June 24, 2008
German/Swiss Location Startup Plazes Bought By Nokia
Nokia has bought Germany location-based Web 2.0 and mobile firm Plazes for an undisclosed amount. as our sister site the a:c euro reported, Plazes is a Swiss company that was founded in December 2005 with R&D is in Berlin. Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures invested €2.7m in its first round in February 2007. In 2006, Plazes won seed financing from well-known angel investors Esther Dyson, Marc Andreessen) and Martin Varsavsky (FON founder).
Pazes is a website that users exploit to locate friends, colleagues, and wireless hotspots. The user downloads a client which sends the users' location back to the Plazes database and that spot or location can then be searched, mapped and located by other registered users. It can also be edited with photo, text descriptions, and other bits of info.
Plazes doesn't seem to get much traffic and certainly there is no business model to speak of so we suspect that Nokia got a good bargain with this one and can certainly figure out how to evangelize usage for a product that should have appeal beyond its current geek crowd.
The German narrator here makes Plazes seem as dull as dirt, but you still get a good idea of how it works.
View - site
Posted at 04:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 06, 2008
Gazprom Media Buys Most of Russia's RuTube at $15M Valuation
Gazprom-Media is taking a majority stake in the Russian online video site RuTube at a valuation of $15M, reports business daily Kommersant via Yakov at Quintura. Gazprom-Media will also invest several million dollars in RuTube business.
RuTube was founded 2 years ago, taking inspiration from Google's buyout of Youtube. The site says it currently has 400K daily users and runs more than 40M video views per month. Apparently Mangrove Capital among other firms was interesting in investing but Gazprom swept in.
View - site
Posted at 04:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 05, 2008
AllPeers RIP
UK-based AllPeers has been turned off by its investors. The company had raised a round of funding in early 2006 from Index Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners. Allpeers is an Firefox extension dedicated to the private sharing of webpages and files of any size.
AllPeers has a trophy case worth of awards:
CNET: Winner Webware 100.
PCWorld: Best file-sharing freeware.
WiredNews: Best Firefox Add-On.
ComputerWorld: Best new Firefox Add-On
The startup was founded by CEO Cedric Maloux who was VP European Operations at PlanetOut. He explains that "We have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service."
It's surprised us that Allpeers was just shut down. It seems that given the connections of their investors they should have found someone to at least employ the staff and to provide a stock deal to land the software. At the very least we would think that the founders could keep the site afloat while working on new projects. Odd.
Read - final blog post
Posted at 11:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 20, 2008
An American Is The Blogging Czar of Russia
Although there have been no news to break on Russia's SUP-Fabrik, BusinessWeek profiled the firms' founder Andrew Paulson. SUP did make news late last year when it paid a rumored $30M for the blog platform LiveJournal from SixApart.
Paulson in his penthouse office with panoramic views in Moscow's Smolenskaya district.
The profile does fill in some grey area in the SUP story. The money behind the firm comes via Paulson's partner Russian banker Alexander Mamut. Also, its interesting that Paulson has never experienced business success. Rather he was a failed novelist and high fashion photographer before moving to Russia and falling into the local online publishing scene.
Forbes pegs Mamut's Fortune at just shy of $1B
Read - BusinessWeek
Posted at 09:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 14, 2008
The a:c Is Hands Down The Best. Bragster Raises $4M From Intel
Visit Bragster and you are bound to read some idiot get in your face about how he banged three chicks before lunch on his yacht on route to his crib in Greece. If this is your cup of tea have at it.
London's Bragster raised $3.5M in a first round of funding led by Intel Capital. Indeed Bragster's traffic has come out of nowhere. We assume that Intel did their research to see if this is natural or paid traffic. The company says it has had 800K visitors in its first 12 months.
The company is led by Wim Vernaeve, a former Morgan Stanley banker (which he boasts is the best frickin bank in London.)
View - site
Press Release Source: Bragster
Daredevil Social Network Bragster Secures Intel Capital Venture Funding
Wednesday February 13, 10:36 am ET
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bragster, a leading social network for dares and social bets, today announced it closed a $3.5 million Series A round of venture capital funding led by Intel Capital, the global investment arm of Intel Corp. The funds will be used to support future product launches, scale the team, accommodate new partners’ requests and market the site.
ADVERTISEMENT
The funding comes at a key moment for the year-old site, which has built an audience of 800,000 viewers in just 12 months. As social networking has spiralled upward to millions of users and $1.2 billion in advertising revenues last year, its success has a price: The leading social networks have become too large, unwieldy and homogenized for many users. Bragster founders Wim Vernaeve and Bertrand Bodson are leveraging the audience shift to connect with more targeted communities. They believe a site with higher-value content that targets a specific audience will create more engaged users and, by extension, a more attractive value proposition for advertisers.
“How many times have you told a friend ’I bet you can't do this?’ That’s the inspiration behind Bragster,” said Vernaeve, who worked at Morgan Stanley in London before launching the site in 2007. “Bragster was founded to record all the crazy things our friends were bragging about but never seemed to happen. There's a competitive spirit in each of us and challenges everywhere, and Bragster is available to record and enrich them.”
Bodson, who co-founded Bragster after working at Amazon.com, said the site is a unique entertainment channel. “Every story has its own build up and rich media content, created by our community of users. Intel Capital‘s role as an investor will help us write the next exciting chapter in our young company’s history.”
“The social networking market segment is experiencing tremendous growth but has yet to find an optimal business model,” said Alain-Gabriel Courtines, Investment Director at Intel Capital. “Bragster’s understanding of social media along with its broad entertainment appeal positions it to capitalize on this opportunity and create a richer, deeper experience for both advertisers and users.”
Intel Capital led the funding round, joined by David Frankel through Puressence Limited. Frankel previously invested in companies including GetMeIn and SiteAdvisor, sold to Ticketmaster and McAfee, respectively.
About Bragster
Bragster is the place to dare your friends online and brag about it after posting evidence. It combines the power of online communities with the fun of having dares, challenges and bets among friends. The company was founded by Wim Vernaeve and Bertrand Bodson in 2006 and the site launched in January 2007, reaching over 800,000 unique visitors from over 150 countries by the end of its first year. The largest markets by far are the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. More information can be found at http://www.bragster.com.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing, and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$7.5 billion in approximately 1,000 companies in 45 countries. In that timeframe, 168 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 212 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2007, Intel Capital invested about US$639 million in 166 deals with approximately 37 percent of funds invested outside the United States. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.
Contact:
Blanc and Otus Public Relations for Bragster
Meredith Obendorfer, 415-856-5167
mobendorfer@blancandotus.com
Source: Bragster
Posted at 06:43 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 22, 2008
VC Money Piles Into UK Web Ventures: W7 and TouchLocal
The European market might have seen a dip in Web investments in 4Q07 as TechCrunch writes, but this quarter is looking like that might change. After reporting a flurry of deal announcements last week, we've got two more to report today.
=> We7, a UK-based music download service driven by advertising sales, has raised a $6M Series ‘A’ round led by musician turned investor Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures. Also joining was early stage British VC firm Eden Ventures.
The founders of We7 are John Taysom, chairman, and CEO Steve Purdham. This is not Purdham's first venture. He was also the founder of SurfControl, a publicly-traded firm that was acquired by Websense last year for about £204M (about $400M at the time).
After one year of trading We7 reports it has 90,000 registered download users and delivery of over one million free to download, ad-supported music files from its growing music catalogue of 80,000 tracks.
The companyappears to have some interesting advertising technology to support it, with some finely tuned demographic targetting. So far, it has run advertising trials with Microsoft, for Xbox 360, and campaigns for Sony Ericsson, Café Direct and Sicko, the Michael Moore film.
Joining the board is Eden Ventures, Charles Grimsdale, who co-founded music distribution service OD2 (along with Gabriel), in Nokia's hands since 2006, and is a co-founder of Eden Ventures.
=> Another UK firm, TouchLocal has raised £7M (about €9.4M or $13.6M) from Balderton. It is going for a local search service, one that combines a yellowpages kind of business model (charging local business for positioning in its pages) with a community of recommending/reviewing users.
The company was founded back in 1999 and recently went through a Web 2.0 makeover. The Guardian has a good analysis of its position in the market and TechCrunch UK lists several rivals in an article entitled Qype launches in France, as local reviews space hots up, mentioning Qype, Welovelocal, Tipped, and Trustedplaces.
Posted at 07:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 13, 2007
German Web Investment Roundup
We're catching up on recent early stage deals in Germany's Web world.
Adscale
German text and banner ad network startup, Adscale, has raised an undisclosed amount of early stage financing from Holtzbrinck Ventures, along with the European Founders Fund and business angels, Oliver Jung and Lukasz Gandowski.
Just selling and serving ads for all the web projects these four investors have would probably be enough to keep this startup in business for a while. For US readers, if you know Adbrite, then you will know what Adscale is like.
Adscale is currently selling text and banner ad campaigns that run on websites with 100 page impressions up to 500K page impressions a day. It launched in September 2007.
Weblin
The company's platform lets users create an avatar to surf the web together (formerly Zweitgeist which we covered a while ago) has received a strategic investment of an unidisclosed value from T-Online Venture fund. Its other investors include High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Swiss-based Mountain Partners.
Youmix
IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft (state-backed fund), along with seed stage investors Mountain Partners, Tiburon, T7M7 and Oliver Jung, and YMC, a content management system vendor out of Switzerland are providing financing for Youmix, a platform for bands and fans. Youmix launched "Project Famous" which offers every band that successfully invites 5K people to the platform (directly or through a Flash widget provided by Youmix) gets funding for their first record.
Looking at the logo - could it be a red sofa trend next?
Townster
We eyeballed a PR from this local search startup announcing it almost raised finance. That was a first.
[via deutsche-startups.de]
Posted at 06:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 02, 2007
Zyb's New Ego Search
We tried out Zyb this weekend after noticing this guy around the Web.
What motivated us to sign up was not the shiny blue suit, it was this little teaser.
And this SMS message on founder Tommy Ahlers zyb profile page.
Expecting to be in at least one or two contact lists, your a:c euro reporter found an ego-deflating zero hits. There are 10M phone numbers in Zyb and not one of them is hers.
Posted at 07:08 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 28, 2007
Lack of Exits Is Not Slowing RSS Feedreading Innovators
Sister site the alarm:clock writes about the lessons learned from the first wave of pure-play RSS reader software developers, and speculates on how Netvibes, Webwag, and Pageflakes will develop.
Your alarm:clock euro reporter would like to add that the innovation continues, there is yet another wave of RSS reading and filtering tools coming to the market, according to a recent post in TechBytes, from Jason Ball.
So how will these developers that know a thing or two about RSS and related web technologies make money? One strategy is applying RSS prowess to the enterprise, or to specific types of applications used by businesses. Finding a niche is what the alarm:clock calls it.
There is already a trend on this side of the Atlantic of applying RSS know-how to market intelligence, which seems to be creating some growth for early adopters.
Ball's funds has invested in Magpie, which is applying RSS know-how and its own proprietary crawlers to brand intelligence and media monitoring. Note we are talking about Magpie whose service is called BrandWatch , not to be confused with Magpie, an open source RSS reader.
From what its website says, Brandwatch not only tracks hits (mentions in the press and blogs), it measures the sentiment, and the credibility of the source, for example. The screen shots suggest it delivers the plethora of data in a way that you can actually use it.
In the UK, there are other examples of companies that have built new businesses, at least in part, on the ability to add value to the firehose of information being pumped out by RSS feeds. For example, Library House, which is specialized in fast growing companies, and StrategyEye , which is specialized in new media market intelligence.
And Skinkers has evolved its model since its early days. In recently published user case studies it says that it has turned on its software at places like Virgin Atlantic to improve the way the airline disseminates its fare information, helping it to make more money in the process.
We're sure there is more evolving at Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Webwag, and other innovators. And we'll report it as long as we hear about it.
Posted at 06:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 23, 2007
Hot betas: MindMeister, Restorm.tv, and RapidObject
The hot betas section used to be beta only but now it is a place to highlight Web 2.0 things, mainly, that we see or hear about.
MindMeister
This reporter has tried mind mapping software from Microsoft in the day job but didn't get very far. So the MindMeister app is probably facing a hungry market. At any rate it is wowing investor types, well at least it wowed Hasso Plattner Ventures, which gave it the 2007 Software Design Award recently. HPV says MindMeister, which is from a startup called Codemart, "skillfully hides the complexity of its full capabilities to first-time users, it may initially appear simplistic. But any extended use will quickly reveal the several advantages of the product and the careful, deeper design decisions that were made during development."
Rapidobject.com
Its like a Vistaprint for three dimensional objects (the company behind it has a chain of printing shops equipped with 3D printers). RapidObject gets high praise for innovation and business sense from exciting commerce blog, which covers the ecommerce seen in Germany closely and critically.
Restrom.tv
Swiss startup restorm.tv has raised seed financing from active business angel Peter Schuepbach. It does what the logo tagline says, combines music videos with a soc net. It is a good idea to have a platform for acts that don't make the local versions of Viva or MTV, but the site is using Quicktime which served up some annoying sync problems between sound and video. Schuepbach is also backing kyte.tv, plazes, as well as studivz, Xing, and owns Genevalogic.
Posted at 05:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 19, 2007
Socnet Stats France: Skyrock Dominates
Comscore has some stats on the French social networking market compared to the European market. The news nugget is that while MySpace dominates the Euro market, Skyrock (which runs the Skyblog sites) leads by a long shot in France.
FRANCE
EUROPE
Source: Comscore
Posted at 08:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 13, 2007
User Profiling Gets Visual With U-lik and Imagini
If Last.fm (acquired by CBS for $280M) was last year’s taste-matching trendsetter, what will be next year’s? A couple of European sites that are onto something are U.[lik] and imagini.net. Both are taking a more visual approach to creating user profiles based on interests, tastes, and habits.
And both package the profiling - at the moment - in a social network that promise to match users based on similarities.
There is also French startup Criteo, which could probably fit in here, but we profiled it earlier.
Imagini.net is running two ‘personality’ tests at the moment. It is kind of a visual rendition of one of those personality tests that used to be staples in mainstream consumer magazines. There is one based on what you desire and another to determine a personality profile.
No registration is required to do the tests, but if you want to save the selection you have to register. About 4 million people, according to the site ticker, have completed profiles.
At u-lik, after a basic registration step, a user gets into choosing and rating based on things like stuff you already own, or things you’d like to own, see, or have and so on. It doesn’t print you up a personality analysis but it also offers matching with like minded people.
It is a bit more geeky at the moment than imagini.net. We say that not just because of its name, but because the user interface takes a few seconds longer than imagini's to internalize.
We met the founder of U.[lik], Raphaël Labbé, a couple of months ago. He’s been obsessed for the past two or three years with the idea that people are better described by what they want or what they like than what they buy. (Note that sister-site the alarm:clock will be doing a profile of imagini.net soon).
We asked him what the two sites have in common. He said that beyond a new twist on user profiling, there’s a common business model: affiliate marketing based on a personalized list of products, and selling on the aggregate data about users’ consumption habits.
Read on for a Q&A that touches on what Last.fm did right, what Amazon could be doing better, and Labbé’s view on how his technology can contribute to better online sales and online customer conversion. It is based on an edited version of several weeks of email between the a:c euro and Labbé.
What is wrong with Amazon's recommendation engine in your view?
Amazon’s recommendation engine is a very efficient sales booster, since it’s actually their second source of sales representing about a third of total sales, just after their own search engine. Considering a sales volume of $10.7B in 2006, no doubt you’d pay a tribute to Greg Linden, the engine inventor, as Jeff Bezos did.
But Amazon’s recommendation engine is not really user-customized. It’s far from being like the trusted librarian or friend who knows your tastes. That was the kind of experience we were looking for and are currently building with U.[lik].
We started U.[lik] two years ago because we weren’t satisfied with Amazon’s generated recommendations, despite being one of the most visible recommendation systems at that time, built on a large-scale platform and fuelled by a huge number of click streams.
Amazon‘s engine mainly computes selling statistics from their customers’ purchase history. It has flaws like two DVDs that end up being rated as similar because many people bought them at the same time. Flickr provides many such examples.
Also, my purchase history is not a really good proxy of my tastes: I dislike some CDs I ordered and many books I bought were intended as a gift for someone else.
Amazon has actually few social / community features that would entice users to rate items and share them. We even assume that a merchant site can’t do that business well. That could explain why Amazon is launching alternative solutions like Amapedia, or investing in a company like shelfari.
E-retailers have never created such an experience but sites like Last.fm have by providing a social and personalized experience (with a business model based on affiliate marketing and sales revenue sharing).
U.[Lik] is on a similar track, building a trusted place where users can discover entertainment and culture, rate items based on a personal scale and engage with users having similar tastes.
You wrote that the next wave of Web innovation is ‘all about math’ - what do you mean by that?
Due to the sheer wealth of information available on the web, maths and algorithms are essential to organize and filter that huge amount of data humans can’t handle.
Nowadays, the main issue is to give access to less known but relevant content. Existing algorithms are becoming inadequate because they tend to rely on popularity.
To address these problems we need new approaches and math tools that focus less on statistics and more on organizing information at a lower scale -- a few like-minded people is definitely more valuable than having a thousand contacts.
The difficulty is that computing at this micro-scale is harder because you’ve got less data, so you’ve got to be more precise.
How do you address the problem of less data and more precision?
The U.[lik] algorithm tries to mix several sources to gain in precision: computing is mainly based on the votes of users. It is completed when data is lacking with natural links between the items (the casting for movies for example) and tagging (filtering by genres for music for example).
Pandora with its Music Genome is also following this path, what we call “content based” algorithms.
Can you point to any other examples that are not based on statistics like "popularity" or "what else did I buy" ?
Pandora is unfortunately a rare example. But attempts are being made, for example with music by trying to analyse the songs directly in a project at Sun Microsystems from Paul Lamere ). I am not sure if librarything is using its huge amounts of tags in its algorithm, probably not.
You wrote that you agree with the view that we’re coming to the “end of the page view”.
Value is less in eyeballs and more in interactions and leads generation. It’s more valuable to sell “intention” like Google does when it puts related advertising to what people are looking for. Its recent move to introduce “pay per action” PPA where advertisers only pay for a result is creating another challenge for “page views” business models.
Web technologies are changing with rich internet application, Ajax and streaming. All are making pages views less relevant to capture what users really do.
Nielsen’s decision to focus on time spent to measure online engagement is a recent acknowledgment of this change.
Social networks have to deal with two issues when they are monetized by pages views advertising. Doing advertising on a user profile is much harder than advertising on a given topic.
The intention of the user is to engage socially and most social networks don’t have a clear view of what ties people together. The more the network grows, the more complicated it is to sell its inventory, especially when a real energy has been developed to optimize that same number of page views.
These two phenomena can explain why many social networks deliver lower conversion rate on ads as they grow.
Building a social network around socials objects enables to capitalize on affiliation programs, which are the first and main form of PPA.
Building a trusted context where user can opt-in to engage with brands is another possible approach. While building U.[lik] we have always kept in mind that advertising or suggestions when reaching a certain level of personalization will likely be as valuable and useful as information.
Posted at 06:29 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 06, 2007
Stealth Web 2.0 Gets Backing of Skype Funders
We have very little information to go on here but giving the high levels of interest paid to Skype we thought it is worth reporting on some recruitment efforts in London's West End for a Web 2.0 startup that has been funded by backers of Skype. Senior positions are now being filled by the recruitment firm ReadyPeople.
Posted at 10:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 31, 2007
Viadeo Raises Another €5M
French business social networking startup Viadeo raised $5M from local investors AGF and Ventech [ via DeutscheStartups]. The three year old venture raised a similar amount last year from the same investors.
The startup has gone international since this reporter first looked at its then all-French website. Viadeo currently has about 2M members, about half of which are in France, says Neteco and has raised €10M in total prior to this round.
Growing across borders in Europe is not as easy-- or as cheap -- for a business-oriented social network as it is for ones that cater to our more basic instincts, it seems.
Based on the public information about Viadeo, it is spending about €5 for every new user and has a couple of revenue streams: subscription to its premium version and it also charges for ads on it classifieds platform.
Neteco reports that the capital is for Asian expansion and there are plans afoot to make some acquisitions in that part of the world. It is currently running a publicity campaign in the UK that pitches to potential users to join as a way to "manage" their Internet reputations.
Read - Job seekers must keep 'NetRep' in tact (hrzone)
Read - Viadeo Leve Encore (neteco)
Posted at 06:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2007
Sweden's EPiServer: A CMS Business Model That The Money Likes
Amadeus Capital Partners and Northzone Ventures, together with Peter Larsson (founder of Protect Data, mobile security tech startup acquired by CheckPoint for $585M last year) have acquired a majority stake in EPiServer, a Stockholm-based web content management platform developer.
They paid $23.5M for the equity and Larsson will join the company as CEO.
A couple of things made us follow up on this announcement. It is a later stage deal for two VCs known for early stage. EPiServer was founded in 1994.
And it's a content management software deal. Yes there's a lot of spending on webdev these days - the last time we looked even Intershop was growing sales again - but there are already about 1300 CMS firms in the market, so why this one?
And the third reason is Peter Larsson who will return to the fray with this one.
More insight into the latter two was given to us by Jeppe Zink, of Amadeus in a phone interview. More on the first observation we will save for another post- fact is, it's a trend among many, but not all, of the tech-oriented European VCs that recently raised new funds.
Zink anticipated the question about why a CMS company (you can imagine him pitching the deal to Amadeus senior partners). He acknowledges that it is a fragmented market where most of the money is made in services.
The industry average ratio he gave us was 1 to 5 (for every one product dollar there's five dollars for services).
This startup sells to developers, over a thousand. It does not do direct sales. It does not get involved in the service side, which is where the majority of rivals generate sales, as mentioned before.
The company's business model enabled it to acquire 1500 customers with a sales and marketing team of less than five people and it has a greater than 20 percent margin on sales, according to Zink.
It grew developer end user numbers during the downturn, according to its website we note.
Nevertheless, its partners page suggests there is plenty of room to grow in countries beyond the home region.
According to its partner FAQ, it provides its platform, guidelines and training (certification) to developers and channel partners for a fee and leaves the rest to them. There is a module trading exchange too.
In summary, for the investors the technical and business model risks are out of the way. Zink said as much in the interview: "The challenge now is to scale the business, while adding more next generation, or Web 2.0, functionality".
This is where Larsson will contribute. He was brought to the syndicate and the startup's helm by Northzone. "EPiServer has the same model [as Larsson's previous company]. It is a different market, but the same business model," said Zink.
View Episerver
Posted at 09:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 04, 2007
How Much Money For A User?
Hendrik Speck, an Internet expert and researcher, did the math on the value of a user based on valuations of web properties. 
eBay and NewsCorp were ribbed for paying too high a price for some of their acquisitions but in context they are not out of the ballpark .The trade buyers have not paid more than what the captial markets are currently paying per user.
Source: Hendrik Speck Presentation Cebit 2007
Posted at 06:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 02, 2007
Eutube Launched On YouTube
We got a lot of traffic today on an old post where we asked "Who is Eutube, er Europe's YouTube" which was an article about startup European video publishing sites like DailyMotion and seveload. Turns out it was driven by Google searches for the European Commission's new video channel on YouTube.
From the first barrage of comments on the site, people are wondering why EC didn't use DailyMotion, or one of the other Europe-based sites. The answer to the queries suggests that eutube wanted to reach YouTubes bigger audience.
View Eutube
Posted at 06:01 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 28, 2007
DotGreen Variation: Trendwatching Still Made Here Report
We wrote about Bruce Sterling's call on the DotGreen boomlet. Trendwatching sees a carbon offset friendly trend too, one that is evident in the manufacturing and retail sectors in the Still Made Here Trend Report.
Trendwatching says that USA swimwear manufacturer still makes it clothing in the US, and it does so profitably.
Posted at 07:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 22, 2007
Xing With Another Spanish Buyout
Fresh off its buyout of eConozco in March, Germany-based business network Xing has bought out Spain's Neurona. No price was disclosed on the acquisition. Neurona claims about 830K business contacts, which would make it larger than eConozco which had only 150K contacts at the time of the deal.
Read - Xing blog
Posted at 03:28 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 18, 2007
MOMBastic News: Betas in Decline
Recent entries in the Museum of Modern Betas MOMB reveals "shocking news" from a betalogical point of view, fewer beta sites are winning 'best of web' awards on a global basis.
The MoMB, whose author tracks the beta quotient around the web, also does some other fun analysis:
Read -Germany 2.0, a listing of 100 German web projects and sites;
Read - Google's 50 Most Popular betas (how many does it have altogether if it has 50 popular ones?)
Read - Percentage ofGerman Twitter clones that are in beta (38 percent).
See - Recent entries on the MOMB blog
Posted at 06:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 06, 2007
London's GreenVoice Social Network Wins Funds For Enviro Activism
Greenvoice has raised an funding from undisclosed investors and is hiring ROR developers. The site is up and running and looks good enough.
It faces a field of competitors including: CommonCircle
, WorldCoolers, Care2, TreeHugger, and more.
Posted at 11:22 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Hot Betas: Ziki, Steek, Sclipo, and 5min
The hot betas for this week are France's Ziki, which we found via Decideurs.tv, Sclipo, out of Spain, and 5min, out of Tel Aviv, both are video oriented sites that are pushing the envelope we hear and won recognition in the Euroean Startup 2.0 competition in Bilbao a week or so ago, and last but not least some upbeat news from France's Steekup.
Ziki is how you say better-than-MySpace in French (it's early and we cannot think of anything wittier to say than that). It has had a bit of buzz among French entrepreneur-bloggers. It's offering individuals, companies, and event organizers free rent to publish profiles and miniwebsites. Catalyzing early adopters to sign up was an offer for free sponsored links on Googe, Yahoo, or MSN, which was gratis for the first 10K users, a landmark that the startup reached a week or so ago.
No news yet on how much it will cost thereafter or how the startup is funding it. Ziki boasts a founding team with some Internet creds: Olivier Ruffin (former CTO of web hosting company Amen) and Patrick Chassany (founder of Amen and co-founder of Fotolia, the French stock photo company. Ziki currently reports the following user stats: 12,369 people; 2,074 companies; 392 groups and 76 languages.
Sclipo
Out of a pool of 250 companies in a competition to find innovative European web2.0 startups, Sclipo came in tops. It seems to be similar to VideoJug, also out of Europe, as well as the other finalist 5min (see below). The difference is that it's about skills while the others are DIY how-to sites. We guess you had to be there to understand the differences. Also placing in the top three was Properazzi, which by the way is now working with Nokia spinoff Widsets to take its property search mobile, according to its blog. (See our early post on Properazzi)
Steekup
The founders of Agematis, the company behind Steekup and Steekr wrote in to tell us that they now have 350 000 active users for its steekUP : an online backup solution for mass market backups and steekR : an online virtual drive to store, share and play your personal content. The steek technology is used by NeufCegetel for the NeufGiga service with more than 450 000 active users.
5min
A startup team out of Israel, 5min is like Sclipo, a short format, DIY video publishing platform. It's got some unique content though, like how to make homemade sex toys or how to adjust a sliding door. DIY cable TV shows watch out!
Posted at 11:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 04, 2007
Israel Alert: Top 10 Web 2.0 Wonders
Our sister site alarm:clock has investigated the Israeli Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Israeli Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up. Read the full post here.
BTW - This is the third installment in our series of national Web 2.0 leaders. Previously we broke down Canada and France.
Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation, and 4) user uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz).
Helping us again with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and Israeli VC Ouriel Ohayon. Ouriel is also the gracious host behind the Israeli Internet mixer iDrink which is convening next in Tel Aviv in beginning of July (wear your shorts, should be warm).
Ouriel describes the Israeli Web scene like this:
"These recent years Israeli has turned out to be a central place in the global internet industry with a blossoming ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, providers and technical expertise . The challenge for Israeli company is to immediately manage to succeed in a foreign market since the local market is very small. Companies like Shopping.com proved it can be done and there are promising young companies as well as intensive deal flow that are doing a great job."
A survey by the Israel Venture Capital Research Center finds that Israeli Internet companies raised $64M in the first quarter of 2007 - highest in 5 years. $64M represents 16% of all capital raised in Q1 in Israel.
Jajah
HQ: Founded in Ra'anana, with development there, but new HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Intel and TMobile recently invested in a $20M round. Sequoia has also invested.
Business type: Free/cut-rate international mobile calls via VoIP.
Made the cut: Jajah says it currently has about 2.5M customers. Jajah has named a new CFO who has IPO experience. Intel and Tmobile deals might make it the space leader behind only Skype.
Competitors: Skype, Rebtel, OQO, Truephone, Fring and others.
Read - a:c post
Aniboom
HQ: Tel-Aviv
Funding: Evergreen invests $4.5M.
Business type: Animation portal. aniBOOM allows animators to upload their original animations (YouTube for animations). Recently the site had a competition with over 1,500 movies and top prize of $25K.
Made the cut: Sure video is bigger than animation, but it's nice to have a secondary niche to yourself. We are hard pressed to find many serious competitors here. Sure you can find animations on YouTube but there is no community around the art like you find with aniBOOM.
Competitors: Mytoons.
Read - NewTeeVee profile
Metacafe
HQ: Tel-Aviv and Palo Alto
Funding: $15M from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, plus $5M in a prior round.
Business type: Online video site. Calling card is fewer videos, higher quality than YouTube. Advertising business model.
Made the cut: Newish CEO Erick Hachenburg recently came over from EA. Its hard to be a runner up in a space where number one, YouTube, is so dominant and is hurting most of the competition. The company may have hired Lehman Brothers to shop them to Yahoo and Microsoft, and were asking for $200-$300M, but TechCrunch reports talks stalled due to traffic dip. Metacafe is very strong internationally.
Competitors: Blip.tv, VideoEgg, Dailymotion, YouTube, Veoh, Guba, Revver, Google Video. Grouper, Jumpcut, AOL, Eyespot.
Read - Techcrunch post
Speedbit
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Yossi Vardi is an investor in the company and founding investor of ICQ (acquired by AOL) along with STI Ventures.
Business type: Its download accelerator is integrated into the browser and
may speed up downloads by up to 300% . Its compatible with any Internet connection (Dial-up, Cable, DSL, etc.)
Made the cut: Speedbit recently crossed the 100M registered users and 1B files transfered mark.
Competitors: Bittorrent, Steam.
Read - BusinessWeek profile
Foxytunes
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Seeking investors.
Business type: Control more than 30 media players (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc.) from your browser window. More recently it launched a sort of wikipedia for musicians with a Pageflakes type interface.
Made the cut: Everybody loves FoxyTunes. Plus, with LastFM getting a big buyout from CBS, online music startups are again validated.
Competitors: Hard to peg as they do several things and integrate with potential competitors.
Read - Mashable profile
MySupermarket
HQ:
Funding: Just raised $6M from Greylock and Pitango.
Business type: Grocery shop price comparison
Made the cut: There are any number of eCommerce comparison sites but for grocery store visits there is a void. The company currently operates in the UK but we expect them to expand to the US and elsewhere with this model and to become a hit.
Competitors: Impossible to find strong competitive service.
Read - Searchengineland profile
Zlango
HQ: Ramat Hasharon
Funding: Zlango raised $12M from Benchmark and Accel
Business type: Emoticon language for Web and mobile messaging to augment your :), LOLs and FTWs and ZOMG!
Made the cut: Part of us says this might be Israel's Pets.com. We don't use emoticons, but on the chance that kids go with it, Zlango would own a generations vernacular and there have got to be ways to squeeze money from owning a global language.
Competitors: It's unique.
Read - a:c profile
MyHeritage
HQ: Bnei Atarot
Funding: One of the major investors in the online gambling site Empire Online, Aviv Reis, has invested $3M with a partner.
Business type: The site allows users to share family photos, showcase their family tree online, and organize family events. Through the site's face recognition technology, users are also able to organize and auto-tag their digital photos. In addition, they can find their own photos or those of their ancestors submitted by other users, as well as discover ancestors and relatives based on facial similarity. It also has viral features like Find My Celebrity Look Alike.
Made the cut: Competitor Geni.com has some of the strongest mo of any startup and we think MyHeritage is cooler. Older giant The Generations Networks does $150M in business here through subscriptions.
Competitors: Geni, Zoof, OneGreatFamily, The Generations Networks (Genealogy.com, Ancestry.com)
Read - Haaretz profile
WeFi
HQ: Founded in Israel with current HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Lightspeed and Pitango have invested.
Business type: Combines social/Web with wireless and with location-based services with a goal of helping us to find hotspots.
Made the cut: Finding WiFi hotspots and good signal strength continues to be a pain and there are no reliable answers. WeFi, if it gets some adoption, will power ahead of older services like JiWire.
Competitors: RadiusIM and Skyhook.
Read - a:c profile
eSnips
HQ: Herzliya
Funding: eSnips has received investments from Greylock Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Social content-sharing site where users can publish and share any media type - pictures, music, videos. Launched a marketplace for users to sell creations.
Made the cut: 2M registered users and over 10M unique visitors a month. Tough management: Yael Elish, former VP of Strategic Development at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH), is the founder and CEI. The company was initially funded by Nahum Sharfman, formerly the founder of both shopping.com (NASDAQ IPO in 2004, later acquired by eBay) and Commtouch.
Competitors: Plum
Read - Read/write profile
Read the full post here.
Posted at 08:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Manchester's LiveLink Funded For Raw Video Portal
LiveLink has built a reputation for itself by playing the videos first that other sites flinch at - like the hanging of Sadaam Hussain and video of a lion eating a man. Given that YouTube blocks violence and porno, Livelink has found a niche for itself with both. The Manchester-based, but virtual company was on MSNBC today saying that they have raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding and that it is slightly profitable.
Watch this video of a baby being attacked by a King Cobra, or not.
View - site
Posted at 06:44 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Amsterdam's Bliin Funded For GPS-based Blogging
Mobile blogging that pinpoints the bloggers local, while a neat trick, is not terribly interesting to us. Why do we care if a blogger is on their bed or in a pub? That said there are any number of companies making a go at developing mobile blogging software. Amsterdam-based Bliin has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Digital Pioneers and DCIF.
Bliin requires a software download and from there users can post photos, videos, sound & text - in real-time, located on a world map.
Bliin competes with Google's teetering Dodgeball, as well as Rabble, Gatsb and Twitter Atlas.
Read - Bliin Is GPS-based Live Blogging (Mashable)
View - site
Posted at 05:21 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 01, 2007
Yumondo Wows Bloggers - Its Backers Wow the a:c
Yumondo, a beta German social networking site, got write ups in ReadWrite and Mashable this week, which shows it knows its blog opinion-makers. Mashable says Yumondo helps its users get to know their cities better and ReadWrite says its reversing the “traditional Web 2.0 model” by building local communities that branch outward.
An alternative to Yumondo's way to get to know your city would be to go outside. But we're not here to give lifestyle advice, we're here to follow the money. The company behind Yumondo, is called Metaversum, and it has raised an undisclosed amount from Grazia.
The results of our research on its backer, Grazia Equity, impressed. Grazia we discover has been investing in entrepreneurs that you could characterize as able to build teams that execute - make money/find customers/create jobs - and establish themselves in tough, regulated, or risky markets.
It was an original backer of Conergy AG, a solar module integrator founded in 1998 that employs 1400 people, and boasts a €1.9B mkt cap – it just did a $150M private placement and it’s expanding into China where renewable energy interest is high as we hear from our moles.
In the meantime, it has co-invested with the likes of Venrock, Mohr Davidow, Benchmark (US), and Asia’s Mitsui.There are not too many early stage European VC types that invest alongside names like that.
In the US, Grazia is backing a la mobile (open source mobile tech) and Nanosolar ($100M in VC and counting), while in Germany it’s backing mobile TV pioneer MFD, which seems to have snagged some important licenses in its early days and is signing up TV stations and building a chain of retail outlets specialized in devices that support mobileTV; it has shares in VoiceTrust, a company we’ve been following for a couple of years now that does password voice authentification applications for the likes of Microsoft.
It also backed the company behind DVBN.de, an online platform for the German construction industry. And it even has a wireless sensor networking startup in its portfolio (the a:c euro is a WSN fan).
Grazia’s not a well-known name. But it’s doing what a lot of brand name VCs claim to do. If any LPs are reading this, you’re out of luck. Grazia doesn’t manage or raise a fund, it taps its network for the capital it needs.
Founded in 2006, Metaversum's first project was a 3D visually gallery (pictured nearby) in Second Life for a Berlin-based design collective. Launching multiple soc nets makes it a bit like Ekaabo, also German, but with cooler software.
Read Yumondo is an Urban Stylesharing Site (mashable)
View Metaversum
View Grazia Equity
Posted at 07:18 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 31, 2007
Spain's Panoramio Bought By Google For Map/Photo Mashup
Alicante, Spain-based Panoramio, a website that connects millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken, has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. Incidentaly, the company has its other key office in Germany.
Panoramio users can search and browse Panoramio photos and edit the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites. For example Everytrail.com made use of the API for their GPS Travel Community. Panoramio has had a default layer within Google Earth since January 2007. The founders acknowledge in their blog announcement that they knew they were headed down the path toward Google buy-out when they did the Google Earth layer.
The site has 330K registered users and 1.1M geolocated photos.
Flickr has a similar service here.
The company was founded by Joaquín Cuenca Abela. Previously, Abela founded Loquo, a Spanish clone of Craigslist, from the end of 2004 until Loquo was sold to eBay in 2005. He co-founded Panoramio in the summer of 2005 with a co-worker from Loquoa, Eduardo Manchón.
In addition to Panoramio, Abela and Manchón have 2 other projects, Cursoo a pre-launch e-learning platform and Revoluz a real estate mash-up with Google Maps.
View - announcement
Posted at 08:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2007
Bubble 2007 Metrics
Frontrunner, the Dutch blog from Het Financieel Dagblad, gave us the scoop on the Fluxxion deal and we also like this post it did considering the question of whether or not Internet hype is getting all bubblicious.
Click image to see the full view on Frontrunner
On the left: Red Herring's 628 page June 2000 issue, lies on the December 1999 issue of Wired, weighing in at just over 400 pages, writes Bert van Dijk in Frontrunner. On the right: the 160 page Feb issue of Wired, on top of the 40 page March issue of Red Herring.
Posted at 06:16 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
May 16, 2007
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
The a:c euro has investigated the French Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up.
Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation 4) User uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz). (ed. We turned on the Comments below for this one so you can have your say too.)
Helping us with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and VC Ouriel Ohayon who describes the French Web scene like this:
"Startups are being funded at a faster pace lately and some projects are really interesting with global ambitions and presence but there is still a huge gap with other countries and the USA. There is in particular a lack of light investment structure like YCombinator or CRV quickstart or even experienced business angels to support projects at very early stage before they arrive in VC hands."
Looking at France, Web 2.0 sees a thriving blog market, 10M bloggers as of January, and a lot of video platform projects. Other Web trends: a mature ecommerce market. The private sale of brand name discounted goods has taken hold. Social networks are not as popular among entrerpeneurs in France, but the mobile/web hybrid is.
France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders
Boonty
HQ: Officially its NYC, but the company came out of France
Funding: $10M
Business type: Casual gaming
Made the cut: Casual games are hot and Boonty is one of the best funded ($10M) and fastest growing. The company is making a smart entry into China with its buy-out of Beijing-based Gamehub. It has both a private label business and a destination site so it wins both ways. It recently signed up to French online retailers to sell its games through their popular shopping sites.
Read more
Criteo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: It raised €3M in seed capital from Paris-based investors, AGF Private Equity and ELAIA.
Business type: Recommendation engine
Made the cut: Criteo recently released a widget called Autoroll, which allows blogs and websites to display which sites visitors have been to before and after stopping by your site, the idea being to recommend sites your visitors might find useful or interesting. Criteo's tech is flexible and the founders have tweaked it to provide recommendations for YouTube and for Netflix, although neither of these bigger players have picked up on it. We figure one or the other video content-related site could use it and one of them might buy Criteo to own the tech.
Read more and here.
DailyMotion
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised capital from Atlas and Partech
Business type: European YouTube
Made the cut: The site is one of the biggest video clip sites in Europe. The buyout of YouTube by Google stamps a huge valuation on DailyMotion. As of November 2006, the site was getting about 9,000 new videos posted daily, and page views in excess of 16M per day.
Read - more
Eyeka
HQ: Paris
Funding: Eyeka raised €4.2M from Ventech.
Business type: White label platform for talent to upload, sell and distribute video/photos
Made the cut: Management is proven for sure. The co-founder is French entrepreneur Gilles Babinet who sold his last venture to Openwave for $121M. The other founder is Franck Perrier and CEO, led 200 employees at Corbis, managed the photographers and helped it enter the mobile market. The site design shows that some real pros are behind it.
Read - more
MXP4
HQ: Paris
Funding: $6.5M from Sofinnova Partners and Ventech.
Business type: Digital music technology that auto remixes songs.
Made the cut: We can't wait to get our hands on the tech. Music recommendation has seen great consumer uptake but MXP4 is a new twist. Management is topped by one of the top startup guys in France.
Read - more
NetVibes
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In August 2006, Index Ventures and Accel have invested €12M in Netvibes
Business type: Personal portal.
Made The cut: This one is easy. NetVibes is probably the most globally known of the new Internet brands. Sure the space is competitive but the ownership over home pages for millions is invaluable. Management and investors are heavy hitters.
Read - more
Skyblog
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bought by a buy-out firm
Business type: European Myspace
Made the cut: Skyblog may be little known outside of France but it dominates the French blogging scene, currently hosting over 9M blogs. From a marketing perspective, the company has a great tie in to Skyrock, France's most popular radio station. Not only is the platform popular, but reviewers like Mashable give it great reviewers compared to other blog tools.
Read - more
Wikio
HQ: Technically Wikio is Luxembourg-based - think tax haven. The CTO, CEO and others are French.
Funding: Wikio raised a series A round of €4M ($5.3M ) led by Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Wikio is a personalized blog and news aggregator and search tool with user voting.
Made the cut: Many Web 2.0 reviewers put down Wikio because its not innovative - nothing special about knocking off Digg. But it does track news sources that Google News (for example) does not. Digg and Google tend to be gringo sites while Wikio is taking this proven model to Europe, and it seems to be working.
Read - more
Yoono
HQ: Paris, France
Business type: Social networks empowering contextual search
Funding: AGF Private Equity invested €1.7M in January 2007
Made the cut: Yoono announced this week that it has 600K users. It also announced the private beta of its social Web clipping tool as an extension for its popular community. This makes it similar to StumbleUpon. Unlike many other Web 2.0 companies, Yoono's CEO Pascal Josselin has actually run a large company.
Read - more
Zlio
HQ: Paris
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eShop building tool
Made the cut: We like bootstrapped startups that create buzz because of the quality or ease of use of their service and products. It's not as easy as it looks.
Read - more
Runners-up
Vente-privee.com
HQ: Saint Denis
Funding: Bootstrapped
Business type: eCommerce
Claims €240M in turnover last year. Founded in 2001 pioneering the private sale model. We note that it gets more traffic than buyvip.com and 24h00.
Achatvip
HQ: Paris
Funding: AchatVIP raised €3.5M from Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners and OTC Asset Management.
Business type: eCommerce
Read - more
24h00.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: 6M euros
Business type: eCommerce private sale
Read more
Looneo
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: Backed Groupe Marc de Lacharrière, a major shareholder in the French holding company Fimalac.
Business Type: Social shopping
Read - more
e-Box.fr
HQ: Paris
Funding: E-BOX has raised €1.7M
Business type: Self service postal facilities
Neteven
HQ: Paris
Funding: Neteven that raised 1M euros in March 2007
Business type: eCommerce platform
Read - more
Fotolia
Business Type: Platform for stock photo talent
Funding: Private non-VC
Well-designed and attractive web-hosted stock photo platform. Number two to iStock photo's pole position in terms of number of photos. Headquarters moved from France to New York in anticipation of winning market share in the US.
Mobease
HQ: Bordeaux.
Business type: Widgets
Funding: Now a subsidiary of angel-backed Webwag
Mobease was acquired in March 2007 by Webwag, a personal portal provider like Netvibes. Mobease makes mobile widgets and a mobile search engine. Its software supports Symbian phones and enables things like a scrolling news feed. Webwag was founded in France but moved its HQ to Palo Alto. Webwag is funded by its founder who was an executive with Google France.
Read - more
Kewego
HQ: Paris
Funding: Banexi Ventures has backing a low-budget rollup of interactive video and TV startups by the founders of Pulsevision, now called Kewego. The startup raised €5M in a second round from Banexi Ventures. It acquired Pooxi.com, a French video sharing and aggregator.
Business type: Interactive TV
Read - more
Glowria
HQ: Paris
Funding: Venture-backed
Business type: Video on demand
A founder executing on a vision of a European consumer video powerhouse.
Read - more
Vpod.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from Innovacom. Angel Martin Varsavsky has invested an undisclosed amount in June 2006.
Business type: Video publishing platform
Read - more
Miyowa
HQ: Paris, France
Funding: In September 2006, it raised €3M from Techfund and Sophia Europlab
Business type: Mobile instant messenger
Read - more
Navx
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised funding from AGF private equity
Business type: software and services that can be integrated into navigation devices
Read - more
UbicMedia
HQ: Lyon.
Funding: The has team raised €320K round of seed finance.
Business type: Video distribution platform
UbicMedia is set to launch in May a new video and film platform called PUMit, which at the time of this post is still under wraps but is signing up beta reviewers. The company has several patents on enabling a combination of Video on Demand and P2P streaming of films and videos.
Read - more
Splitgames
HQ: Paris
Funding: It raised €2M from Credit Agricole Private Equity in October 2006
Business Type: Game swapping
Read - more
Atafoto
HQ: Gif-sur-Yvette
Funding: Bootsrapped by Founder and CEO Thierry Verrecchia who was founder/CTO of KeeBoo.
Business Type: Online shared photo site
JobMeeters
HQ: Paris
Funding: The startup says it has raised a few hundred thousand euros in a first round from Unaya.
Business type: Recruitment social network
Read - more
Trace.tv
HQ: Paris
Funding: Universal Music Group has made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount.
Business type: Urban music programing
Read - more
Contrarian picks
Sarenza
HQ: Paris
Funding: Raised about €5M from Galileo Partners and business angels.
Business Type: Online shoe shop
The VCs recently swapped out the founding team and replaced the CEO with a former AOL executive.
Read - more
Exalead
HQ: Paris
Funding: In January 2007, it raised $15.6M (12 million euros) led by Qualis SCA.
Business type: Search
Read - more
Posted at 11:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
NottaClone.de or Web 2.0 Originals out of Germany
Who knew that the original source for software for managing content of Wikipedia's massively popular onlilne encyclopedia was German? We didn't (University of Cologne was the source, the story goes). It's something we learned after following up the comments to a post by German blogger and entrepreneur-in-residence at Hasso Plattner Ventures, Gregor Hochmuth, on TechCrunch.
Hochmuth's analysis of the region's Web "copy and paste" phenomenon shook a few original Web 2.0 startups out of obscurity and onto our radar.
We take a look at the non-clones below. (Hochmuth also takes beautiful photographs, like the Berlin shot below, via his webpage Dotgrex )
The copycat phenomenon sees German entrepreneurs take a successful concept from another market and hone it for their own. A couple of examples of Internet ventures that serve got their start serving the German market and that are now €100M companies include Xing, Tipp24, and Interhyp. A lot of people think that with 14M broadband users it has a good sized market ... to make your first fortune on.
MyTv.de - a "TV Guide" for the Internet video couch potato - Original and with a very well designed user interface. We like this one a lot and it deserves a longer analysis than what we can do this morning. MyTV.de provides good information and details on the plethora of video blogs and video clips that are uploaded each day. The UI supports bookmarking, forwarding, chat, and the ability to vote on the content. And it claims some serious tech: a crawler that processes 100,000 new pieces of content a day. About 500 of which get vetted by the sites crew of 35 to 40 freelance editors, mainly students. This is something that they can fairly easily internationalize and we can imagine a few ways to make money with this one.
Partnr.de A web to SMS platform for lovers. It is not