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.
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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
Posted at 05:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
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
Posted at 07:30 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
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
Posted at 05:33 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
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 vibr