 30, 2006

Italian Online Mortgage Broker Wooed To IPO

Investment bankers are wooing Italy's Multui Online, a mortgage broker, now that it's showing quick growth in sales. According to BusinessWeek, the founders raised a million in seed financing in 2000 in "half an hour".

MutuiOnline turned profitable in 2003 and hit $19 million in revenues last year, up 76% over 2004. With an estimated valuation in excess of $128 million, the company will likely pay investors handsomely for their steely nerves.

The co-founders -- now a post-bubble success story -- field calls from investment bankers eager to take them public. "Their execution was excellent," says Michele Appendino, founder of Net Partners Ventures in Milan, which provided seed money to MutuiOnline. "There is still a lot of room for growth."

Interesting to see Net Partners quoted. It is a VC fund that was formed to invest only in Internet ventures in the late nineties, a rare Italian based early stage fund. It has obviously survived, although we note a bit of style drift circa 2003, with investment into a retail clothing chain and a manufacturer of super-small motors.

Read - Venture Capital Takes Off (BusinessWeek)

Posted at 09:56 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 25, 2006

Benchmark Takes Stake In B2B Music Platform

Ricall, which runs an online platform for music research and clearing licensing rights, has raised an undisclosed amount from Benchmark Capital's European fund.

The deal was announced a few weeks ago, but the a:c euro just came across it today via an announcement that it won what we'd call an outsourcing contract from Five, a UK TV station. The contract gives Five a fully managed digital music facility for in-house staff.

The move into providing managed services for broadcasters looks to be new, as its typical transactions, listed on its website, are for single titles. For example, it cleared Britney Spears Oops I Did It Again for Gala Bingo, The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again for Swiss bank UBS, and Sugababes' Push The Button for Heart FM.

Founded in 1998, the firm said this was its first round of institutional funding. Ricall's platform brings together professional buyers and sellers of music to enable licensing of titles for use in advertisement, films, TV, video games and the like.

The deal was led by Ynon Kreiz, who joined Benchmark Capital Europe's team as a GP about a year ago. He is http://www.ricall.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsdetail&asset_id=51&type=1also the founder of Fox Kids Europe. This is one of several media-related he has closed in recent months.

Kreiz said in a statement:

"Ricall has a highly experienced management team and has created a market-leading online service that has proven its value to an impressive and growing client base. Ricall is poised for rapid expansion and we are delighted to be able to play a meaningful part in that."

Ricall secures multi-million pound financing from Benchmark Capital

Posted at 03:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 16, 2006

China's Maxthon Brings In Charles River

Maxthon has raised an undisclosed amount of venture backing in a deal led by new investors Charles River Ventures, along with early investors Lund/Kenner, a Danish seed investor (see link below for a profile) and WI Harper (via GigaOm).

The firm's founder said in his blog that there were several VCs interested in the Series A round, but it chose Charles River because of a common vision about the future of the market it targets. It's not mentioned in the post, but the new investor is also backing Avvenu, a software company that supplies a photo and file sharing plug-in to the Maxthon browser.

Read Charles River Ventures Invests in Maxthon (press release)
Read- Profile of Lund Kenner (a:c euro)

Posted at 05:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Musicbrigade: MTV For The Broadband Crowd

Swedish VC fund Provider Venture Partners has invested about €3.2M in Musicbrigade, a developer of a platform for downloading and distributing music, videos, and audio via the web and mobile devices, buying itself a 28 percent stake in the seven year old venture.

Musicbrigade started out as a music video distributor, an online version of MTV (at least the way it was in the eighties when it was mainly broadcasting music videos). It has 40 different music video channels.

But the Swedish company is now aiming to become a "onestop-shop for all digital music online", including audio and video.

Customers today are mainly in Northern Europe: broadband operators(Bredbandsbolaget, Telenor, Chello, Telewest/NTL, a o), portals (Microsoft Windows Media, On-line Spotlight, ao), mobile operators (3, Telenor/Vodafone, a o) as well as the hardware manufacturer Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

The plan is to use the capital to "substantially increase the presence on the European market".

Read - Provider invests in Musicbrigade (press release)

Posted at 03:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 14, 2006

More HabboHotel Clones in Europe

Sulake Labs' Habbo Hotel, the graphical online chat and virtual community site, has grown to over 40 million, and spawned a few copycats or variation on the theme, including Playdo in Sweden which reports 405,000; Dubit, based in the UK, reports 415,700 members and Taatu in Belgium with an unpublished number of registered members.

Playdo also develops gaming applications such as webcam-to-game integration. Sony's EyeToy has a similar feature.


Dubit offers members their own blogs, online games, and cash incentives to complete marketing surveys.

Update: Silicon Beat has a post on yet another one, this one's called Doppelganger
Read - With record company (Silicon Beat)
Read - HabboHotel Clone Taatu (a:c euro)

Posted at 05:42 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 11, 2006

ad pepper Rolls Up Affiliate Marketer

ad pepper is paying up to €4.2M to acquire two-year old Webgains, a UK based affiliate marketing company. As we reported earlier, the European online marketing company is on an M&A roll. This is its latest deal.

The acquirer's deal rationale:

This acquisition dramatically enhances our existing product and service set up for our advertisers and website partners. In addition, it adds an attractive new line of business for ad pepper with innovative affiliate offerings not only in the UK but also in our other countries", explained Ulrich Schmidt, CEO of ad pepper media.

Read ad pepper media announces (press release)
Read - ad peppers Bargain Basement Rollup

Posted at 05:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 08, 2006

VC Backs Sharing Music Tastes

Last.fm, a London-based consumer Internet startup, has raised a first round from Index Ventures and its early business angel investors. No disclosure on the amount, but it was a typical-sized Series A round, the firm’s Austrian co-founder Martin Stiksel told the a:c euro.

Stiksel said that the deal was initiated by Index Ventures, and that the founders had not been actively looking for funding. The VC’s track record with Internet investments is one reason it was taken on as a backer.

We asked Index why it didn’t bring in any co-investors on the deal. Neil Rimer answered (via his assistant) that the round “wasn't big enough for more than one VC investor.”

Judging from the Ikea decor and the hands on office-moving efforts of Last.fm's founders (picture right), this is one of those low-cash-burn ventures.

Indeed, it was founded in 2003 and only raised seed capital last June, when several private investors took stakes. All three had success in the first wave of the consumer Internet and are now on their second or third ventures, namely Joi Ito, who is currently an excutive at Technorati and Six Apart, runs a VC firm, and prior to that built several Japanese Internet ventures; Reid Hoffman, a former PayPal exec and currently CEO of LinkedIn, and Stefan Glaenzer, who co-founded Ricardo.de (auction site) and is CEO of 20six Weblogs.

Last.fm’s business idea is to enable music promotion and to provide music title recommendations for its users by publishing other users’ tastes and listening habits.

It generates sales via advertising, premium services, and selling recommended titles in partnership with Amazon and other etailers.

Its software automatically tracks what people listen to on their audio players then makes sure that the title information is loaded back up into their profiles.

This information is then shared and can be used to create a set of tracks to listen to (the firm calls it creating your own radio station and as its name suggests is meant to disrupt traditional radio broadcasting), or to make new music purchases.

It is not primarily a music file sharing site, so it avoids the issues with copyrights that have hindered the growth other online music ventures. But it’s got a few competitors, mainly Pandora, if the discussion on various web business-oriented blogs is anything to go by. (Among users of Alexa Last.fm's more popular, according to Alexaholic)

Last.fm will use the funding to broaden its product offering, start translating the site into languages other than English, and to expand its business development efforts with the music industry, Stiksel told the a:c euro.

Posted at 10:04 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 05, 2006

Jupitermedia Snaps German Image Vendor

Following its rollup strategy in the royalty free and rights-managed image space, JupiterMedia's Jupiterimages division acquired all of the shares of Germany's IFABilderteam GmbH (www.ifa-bilderteam.com). No disclosure on the terms of the agreement.

Read -Jupiterimages Division Announces Acquisition of IFA Bilderteam of Munich

Posted at 10:21 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

Meetic Buys Brazilian Dating Site

The French online dating company, Meetic, has made another acquisition. This time in Brazil, paying €21.6M in cash for ParParfeito, it said in a statement. Since going public it has purchased LeXa.nl (Dutch) and efriendsnet (China).

MEETIC announces that it has signed an agreement with a view to the acquisition of ParPerfeito, the online dating leader in Brazil. Founded in 2002 and based in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), ParPerfeito runs the www.parperfeito.com.br site, and has rapidly become Brazil’s leading online dating service with close to 8 million registered profiles since its creation. ParPerfeito’s estimated revenues in 2005 totalled R$ 10.4 million, or approximately 4 million euros. ParPerfeito’s estimated EBITDA in 2005 totalled R$ 6,0 million, or approximately 2,3 million euros. This acquisition, which should be finalised over the coming days, concerns 100% of the Company’s capital and voting rights for a global price - totally paid for in cash - of R$ 56.6 million, or 21.6 million euros, excluding further payments based on the Company’s results over the next three financial years.

Read - ACQUISITION OF PARPERFEITO (meetic PR)

Posted at 05:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

May 03, 2006

Dohop = Travel Search +660 Airlines - Focus on Price + Reykjavik Cool

We're going back to Iceland again today for a look at Dohop.com, a new travel search engine startup founded by Frosti Sigurjonsson in 2004. We picked it not because the founder's name is memorably apt, coming as he does from Iceland, but because it's a bit different from the competition. It is a fast search engine and checks hundreds of airlines (660 says the founder) and supports multiple currencies, which is important when targetting the European and other international markets.

We talked to Sigurjonsson about the competition and how dohop.com generates sales.

Even with its use of new web development technologies, Dohop has plenty of competition from other young rivals, including Kayak, Sidestep, Mobissimo, Skyscanner and allcheckin. How to compete with all that?

These are all price comparision sites, several with a strong focus on the USA travel. dohop has much in common with the competition, it finds flights, checks the price and links the user to the airline or OTA to do the booking, but what sets it apart is its ambition to be a comprehensive Flight Planner -- for planning connected itineraries.

We have developed a unique routing engine that uses the timetables of more than 660 low-cost and legacy airines to find the best flights and connections for any given route worldwide, in only three seconds.

The price comparision engines are by contrast limited to search only the airlines that publish their fares in GDS systems [third party provider] and will only show connections with legacy airlines. They must rely on third parties like the GDS or ITA software to do the routing and pricing. Skyscanner.net has the benefit of including low-cost airlines but it does not offer a routing engine.

Dohop is barely registering on the Alexa radar, compared to Kayak.com and eBookers. Why is that?

The reason for lower traffic counts is simply that dohop.com has not yet done any marketing whereas both Kayak and ebookers have had the budgets to do quite a bit of marketing and PR. Almost nobody knows about dohop yet.

So far the traffic we do get is by luck. A couple of days ago the Times Online published its list of the 100 best travel sites and put dohop.com as #2 on their list of Flight Essentials. This is now driving unusual amounts of traffic our way.

The target market is travellers that want to manage their own trips. What is the offer?

We take the pain out of planning. By searching ALL airlines rather than just the legacy ones, dohop is often able to find more efficient flight routes and because it includes low-cost carriers the price of the trip can sometimes be very cheap.

Flight planning usually involves a lot of information. dohop employs Web 2.0 technologies to make the planning more intuitive for the user. Results can for example be sorted, filtered and drilled into with instant effect.

Another difference is that dohop does does not display live prices for all results, whereas the price comparision engines do display prices upfront. Why is it set up like that?

When we decided to include all 660 airlines worldwide we had to accept that it would not be possible to display the live price for every possible flight combination and travel dates all the time. Fares change too frequently, often several times a day. To make matters even worse, prices for the same flight number can differ by user's country of residence.

Dohop suggests that once a user has refined the results to a single itinerary, he or she can then check the price with more than half of the airlines in the system, and more are being added each week. A price lookup only takes a few seconds. Each price is then stored in case it can be shared with another user asking for the same flight later.

But how will dohop make money? One thing is that it offers "sponsored links" in the search results, e.g. searching for a flight from basel to Paris, Air France's sponsored link displays its offer at the top of the list. Anything else?

We offer custom flight planners for placement on the websites of low cost airlines. Results are of course optimised to show only results that include at least one flight from that airline. You can see one example here: http://search.icelandexpress.com This airline flies to 10 destinations but the custom flight planner will find convenient onward flights to at least 100 more. A great sales tool for them and a source of traffic for us.

We are now talking to major portals about powering white label flight-planners for their travel sections.

As for financing, it has some angel and founder funding, but the founder will be looking to raise some venture capital. "We are now starting to talk to VCs about funding dohop's global rollout," Sigurjonsson said.

Posted at 09:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

April 24, 2006

VCs Team Up For a Bite Of Garlik

3i and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures have taken an early stage stake in garlik for an undisclosed amount of cash. The founders hail from Egg, one of the most successful online banks in Europe.

You may remember that some of the other Egg creators founded and launched Zopa, the eBay of personal loans, last year.

garlik is a consumer-oriented online service provider of a new kind. It is so new that we didn't quite understand what is on offer, even after reading the PR a couple of times. So we've decided to take another poke at the company at the end of May when a pilot programme is to go live. Full consumer launch is expected in the autumn 2006.

Garlik has a lot of the markings of newfangled web applications, what with the beta pre launch sign up page and its moniker. But the background color used reminds us of the FT's trademark salmon.

Posted at 10:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

April 18, 2006

WidiWici's Social Networking For Sporty Types

Neteco, which has become a good source for getting the skinny on French startups, has an interview with the creators of Lyon-based widiwici, a recently launched sports-oriented social networking site that has about 500 members.

About 20 percent turn up as active users who arrange sports matches, tournaments, and meet-ups online. We had a look and it is a bit like an early stage OpenBC with the focus on sports, rather than business networking, but with support for photo and video sharing, particularly appropriate for team sports or competitions.

The business idea is to create a community of sporty types and then provide premium services, ads, and products to that community. Originally only in French, it is now also available in English and Spanish.

It says it won't be selling its users email addresses to third parties to make money, but it may introduce a premium service for heavy users, those what that want photo and video storage will be offered a monthly fee of two or three euros. Otherwise access is free for registered users.

There are plans afoot to run ads for sports events or announcements in the public areas and it is putting in place affiliate marketing schemes for products like sports club insurance and sports gear. A white label service is targeted at firms or organizations that want to offer a sports networking to their community of users.

Widiwici's founders are hoping for 1000 members by the end of June and 10,000 by the end of the year. The interview did not have any information on how the venture is funded.

Read - Entrepreneurs et sportifs, Benoit Mouren et Arnaud Latourrette précisent les fonctionnalités de widiwici.com, site communautaire dédié au sport et aux loisirs

Posted at 01:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

April 09, 2006

UK Netflix Clones Merge And Make Video Download Plans

Netflix has not come to Europe shopping for startups as quickly as once thought, so now we're seeing a bit of consolidation among venture-backed online DVD rental businesses. Last month France's Glowria acquired a German rival. And now Video Island and LoveFilm in the UK have merged.

The firm's said It is a 50-50 deal with the merged company being called LoveFilms. Video Island’s CEO is taking the helm of the new firm, while Lovefilm’s CEO will be acting as an advisor.

Combines Lovefilms and Screenselct (Video Island) will pull well ahead of Blockbuster's online biz in the UK

Last year, sales of the combined group were £25m and it went profitable in December, the firm said in its statement.

Both companies have modified the model pioneered by Netflix for the UK marking, and run their own brand name online DVD rental businesses (having completed some smaller acquisitions on both side prior to this deal), as well as running white label online DVD rental business for the likes of AOL, CD Wow, Channel 4, Sainsbury, Tesco and Vue Cinemas. The plan is to start offering videos via download too.

There are lots of VCs backing the merged company Arts Alliance Media, which had backed LOVEFiLM, along with Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Cazenove Private Equity, and European Venture Partners, which were backing Video Island.

Read -LOVEFiLM and Video Island Merge

Posted at 04:26 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

April 06, 2006

Estonian Founder To Expand Popular Youth Portal Internationally

We followed up a news item that we eyed on PaidContent yesterday about an equity investment in the company behind Rate.ee, a popular youth-oriented portal in Estonia. And had an email interview with Andrei Korobeinik, who created the site.

Korobeinik confirmed that EMT paid €2.5M for a controlling stake in the new company, Serenda Invest, set up to hold rate.ee. Korobeinik owns 49%.

The price paid by EMT for its stake implies a company valuation of €5M, which translates into €13 euro per user. Alternatively, the valuation as a multiple of profit is about 16 times profit.

The deal was a windfall for the young entrepreneur who plans to use the capital to expand his user-generated content and portal concept (he retained rights to the platform for international use) across the border into other countries. He has already launched Baltic region portals, Face.lv and Point.lt.

Rate.ee is the most popular internet site in Estonia, says its creator

The Estonian portal has 360K registered users. It generated a profit of €300K on €400K in sales last year, according to Korobeinik.

If he can translate the concept's popularity across borders, then Korobeinik will have the foundation for a healthy business with an enviable margin.

Read - EMT Buys Majority In Estonian Portal (paidcontent)

Posted at 09:43 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

April 03, 2006

France's Netflix Clone Glowria Raises VC to Acquire German Rival

French online DVD rental company, Glow Entertainment , the company behind Glowria.fr, has reached across the border to acquire Germany's DiViDe, which it says is number three in Germany, tapping new investor Credit Agricole Private Equity, and exisitng investor SPEF, to finance the transaction.

Founded in 2003, Glowria has raised some $15 million to date.

The new capital is not all being spent on the acquisition, the startup up also to invest some of it in the roll out Video on Demand (VoD) in France and Germany, which is something that founder and CEO, Mihai Crasneanu , has had in mind since the early days of his company's formation, based conversations that the a:c euro had with him over two years ago.

The entry into the German market will bring Glowria into competition with AMANGO pure Entertainment GmbH, founded by serial entrepreneur, Andreas Poliza, who is backed by Munich-based Burda Digital Ventures GmbH, the corporate venture arm of Hubert Burda Media, as well as Netleih, Amazon.de, and InVDeo which survived a brush with bankruptcy last year but was bought out by Palago GmbH in the meantime.

Read - glowria.fr acquires German Company DiViDi (Press Release)

Posted at 04:23 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 28, 2006

Zanox Up For Sale?

We've been hearing that something is afoot at affiliate marketing technology firm, Zanox, and it looks like Dow Jones reporters have picked up on it with a story that says an IPO or a trade sale is in the works.

Things are looking up for Berlin-based Zanox
The newswire cites un-named sources in the article, which estimates that Zanox is worth between €250M to €350M, based on Zanox's EBITDA numbers (which are not publicly available) and a mutliple of 20X net profit (based on the multiples apparently enjoyed by its peers, such as recently floated TradeDoubler in Sweden and CommissionJunction in the US.)

Zanox management has told the a:c euro in the past that acquisitions are in its sights. It already completed one in France recently, so an IPO, or a sizable investment by a private equity firm, would fit with that plan, but a trade sale less so.

Read - Zanox plant IPO oder Verkauf bis Ende des Jahres - Kreise (Dow Jones on Finanztreff.de)

Posted at 09:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 24, 2006

Dotcom biz model with no name gets one

Fred Wilson in his VC blog described a few days ago his favourite business model. At the time, it was without a name. It's the sales stragegy that involves giving away free access to a service, or software, and then offering a more advanced version for a subscription fee.

Examples of online companies successfully managed this model include Skype for IP Telephony, Box.Net for storage, and Flickr, for photo storage. And examples of software companies, include firms like MySQL and shareware vendors.

At the end of the post he asked readers for suggestions of what to call the business model and he was provided with plenty. So far Freemium seems to be the one he's chosen.

There is no denying that Freemium is a trend right now, so we will keep you posted if a) the term catches on; and b) startups beyond this handful can repeat it.

And c) more importantly if any of them emerge as corporations in their own right, that is, they don't get acquired before they've become profitable and proven than this is a great business model over the long run.

The alarm:clock euro would also like to note that there are software companies at the other end of the spectrum that not only charge right off the bat for their software, but even charge for a demo.

You'll find pictures of the packaging and data flow diagrams but you won't find a decent screenshot at trend-bucking Kalido.

OK, it is only one example of a company that does both, but we're now looking more actively for other examples.

The startup in question is Kalido, a Benchmark Capital Europe portfolio company. An entry-cost license is $350,000; maintenance is $60,000 annually. That is a trend-bucking sales strategy if ever there was one.

We recently heard one of the top execs at Kalido speak on a tech venture panel. The firm spun out of Shell and has about ten years of R&D behind it. The spinout took a lot longer to pull off than the developer team hoped but now that it's independent, business is booming and expansion into the US market was the current challenge facing management.

Read - Kalido Interview (Daily Telegraph)
Read - My Favorite Business Model (Fred Wilson blog)
Read - The Freemium Business Model (Fred Wilson blog)

Posted at 08:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 23, 2006

France’s Bubble-era Entrerpreneurs Return En Masse

01Net, an online journal out of France (and not Journal Du Net as originally stated), has published this week a good list of French bubble era entrepreneurs that have returned to the fray. It is something that is happening all over Europe as we all know, and this list makes the case for France. It has the name of Gilles Babinet’s new venture wrong, it’s called Eyeka, but other than that it looks good.

Since the a:c euro has reported on the financing of some of the ventures listed, we note that several raised venture capital from some of the same investors (e.g. Modelabs and Eyeka) that backed their last businesses, which is kind of interesting to see.

Click to enlarge

Read - Internet Seduit Le Capital Risque (01Nett)

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March 17, 2006

Variations on BitTorrent from Peerfactor and Tribler

Several European teams are bent on making P2P file sharing more mainstream. Last week we wrote about Allpeers, which is now venture-backed. And this week we hear of Tribler in The Netherlands and Peerfactor in France.

The Tribler Team From TU Delft

Tribler launched a beta version of its P2P file sharing client today. Developed by a team of researchers with government funding at TU Delft, one of the top tech institutions in Europe, it is file sharing without the anonymity.

The theory goes that knowing whose resources your sharing will encourage users to open up their own PC and broadband connections for P2P.

Apparently even in the most popular P2P file sharing networks, only a tiny minority carry most of the traffic and data.

The improvements in store for Tribler users include an Amazon-like recommendations engine, real-time P2P file sharing with P2P video streaming, and a location-based omcpnent that shows the locations of other downloaders of the same content with city-level accuracy on a world map. "We are improving this protocol with over a dozen people with such features which go way beyond the original. We are extending the code from the ABC [Another BitTorrent Client] project."

PeerFactor comes out of France.

The firm says its software is created to enable webmasters to offer a legal downloading service and distribute large content more easily. It uses a client called microbittorent (ubittorrent) which is proprietary and developed by Ludvig Strigeus, a young Swedish programmer who has guru status among P2P experts. The users are anonymous unlike Tribler's concept.

Both Tribler and PeerFactor have to incentivize members of their P2P networks. PeerFactor offers gifts, such as subscriptions to Metaboli subscriptions to encourage people to open up their resources for file sharing. So far its client has been downloaded 7000 times since launching in France (only) this month and almost 4,000 users have signed up (agreeing to share traffic load).

The US web-site for PeerFactor is in still to come mode.

Tribler relies on a community of interest (friends and family) concept. According to Eric-Paul Scholten, the Dutch based founder of OGC Networks, a platform where online gamers bet on their skills, Tribler “has a lot of potential”, but it needs the consumer to support it with home-made video content, like "consumers have done with podcasting".
“It will all depend on the home-made video content and how well the social platform works,” said Scholten.
Read - Allpeers funding (alarm:clock euro)
Read - About microBittorrent
Read - PeerFactor Launch (peerfactor)

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March 16, 2006

Scripps buys British dotcom for $366M

EW Scripps, US-based newspaper and television broadcaster, is paying £210M ($366M) to acquire British online price comparison company, uSwitch, to add to its “newly created interactive media” division, which also includes recently acquired Shopzilla.

Founded in 2000, uSwitch’s specialty is price comparisons for consumers choosing gas, electricity, broadband, and phone subscriptions.

Its annual sales for the past year are $25 million. For the full year 2006, uSwitch is expected to generate about $10 million to $15 million in segment profit on sales of $40 million to $45 million.

An Irish paper reports that the deal brings an £18.9m windfall for uSwitch staff and management who owned 9% of the firm.
Read Scripps Acquires (uswitch PR)
Read - uSwitch changes owner

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Trade sale instead of mini-IPO for Falk eSolutions?

Ad pepper, an online advertising agency, made a regulatory filing yesterday announcing it is in talks with private equity-backed DoubleClick to sell its share of ad-serving and email marketing software development company, Falk eSolutions in Germany.

It also said that DoubleClick’s plan is to buy 100 percent of Falk. Ad pepper owns 25 percent of Falk. An IPO on the junior German stock market had been announced by Falk back in October as a way for Ad Pepper to divest its shares.

Falk eSolutions was founded in 1998, employs 130, and has been profitable since 2002, it recently reported.

It is not unusal for such an announcement to end up with the firm in question being acquired. We saw it last year with Cablecom in Switzerland, which was bought by Liberty Media, pre-empting its IPO plan. And another earlier example is online shopping recommendation company, Kelkoo, which also had announced plans to float on the Euronext, a move pre-empted when Yahoo made an offer to acquire the company.

Online ad technology firms in Europe, such as Adviva and Newtention, have recently been attracting VC money.

Read - Adviva clicks Kennet for $8M
Read – Newtention first time funding

Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 15, 2006

PR and the 200 million dollar online brand

Ever wonder how Friends Reunited managed to become the kind of company that ITV would pay £120M for? One point of view on how it was achieved was presented in a recent issue of the Ariadne Capital Journal.

Public relations specialist, Chris Ward, founder of Beatwax (he's no longer with the company) writes about how he discovered Friends Reunited, took it on as a client, and then in his own words “helped them towards creating the brand and media saturated success that won the agency the PR campaign of the year and resulted in the sale of the site to ITV for upwards of £120m”.

In case you missed it, Friends Reunited was acquired by ITV late last year for £120M (€175 M) in cash and shares, plus a £55M earnout. The price paid valued the dotcom highly, specifically at 22 times EBITDA and 12 times sales (based on price paid plus 50 percent of the expected contingent consideration and last fiscal year's numbers).

Ward outlined his 10-point plan for Friends Reunited. It's long, so we chose Number 2 "Establish a genuine angle for people to talk about", as a sample.

This was 2001 and the dot com boom time, when every newspaper and TV programme was full of sharp suited young city boys talking about their great new internet ideas and their ‘exit strategy’ all in the same breadth. I didn’t believe that the public would want to pay £5 to people like this and so suggested we present the site as a husband and wife business based out of home to bypass this almost sordid business side of the web.

…My proposal also said “To be truly successful the site needs to become a phenomenon for a period of time, for it to be discussed everywhere – causing the maximum amount of people to join, in the shortest space of time. For the critical mass to be reached and the site to become truly self-propelling.”

… So our PR angle was Steve and Julie at home running a website for your benefit, quite genuine and a great PR angle, the fact that the business was two businessmen and a handful of staff was irrelevant.

The a:c euro suggests that startups do not use the exact same Mom-and-Pop shop idea, as it's getting a bit old by now.

In the meantime, Ward founded The PlayGroup, a consulting company specialized in consumer marketing.

Read - Friends Reunited How to build a £170m brand from scratch
Read - ITV acquires Friends Reunited for $208m

Posted at 12:52 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

March 01, 2006

Belgium's InCrowd Interactive Has Big Win With BingBox

Social networking photo/blog sites that cater youth are making it look easy. Bingbox is barely launched and its traffic has vaulted into the stratrosphere. The site is owned by Belgium-based InCrowd Interactive.

Per our sister site's recent post on MyYearBook, we think these sites carry huge liabilities. Bingbox's code of conduct states: "These acts are prohibited bye the law and can lead to punishments. Public offenses, publishing pornographic pictures, paedophilia, offering prostitution or escort services and implicitly or explicitly invite for sexual activities." No offense, but we suspect that these offenses are the primary motivator for BingBox crowd.

Posted at 11:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink

February 28, 2006

King.com goes from cold to hot

Over at sister site the alarm:clock we are saying it is good to be King.com as the firm reports quick growth with casual gaming small-stakes betting.

We’ve been following Midasplayer.com Ltd, the company behind King.com, for a couple of years now and note the changing fortune of founders Riccardo Zacconi (pictured here) and Toby Rowland.

The two had a hard time raising early stage financing in 2003, despite having connections to the rich and famous in London. We understand that Rowland's father was a high-profile entrepreneur and Zacconi had worked as an EIR at Benchmark Capital Europe.

What is more, they both had experience with consumer-oriented online services. During the bubble, Rowland had founded Clickmango, a high-profile dotcom flop. After that he backed and worked at udate.com, which was acquired by USA Interactive in late 2002 for $150M. Zacconi had been a VP of sales at udate when the two had the idea for the new business.

When we were researching an article about VC investment trends the other day, we had a look at Ricardo Zacconi’s OpenBC profile and had to smile at the number of investment bankers, executives at places like Google, Excite, Vodafone, as well as venture capitalists, in his contacts list.

About a year ago, several months before the firm raised €34M from Apax Partners, a private equity and late stage venture investor, and Index Venture, we asked the founders to send us some VC quotes circa 2003. Here is one:

What a cold, Internet start-up? Who gave you this number?”

And here is another one:

VC: Could you put £5m to work this year?’
Entrepreneur: No
VC: Do you know anyone who can?’

Toby Rowland, picture here, said some things at the time that fit in with what the a:c and others have been saying more recently about VCs being in a bind these days.

Overall, my feeling is that VC funds are so big now that they are forced to look for companies with existing cashflow, and huge opportunities. Of course, that puts them into competition w/ private equity who tend to be more aggressive about getting deals.

Read - VCs in a no-win bind
Read - It's Good To Be King.Com

Posted at 07:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink

January 27, 2006

MarketXS hires its i-banker as CEO

BusinessWeek is profiling a few tech companies in a cover story about firms creating the most jobs in Europe in the shortest time. One of the companies is venture-backed MarketXS, a Dutch application service provider that enables a Web face for financial news and data feeds. The a:c euro notes that the firm's founder moved over to let his investment banker run the company.

In December, MarketXS announced that Jan De Roeck, a former ABN AMRO corporate finance advisor, was appointed CEO in December. He brokered acquisitions and capital raising for MarketXS, as well as advising on other deals in the niche of the financial services sector in which MarketXS operatres.

We think the company, could be planning further acquisitions, or aiming to become a target itself. By putting De Roeck at the helm, it would be ensuring an “alignment of interest” for its chief negotiator.

Online newspapers and banks use MarketXS to webify financial data feeds
Read - MarketXS profile (BusinessWeek)

Posted at 09:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink