September 08, 2008
French Flash Games Startup Mobitween Bought By Spain's Zed
London and Madrid-based mobile content firm Zed has bought a rival called Mobitween. With its HQ in Paris, France, Mobitween has developed Adobe Flash technology for mobile phones including more than 100 in-house titles and claims agreements with carriers in Europe and the US. Mobitween's games portals can be found at UgenGames and at Mobigamz.
ugenGames, launched September 2007 and allows players can customize the whole game and share it with their friends.
Zed had taken out a a €92.5M ($143.8M) loan in August to fund M&A.
View - zed site
Posted at 06:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 30, 2008
TMobile To Bring Pelago Mobile SocNet To Europe With Investment
img alt="pelago.png" src="http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/pelago.png" width="290" height="132" />
Seattle's Pelago has raised $15M to expand its mobile social networking application, Whrrl, in Europe and Asia. Whrrl allows cell phone users to spot their friends' locations on a map thanks to GPS.
Whrrl on Facebook
Whrrl on Blackberry
The apps look neat and sure the market is promising but Whrrl is early stage with a very limited users base. Much of the excitement around Pelago surrounds its CEO and founder Jeff Holden who can claim some credit for the success of Amazon.com. He was SVP, Worldwide Discovery and SVP, Consumer Applications. He was more or less a founder of Amazon having been there since 1997.
The $15M for Pelago comes from Deutsche Telekom, India's Reliance Technology Ventures, DAG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Trilogy Equity Partners and Bezos Expeditions.
View - site
Posted at 06:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 17, 2008
Mobile VoIP's Truphone Raises Further Gbp16.5M
London's Truphone has raised Gbp16.5M ($32.7M) in Series B funding led by undisclosed investors, who were backed by by return backers Burda Digital Ventures, Independent News & Media, Eden Ventures and Wellington Partners Venture Capital.
Truphone is a mobile operator whereby you can get free or low-cost mobile phone calls via the internet.
Truphone recently bought SIM4travel, which it says will enable it to offer low-cost GSM calls worldwide via a travel SIM.
In December 2006, Truphone raised £12.5M ($24.5M) in Series A funding, which was the largest Series A venture funding of 2006 for the tech sector.
Truphone has some very well funded competitors including Jajah and Gizmo.
See a demo of VoIP on the iPhone via Truphone
View - site
Posted at 05:11 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 03, 2008
UK's Ubiquisys Funded By Tmobile
We have reported on the UK's Ubiquisys as it is one of the hotter startups in Europe, having raised funding from Google at an early stage for its femtocells business. Now at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we learn that T-Mobile is investing in Ubiquisys, plus T-Mobile is trialling Ubiquisys.
Ubiquisys' "ZoneGate" delivers cellular coverage in the home at landline/VOIP rates, enabling mobile operators to compete with fixed line and VOIP providers. The company's pitch is that its femtocell technology will reduce costs for mobile operators, foster new revenue streams, improve user experience and will drive a culture of usage for next generation services. The femtocell business is exciting to end users because we believe that most people want a single mobile phone for all their telephony needs. They want to be reached at one number, anytime and anywhere.
View - site
Posted at 07:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 11, 2008
Sensor Tech Attracting European VC
Sensor technology has been attracting venture capital in Europe with several deals in recent weeks. We reported the Movea deal earlier this week and the €25M Series B for SensorDynamics in Austria. But there have been a few others.
Back in November, Nordic Venture Partners invested a hefty €12M in Exensor, a Swedish military system vendor specialized in perimeter security systems. Its products use the kind of sensor technology that Scottish startup Pyreos develops.
Edinburgh-based Pyreos has raised $3.8M from Braveheart plc, along with Siemens Technology Accelerator and the Scottish Venture Fund, according to an EE Times article this week.
(Image source: Exensor.se)
Exensor sells systems that include a wireless mesh networking communications package linking its sensor units (that include infra red, acoustic and three other sensors) to a database that detects and counts passing vehicles, humans (and whether or not they are gun-toting), and even animals. It has been winning sales deals in Germany and Finland.
(Image source: Pyreos.com)
Founded in July 2007, Pyreos is commercializing infrared sensor tech that came out of Siemens. Its CEO is Jeff Wright was co-founder of MicroEmissive Displays, which he helped lead from start-up to flotation on the London Stock Exchange, according to the startup's website.
The Pyreos sensor tech is good for motion detection, flame detection, and people counting, it says. The startup claims small size and lower cost, compared to existing IR sensors.
Posted at 08:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 04, 2007
Bibob Is Danish Entrepreneur's Latest Disruptive Mobile Venture
Danish entrepreneur Frank Rasmussen has launched Bibob, a mobilephone call discounter based on the MVNO model, reports BusinessWeek. This will be his second under his own name. He founded Telmore back in 2000, which was a profitable MVNO venture, employing 40 with half a million customers, when it was acquired by rival phone company TDC for $73M, according to the BW report.
But it is his third MVNO creation if you count EasyMobile (Easyjet's mobile service provider) which he did under TDC's label during his non-compete period, according to Strand Consult in this report
BiBoB, says BW, has s raised $7M and is going for a Pan European market.
Rasmussen's formula relies on using the web for sales and customer support. Other European MVNO's that BW says have the right approach are described in the article,CBB Mobile, Simyo, Chess, along with examples of the wrong approach that has been used mainly in the US.
Posted at 05:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 02, 2007
Nokia Splashes Out Big For Navteq - A Startup Opportunity?
Neuhaus Partners' Paul Jozefak has a post about the Nokia big-ticket acquisition of Navteq and sees an opportunity for startups and location based service providers.
But it is a qualified opportunity. He recently posted his view on the challenges.
Nokia will pay about €5.4B net of Navteq's cash. Interestingly the deal caused GPS chipmakers' stocks to gain, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Is Nokia's bigger footprint in mobile navigation and its increasing adoption of GPS in its phones a positive for startups in the processes of building new businesses? Your a:c euro reporter will watch to see if the people behind services like Gypsii, Plazes, and Mobiluck weigh in on their corporate blogs on this new development.
Posted at 07:33 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 25, 2007
Mobile SocNet's TruTap Raises $6.5M
London-based Trutap is led by founder, CEO and "Dragon" Doug Richard, who is also founder and chairman of Library House, vice-chairman of Cambridge Angels and co - founder of the Hotxt brand.
TruTap has raised $6.5M in follow-on Series A funding led by The Tudor Group for a total round take of $13M.
TruTap launched at the TechCrunch 40 event and in fact boasts that it was the only UK startup invited to speak. It is a mobile social-networking application that enables users to stay connected wirelessly plus online.
Read - announcement
View - site
Posted at 07:33 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 18, 2007
Mobile Portal Startup Texomobile To Raise New Capital
Neteco is reporting that Texomobile, the French startup behind mobile portal i-Gloo, is starting to meet investors in advance of launching a new multilingual portal called iGloo World.
In Neteco's interview with founder, Vianney Settini, we read about how the company's i-mode roots enable it to offer an apparently popular, and operator-independent portal, aggregating a blog platform, its own dating site, video publishing service, search directory, among other services.
It recently launched a service called myigloo that lets users create their own mobile homepages, which is why it can justify being called the Netvibes for your mobilephone, we guess. This year it opened an office in New York and has been doing some mobile advertising campaigns for Screentonic (recently acquired by Microsoft).
The startup resulted from the merger of two ventures -- three year old BeMobs and Ater Studio.
Read i-gloo partie immergee iceberg (neteco)
View texomobile
Posted at 07:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 06, 2007
Publicis Buys Paris' PhoneValley
Publicis says it is buying Paris-based PhoneValley, which specializes in mobile marketing. Founded in 2000, Phonevalley boats of big league clients like Paramount, T-online, Virgin, Sony, Canal+, and Universal. In addition to selling mobile services on SMS and MMS, it also manages purchases of banner ads and key words on mobile phones.
Read - MocoNews story
Posted at 10:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 05, 2007
RadioComp Tunes Into Seed Capital for Wimax and UMTS Products
WiMAX startup Radiocomp ApS has sold a minority stake in a DKK 16 million (€ 2.1M) deal with local investor Via Venture Partners, according to a press announcement its new investors sent us.
Radiocomp develops remote radio heads, which are used in basestations. Its gear supports software-defined-radio protocols to handle various flavours of high-speed wireless implemented around the world. It is also developing components for both UMTS and WIMAX networks.
It has yet to announce any customer wins publicly but it launched its first products earlier this year. Radiocomp is based north of Copenhagen in the city of Hillerød.
Read- Via Venture Partners
View Radiocomp
Posted at 10:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Seeded Sensinode Looks To Raise New Round for Wireless Sensor Net Tech
Sensinode, a Finnish startup that develops wireless sensor modules and the IP networking stacks to go with them, has raised an undisclosed amount of early stage finance from Veraventure (which is a part of Finnvera - the Finnish version of Scottish Enterprise).
According to Library House's Venturepedia (the part that is not behind its subscription firewall) the startup plans to raise up to €3M early next year.
The startup is targeting WLAN, WPAN, and Zigbee standard networking equipment manufacturers. Its platform is compatible with TinyOS.
View Sensinode
Posted at 06:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 30, 2007
Berlin's ViiF Gets VC for UMTS Mobile Video Fun
Berlin-based ViiF.de announced that Neuhas Partners, along with local business angels, and the IBB, have invested an undisclosed amount to seed it prior to launch of a new mobile video service [via forderland].
Its plan is to deliver a mobile video publishing platform that sounds promising, at least for folks with a German area code.
Neuhaus has a couple of successful investments from the past in the mobile services area so they will have brought that to bear on this decision.
But you don't have to be an industry insider to grasp the need for something easier to use than what we have today. UMTS mobilephones that deliver a faster mobile data experience are more affordable now, thanks to telco subsidies. But sending and sharing photos and clips is still a frustrating exercise in getting the right configuration for the service.
There are some alternatives we've tried via downloaded client or via the operator's portal but our experience with those hasn't been that great. This startup says it enables easy video tagging, annotation, and sharing without the client software and via a 4 digit access code.
If it really works at speed and with high volumes of users, then it will likely be popular. This also is the kind of thing that you could take international.
The question is how will it make money. The startup has not said yet but we'll keep an eye on it.
View viif.de
Read - Viif Receives Funding
Read - Finanzspritze
Posted at 05:01 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 27, 2007
South African Mobile Banking Fundamo Funded For Growth
South Africa’s Fundamo raised €3.7M (R36M) from HBD Venture Capital last month. (We are still getting caught up on the news from over our summer break). It will use the capital to expand into Africa, the Middle East, Asia Pacific regions and the USA.
It has Gemalto as a reseller, as well as recently announced agreements with integrators in Bahrain, the Far East, and Brazil.
HBD is an investment vehicle that belongs to tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth who sold his startup to Thawte to Verisign for $575M during the last venture cycle, a deal that rocketed him into space (read his blog bio for more on that) .
Shuttleworth typically invests in early stage but he said that this one satisfies other criteria like having a 'passionate' entrepreneur at its centre.
The a:c euro notes that Shuttleworth has seed funded several startups and he is currently running Canonical, the company that is offering services related to the open source Unbuntu (linux) project.
The mobile banking and payment solutions company, which has filed patent papers for some of its tech, is almost ten years old and is profitable, according to local press reports. MyDigitalLife says that the value proposition for Fundamo in developing markets, is it enables more people to have remote banking and payment services. In developed markets, convenience is the pitch.
Early backers are Venfin and Sanlam, who also joined this round.
Read - Mobile banking for the masses (mydigitallife)
Read - Fudnamo funded (itweb.co.za)
Read - Shuttleworth’s VC company backs Fundamo for further growtht (Fundamo)
Posted at 08:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 23, 2007
Aito's Funded To Improve Cellco's Return per Customer
Aito Technologies raised a first round from Conor Venture Partners. No disclosure on the size. It doesn't reveal much about its technology or business model on its site but from statements issued by Aito, it is targeting mobile operators and service providers with software solutions that enable the users to "segment their customer base more accurately, analyze the adoption patterns of new services, and reduce support calls".
It is a solution that will integrate "realtime customer behavior" with hitherto separate information and service management systems in the telcos.
Posted at 07:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 12, 2007
Sweden's Cellpoint Acquires Gennum Unit
CellPoint Connect AB, a Bluetooth headset specialist has acquired some audio signalling technology from Canadian chip solutions company Gennum Corporation for an undisclosed amount. The Swedish company makes lightweight earware.
Read- press rel.
Posted at 08:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 01, 2007
Spain's Berggi Gains More Funding For Mobile Email On Lame Phones
Berggi, which develops mobile messaging services for cell phones, says that it has raised $9M in funding from from Avanzit, along with current investor Adara Ventures. Avanzit is a telecommunications company located in Spain. According to Berggi, $8M of the funding came from Avanzit, with the remainder from Adara. Berggi is based in Houston because its CEO is at Rice University there, but its Chairman and investors are Spanish.
With Berggi you can download their app and then get email over most any crummy cell phone. It will charge you $10 per month for this. So you don't have to shell out to buy a Blackberry or iPhone.
Berggi's chief competitor is VC-backed Flurry which also offers a direct-to-consumer mobile messaging service, but its mobile email service is free. Berggi says they will white label their service through well-known brands we are guessing that they will start in Europe.
Another odd aspect of Berggi is that it is specifically targeting women. Not sure why.
View - site
Posted at 07:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 20, 2007
Google Invests In UK Femtocell Startup Ubiquisys
We have been following Swindon-based Ubiquisys since May of last year and in fact reported on a rumor that Cisco was mulling an investment. It turns out Google has picked up the tab. Ubiquisys is developing intelligent 3G femtocell access points for the residential market. Today it announced that t has secured a 2nd round funding totaling $25M. The startup's first round backers Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and Advent Venture Partners are joined by Google.
Ubiquisys device gives mobile users high-quality mobile coverage in the home using their usual 3G cell phones. It plugs into an existing home broadband gateway or is built into a gateway product that includes WiFi, DSL, Ethernet, phone ports and USB.
For cellcos, and ultimately their subscribers, the company's products solve a problem with 3G phones at home where costs of providing indoor cellular coverage have been prohibitive for cellcos, and the battery power consumption has turned off consumers.
What is more, it will enable VOIP services from cellcos.The idea is that cellcos will better be able to compete with the emerging WiFi and wireless VOIP innovations emerging on the market if they have such systems to sell.
It sounds like a good idea since 3G is being deployed in many large sized markets and cellcos need something to fight off the growing number of startups in the Wifi/VOIP area.
In June, the company announced it was working with Netgear on collaboration to deliver a residential gateway with integrated DSL modem, Wi-Fi, VoIP and 3G femtocell technology under the Netgear brand. It also has partnerships with Sony (for the design and manufacturing of the basestations), and Netopia for product-enhancing software, along with a few others such deals that will make the gear easier to install and compatible with several telco standards.
There is another startup we've covered that has similar gear, 4G Systems over in Germany, which was founded back in 2002 and has some early stage financing behind it too, although its core features concentrate more on cellular data services, as we understand it.
View - site
Posted at 03:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 12, 2007
Sweden's SWE-DISH Satellite Systems Bought By US Rival
SWE-DISH Satellite Systems, a Swedish designer and manufacturer of portable and transportable satellite communications systems, has been acquired by DataPath, a Georgia-based rival. The amount of the deal is not yet known. SWE-DISH was formed in 1994 and raised capital from Litorina Kapital, 3i Nordic and Nordic Wireless.
Units range from suitcase size to car size
View - site
Posted at 08:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 09, 2007
Zooming In Opera Mobile Metrics
Opera's sales may not be inspiring to write about but penetration of the mobile market by the Norwegian software company is coming along. Despite the notoriously high barriers to entry in the mobilephone software market, its Mini browser had been downloaded by 15M individuals as of April 2007 and it is getting pre-installed on several new mobilephones. It is also making inroads into set-top boxes and console platforms and higher end smartphones (Opera Mobile).
Its browsers are found in mobilephones from Nokia, Samsung, and a few others. Even the WindowsMobile phone platform uses it (HTC is a customer and it manufactures 70 percent of Windows phones, according to a 1Q07 ir presentation on opera's site pdf file)
We like Opera Mini ourselves and have had various releases installed on an aging Sonyericsson i780 since late 2005. A short stint with or Orange WAP browser last month had us going back Opera in no time.
The Mini browser generates 800M page views a month as of May. If it gets the kind of cpm rates that we get from FM Publishing, then its management will be smiling in a few months.
If it's not making money on that kind of traffic, maybe it should think about buying a mobile advertising startup like Rapid Mobile, the Scottish startup behind Ad360, which so far has managed to elude VC investors and has yet to be acquired, as far as we know - unlike Screentonic over in France, which Microsoft acquired.
Developing the Ad360 interstitial ads platform might be a way of making more money, not that we have any idea if its founders have the venture up for sale, or deeper insight into Opera's strategy than anyone else who can read its investors relations pages .
What we can say is that the stats graphics we snagged are impressive, and that the default Opera Mini-homepage runs Yahoo search bar, which will be a revenue source. It delivers a couple of default news channels and a link to Opera's social network or MyOpera Community, which is growing too. MyOpera counts 850K users as of May and it's Norway's third most popular web-destination, according to Opera.
Posted at 06:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 08, 2007
Zinwave Raising Capital To Make Wireless Go Further
Getting cellphone calls in elevators and underground offices is a hit and miss thing. And pity the network managers that cannot make sure Blackberry-wielding executives get their emails and messages wherever they are in the building or parking garage.
So we figure Zinwave out of England, which can solve that problem without a massive capital expenditure, is onto a good thing.
We will soon find out if VCs feel the same way as it is currently raising €15M. Zinwave, which was founded back in 2002, raised an $8M series A round from Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners. It is now raising its B round, according to one of its backers, Stuart Patterson at SEP, the investment company that helped MTEM from the research lab to a couple of hundred million acquisition target in three years.
There's a buzz on right now about inbuilding cellular coverage. And Zinwave can benefit from it with its recently released products and a broadband solution that supports anything from land mobile radio to cellular and Wi-Fi over the typically existing fiber infrastructure.
Basically, it figured out how slip radio signals into a single optical cable and pump them out wherever normal antennas fail.
It's a so-called Optical Distributed Antenna System. That means a network manager connect Zinwave hub (shown above) to remotely placed antenna units, over fiber, and they can add a basestation to boost particular cellular network coverage, if required.
It claims the ability to carry 2G, 3G, PMR/LMR, TETRA, Wi-Fi, WiMAX - anything operating in the 370MHz to 2.5GHz range.
There are four competitors for this type of in-building gear, each with their own strenghts and weaknesses, as the Computergram article we linked to below suggests. Patterson says Zinwave's closest competitor is MobileAccess, which uses different cabling.
He also explained that Zinwave's origin was a university reserach breakthrough, a technology in search of a problem, and that it took the team about a year to figure out where the sweet spot in the market was for it.
It now has some reference customers like Tyco's headquarters in the US, and the plan is to ramp up, secure the easier RFPs it gets, like emergency services TETRA systems, and to grow the customer base internationally.
Read Computegram Analysis of Zinwave and Co.
View - Zinwave
Posted at 07:11 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 21, 2007
Qiro Funded To Find You The Nearest Bankmachine
Qiro, which was incubated at Deutsche Telekom labs, has been seed funded to grow its mobile location services business. . Investors include teh High-Tech Gründerfonds, VC Fonds Berlin GmbH, along with Berliner Business Angels.
You can download the Qiro client for free and it tells where to find nearby cafes, rent-a-bike places and bank automats. It is like having YellowPages custom-output a search result for where you are standing right now. The app will also locate friends (if they belong to Qiro too).
This is the kind of thing we helped to hype years ago by writing about it as though it was just around the corner -- we fell for market forecasts (won't be letting that happen again anytime soon - you may notice we don't quote them in these pages.)
Just today we were puzzling over why it has taken the telcos so long to get their location based services in gear with a mobile industry tech exec in Zurich. He said, he felt they might be a bit late because in the meantime there are several competing ways to locate mobilephone users, GPS is coming on, and a few startups have come up with alternatives.
The thing is the business model is not exactly obvious - we'll be watching to see how Qiro and others do the money-making thing.
Posted at 09:11 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 06, 2007
Bertelsmann Invests In Mobile Social Network Developer Qeep
Blue Lion, which makes Qeep, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. The amount of the funding is not disclosed, just that its a multi-million euro A round.
Blue Lion is led by former execs from T-Mobile and Nintendo in Germany. Blue Lion mobile developed Qeep (spoke as "kweep") and launched a beta version of it in the German market at the end of last year. Qeep is a mobile service that includes instant messaging, photo-blogging and multi-player gaming.
The company is based in Cologne, Germany.
View - site
Posted at 04:39 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 31, 2007
Spanish Startup Atalum's Wireless Wizardry
We just discovered a Zigbee startup, Atalum Wireless, out of Spain. The company, which sells network commissioning, design tools, and embedded software to support wireless sensing networks, seems to be getting product to market at a rapid clip. We noticed it because it's offering its protocol stack for free.
It's managed to get a few OEM contracts from what we can see and looks to be making a go of it without having tapped VCs yet. Whether that's by choice or not - we don't know. Wireless sensor networking is one of the a:c euro’s favourite categories, but it's being pretty much neglected by the VCs in the region. We've reported on only a handful of early stage investments since January 2006.
Atalum was co founded by Sandra Lucia Wear (CEO), Ken Nickersonexecutive from iBinary Corp., a private technology research and investment firm, and Dr. José Manuel Páez Borrallo of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which has a first rate research center on intelligent networking technologies (they call it smart homes, smart buildings, etc.).
This is not Lucia Wear's first venture. She founded DocSpace (acquired by CriticalPath in 2003) and built up its European business, according to her Atalum bio, did some startup consulting, finally staying put at Atalum in 2003.
View: Atalum
Posted at 07:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2007
Streamezzo Brings Its A Game. Qualcomm Closes Investment In French Mobile Media Startup
Qualcomm Ventures says that Streamezzo is its first direct equity investment in Europe. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. The Paris-based mobile media startup develops TV-on-mobile applications, as well as music applications, portals and user interfaces for enhanced mobile browsing ergonomics.
This closes the investment round announced in April 2006. QUALCOMM joins existing investors: AXA Private Equity, T Source, France Telecom Technologies Investissements and GET Valorisation, as well as new investors Sofinnova Partners and Sofinnova Ventures.
View - site
Posted at 04:48 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2007
Russia's Playfon Looking For CEO with IPO Know-how
Playfon, a mobilephone entertainment and services provider, says it's looking for a Russian CEO with IPO experience. The company's current CEO and owner, Muslim Shortanov, is apparently vacating the position.
For better or worse a new CEO will need to work with Playfon's mobile adult group Hotfon.
Playfon, which is based in Moscow, distributes ringtones, runs a WAP portal, and sells Java games, as well as several supporting mobile services such as a payments platform. Its customers are mobile network operators and service providers (MVNOs).
According to estimates from CNews Analytics, which publishes research on the Russian market, Playfon’s revenue last year was $14M, up by 11% over 2005. The company employs over 150 people working in Sweden, Russia and Ukraine.
It serves operators in South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States.
View: Playfon corporate site
Posted at 05:23 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 21, 2007
Nordic VC Firm Nexit Sells Ownership Of Hantro To On2
VC firm Nexit Ventures has been on a roll with its 4th mobile exit in the past 14th months. Today it sold its share of Hantro Products to On2 Technologies (AMEX:ONT). Helskinki-based Hantro develops compression technologies for wireless video. Hantro says its technology has been implemented on more than 200M devices on mobile phones produced by 5 of the world’s top 6 handset manufacturers.
The stock deal is valued at $8M. Nexit Ventures owns approximately one third of Hantro shares. Other investors include Capman and Atine as well as the company's founders and key personnel. Nexit has been a co-lead investor in Hantro since 2000.
View - Hantro site
Posted at 10:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 15, 2007
Mobile e-tickering : bCODE Makes Inroads With Tiny Amount of VC
bCODE, an Australian startup, has managed within three short years to create a complete mobilephone e-ticketing solution and win some big name customers in different geographies and it did it on the back of a modest $5M in VC investment.
It caught our eye because its recent trade press PR focuses on its ability to eliminate lineups. We love what e-ticketing has done for lineups at the airports but we have weathered much hype from mobilephone startups who have tried to do this before with only limited regional success.
Since bCODE has managed to get customers in the US and in Australia, recent customer wins include CEBIT Australia, the CommonWealth games, and Atlanta-based Real Hip Hop, it must be doing something right.
bCODE seems to have found a smart way to avoid the giant hurdles that phone manufacturers and cellular service providers typically present, it uses old-fashioned SMS or text messaging, its own software and developed nice-looking terminals.
Founder and CEO Michael Mak is on his second venture. Back in 1997 he founded a web messaging company that he partially exited to Looksmart in 1999 for about $8M Aussie dollars.
View bCODE
Posted at 04:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 09, 2007
Rumor: Belgium's Mobistar To Buy Luxembourg's VoxMobile
Belgian mobile operator Mobistar, a unit of France's Orange, will announce a planned acquisition by the end of June after identifying an unnamed takeover target, CEO Bernard Moscheni said. Mobistar is in talks to acquire Luxembourg-based mobile phone operator VoxMobile, which is backed by Audiolux and BGL Investment Partners, says financial daily De Tijd. According to the newspaper, two other candidates have also expressed an interest. No financial terms have been reported.
View - site
Posted at 06:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 16, 2007
Sparus Raises €4M For Mobile Device Management
Two year old Sparus Software out of France has announced commitments of €4M for its second round to finance its « Mobile Device Management » venture. New investors is Crédit Agricole Private Equity, joining existing investor AXA Private Equity. The firm's software is targeted primarily at Windows MobileCE devices. It is another one from the Microsoft IDEEs programme, which we wrote about the other day
View Sparus
Posted at 04:54 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 16, 2007
Big Hitters In The UK Wireless Scene Launch Macropolitan
Founded in May last year, London's Macropolitan has been busy buying up locations in metro areas that WiMax and other wireless operators require for their networks. The firm claims to have obtained exclusive telecommunications rights to 7,600 properties in major urban areas of the UK.
Macropolitan is equity funded by several multi-billion dollar telecoms and property funds including Consensus, and Saudi Oger.
The company's founder/CEO is Ryan Jarvis who was Chief of Wireless Broadband and Chief of Convergence Products at BT. He waas also CEO and co-founder of the pan-European public Wi-Fi operator Megabeam. His Chairman is Richard Greco who was former CEO of the broadband Internet access provider Bulldog.
View - site
Posted at 06:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 12, 2007
Finland's Confidex Raises €5M In First Round For RFID Tech
Confidex, a Nokia, Finland-based designer and manufacturer of RFID tags, has raised €5M in its first round which was led by Logispring with Aura Capital.
Confidex targets three main market segments - aerospace, automotive and retail - as well as newer RFID sectors such as postal applications and healthcare.
Visit - site
Posted at 03:54 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 07, 2007
Backers of Spain's Fon Deliver 10M More Euros
Our sister site the a:c met last night with Faisal Galaria, Fon's New BD VP in San Francisco. Galaria's news blast was that Fon had just closed $13M in new funding from existing investors Index Ventures, Google and Sequoia Capital, and $4M from others. It has now raised a total of $35M.
Spain-based Fon asks users to share bandwidth at home or work to get to connect for free to all the other FON hotspots. Users buy a $40 router from Fon. Fon competes with fellow Spanish star-up Whisher as well as Kiwi start-up Tomizone.
Read - FON has Raised Another 10 Million Euros to Grow its WiFi Community Around the World (Founder's blog)
Posted at 06:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
More M&A For Buongiorno: Dutch HotSMS for £2.8M
Italian mobile content firm Buongiorno is buying out HotSMS, a Netherlands-based mobile ad firm, for about $5.6M plus a small earnout. HotSMS delivers a free, ad-sponsored SMS (short message service) offer. Founded in 2000, HotSMS specializes in permission-based text, MMS and WAP-based advertising campaigns. HotSMS partners with marketing and media agencies to develop mobile commercials, sponsored games and SMS coupons. Clients include Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Universal Music Group.
Read - Buongiorno acquires HotSMS for £2.8m
Posted at 04:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 23, 2007
Boungiorno On A Buying Spree To Grow Mobile Portfolio
Moconews drew our attention to Boungiorno's ongoing small-ticket acquisition spree, with the news that the Italian mobile content and distribution platform company had acquired Dutch mobile marketing company HotSMS for €4.3M.
That prompted us to take a look at it what it's been up to. Buongiorno, whose market cap is €335M (about a quarter of the company still belongs to founder Mauro Del Rio) made its first big acquisition when it bought Italian music download provider Vitaminic, a high-flier of the European bubble era.
And since then acquired European businesses such as GSMbox, Freever, DioraNews, as well as forming a JV with Mitsui to reach the Russian and East Asian market. Last year it bought Calif-based RocketMobile for $17M.
This year, in addition to the HotSMS deal, it also acquired Inventa for $2M and Chinese eDonga for $2.7M.
Boungiorno is making these moves in order to become a "digital marketing services" leader and add know-how for mobile video, that means the firm will not only deliver content but also SMS and MMS-based marketing services to a global market.
It is certainly not overpaying to make that strategic move. It will be interesting to see the results over time. It does about €192M in annuals sales, right now.
Read - Buongiorno Buys Dutch Mobile Ad Firm (moconews)
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Posted at 05:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 14, 2007
RealEyes3D Wants To Boost Your Love Life
Valentine's Day put us in the mood to pick up on some PR from French startup Realeyes3D, whose company name is anything but Xing-y or Zong-y or Zoomf-y, but it doesn't matter much because it is doing what many startups in the mobile market have had trouble doing, getting its software into handsets.
The company's code makes it possible for cameraphone owners to send and receive handwritten notes, like the flirty ones shown here, by taking a photo of them and then sending it via MMS or email. It also enables sending photos with personal messages scrawled on them.
Its software was shipped in more than 23 million handsets by the end of last year, the firm said in a recent press release. It's got a long way to go though - about 1 billion new phones are sold each year worldwide.
So far, it has raised two rounds of VC, one in April 2003 of €3M and another in 2005 when it raised €7.5M. Its backers include Atlas Venture, Partech International i-Source Gestion, and Siemens Acceleration (formerly SMAC).
We note that one of its VCs, Atlas Venture, has partnered it up with another of its portfolio firms, Cognima, which runs the ShoZu service, one that enables documents created using RealEyes' tech to be uploaded in the background - so you can still make calls - and at speed.
View - Realeyes3D
Posted at 07:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 12, 2007
Scotland's Picsel Funds Up With $46.5M For Mobile Browser
Glasgow, Scottland's Picsel sells a content management systems that the can deliver rich content on phones, PDAs, games consoles, set-top boxes and in-car systems. The company claims its software is shipping in more than 50M handsets. Customers include Palm, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic and Nokia.
Picsel's browser translates Microsoft Office, Flash, PDF, and HTML files, as well as common graphics file formats, to an internal "eFIF" format. Translation into a common format enables a single application frontend -- the Picsel browser -- to display and edit many kinds of files, without requiring native application support for the original file format.
Picsel's browser renders large documents on small displays. It offers landscape and portrait modes, zooming and panning tools among other options.
Picsel Group has raised $46.5M in 3rd round funding. Capital International led the deal, and was joined by Doll Capital, NIF, SMBC Ventures, SBI Investment and DoCoMo.com.
Attachments read through Picsel Viewer
Read - PICSEL Technologies Raises $46.5 Million in Private Placement (Release)
Posted at 04:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Advent Invests €7.5M For Zong.com Expansion
Advent Venture Partners will announce today its $7.5M investment in Echovox, the company behind Zong.com, a platform that enables monetization of content and services via premium SMS.
The Swiss company recently changed the name of its content delivery and payment management platform SMSConnect to Zong. It now supports for charging for content published in blogs, on websites, user-generated content, as well as enabling texting (SMS) quizzes and audience interactivity for radio and TV.
One big customer is TheCloud which uses Zong to enable its 300 million from over 40 mobile networks across Europe to purchase hotspot access time via their mobile phones. Payment is charged to a user’s mobile telephone bill instead of having to deal with credit card payments.
Advent sees it is a growth equity deal. It is not clear to us yet if earlier investors such as Newbury Ventures, which invested about $5M in 2005 also participated in the round.
Posted at 05:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 01, 2007
German Bluetooth Marketing Startup Going For Growth
Three year old Blue Cell Networks GmbH, a German startup that provides Bluetooth hotspot services, has raised an undisclosed amount of capital from state-backed funds to develop its business, according to Venture Capital Magazin.
The startup has put together a platform it calls Beamzone that is used by crossmedia and mobile marketing agencies for promotions by big brands. It has a long list of brand names that have exploited it, such as McDonalds, Burger King, Opel, Nike and THQ Wireless.
And judging from the number of translations of its website (Portugese, French, German, English), it is going for international expansion.
Beamzone enables agencies to offer free video clips, ringtones, podcasts, games, and coupons to handsets in the radius of its bluetooth network.
With mobile marketing getting so hot in Europe, we like the idea that Blue Cell has its own technology and it sounds like a cost-efficient solution. It seems to have some barriers to entry around out, compared to other mobile marketing players.
As many of you already know, there is a bit of rush on right now over here for mobile marketing agencies to raise capital (eg. YOC, Cellfish, TagAttitude etc.) The agency model is a good business, no doubt, but we don't think it has the kind of scaling built-in that would enable a venture-like return. Blue Cell can ride the mobile marketing wave, but it can also get into other areas where a local Bluetooth hotspot could be useful.
Posted at 06:34 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 30, 2007
Amadeus and 3i Back Cool Wireless PowerAmp Startup Nujira
UK-based Nujira, a maker of Wimax and 3G power amplifiers targeting original equipment manufacturers, has raised a $9.8M Series B funding round. The round was co-led by current investors 3i and Amadeus Capital Partners, and included further investment by Cambridge Gateway Fund, Cambridge Capital Group and the Cambridge Angels.
The startup currently has product with OEMs who are evaluating the tech before making the decision to design it in.
We recently interviewed 3i's Ian Lobley who had this to say about Nujira:
It’s founders are ex-Symbionics, which was acquired Cadence back in 1998. Nujira is delivering something that network equipment makers’ customers want : a cellular basestation that consumes less power and gives off less heat so meeting one of the operators’ environmental targets. You don’t need air conditioning in the basestation cabinet for one thing and the total cost of ownership is slashed. But it also enables a much smaller basestation, small enough to mount on a pole – so called remote radio heads.
Posted at 11:52 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 23, 2007
3i Finds The Mobile Sector Exit
We’ve posted here several times about the hazards of VC investment in the wireless and mobile sector. Over the past few years we’ve seen lots of money going in and very little coming out. But we noticed that 3i has been divesting often enough that the activity stood out in the flow of news we eyeball at the a:c euro.
We checked that impression with Go4Venture, the technology oriented corporate finance firm, whose data resources are better than ours. Xavier de Lecaros-Aquise, analyst at Go4Venture, wrote back: "It seems your hunches are correct. Not only has 3i been very successful in doing so … it turns out they have been the most active too.”
Here is a list of trade sales and IPOs that we requested from 3i
• Trade Sale: Bitfone to HP USdollars $160m
• Trade Sale: Mobile365 to Sybase USdollars $300m
• Trade Sale: Sychip to Murata USdollars $140m
• IPO: Eleksen GBP £18m
• Trade Sale: UbiNetics 3G business to CSR USdollars $48m
• Trade Sale: UbiNetics test and measurement business to Aeroflex GBP £46m
• Trade Sale: Xenicom to Andrew Corp USdollars $11.5m
• Trade Sale: Trigenix to Qualcomm euro €36m
• IPO: CSR euro €301m
• Trade Sale: Magic4 to Openwave euro €82.6m
• Trade Sale: K-Mobile to American Greetings
In the meantime, the sale of NordNav and Cambridge Positioning Systems to Cambridge Silicon Radio was announced. The NordNav deal gave 3i and InnovationsKapital "up to 8 times" their total investments in the company.
With all that in mind, the following Q&A with Ian Lobley, a senior partner on its VC team, should be of interest to some of you. The interview was done via email and telephone.
a:c euro – How did you manage to find the exit, when many of your peers haven’t?
IL – We’ve had a good run over many years. We’ve been investing in the market for 15 years, across the mobile value chain, investing in software, components, handsets, download platforms and operators….
a:c euro – So have some of your peers in the Nordics and France and they are not yet getting good-sized trade sales or IPOs.
IL: I think that some other investors had a narrower focus in certain areas of mobile, eg ringtones.
a:c euro - How do you interest the big name buyers, like HP, which acquired Bitfone?
IL: Trade sales don't happen in a vacuum - typically there are long term relationships preceding the deals. Helping to get those relationships for our portfolio is one thing we do, for example. Bitfone was an HP partner.
a:c euro – Which area delivered 3i the best returns ?
IL – Investments around the semiconductor area, CSR, Sychip, Ubinetics – have been a great area for us. But middleware and software to the handsets has been good too: Magic4, Trigenix, and Bitfone. Even content, K-mobile was a content company.
a:c euro – Your positive comments on middleware and content are surprising.
IL- It’s true that the most frustrating and challenging wireless model is anything where the operator is part of the value chain – especially marketing content via the operator, or where the success depends on getting into the handset. But even there we have startups that have done it and when they do it and overcome the initial barriers, they can do very well – Magic4 is a great example of this.
a:c euro – Where are you investing now?
IL – DiBcom, chip company for mobile TV where it is market leader; ScreenTonic, mobile ads – it's French and offers a full-set of tools and a platform for mobile phone advertising – its customers are the operators and advertisers; Nujira, which makes components to improve significantly the efficiency of wireless base stations. This allows dramatic reductions in power consumption and, for example makes, Wimax base stations work at unprecedented levels of efficiency.
a:c euro – We haven't heard of Nujira.
IL- It’s founders are ex-Symbionics which was acquired Cadence back in 1998. Nujira is delivering something that network equipment makers’ customers want : a cellular basestation that consumes less power and gives off less heat so meeting one of the operators’ environmental targets. You don’t need air conditioning in the basestation cabinet for one thing and the total cost of ownership is slashed. But it also enables a much smaller basestation, small enough to mount on a pole – so called remote radio heads. There is a press release about it here
a:c euro – What’s your approach to new mobile sector investments?
IL – we are trying to build on our success over 15 years; thoughtful and cautious!
a:c euro – thanks for the interview.
Posted at 09:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 18, 2007
Smart Ball Startup From MyOrigo Founder
We just learned that Ball-IT Oy has raised funding from Finland's Aura Capital for its smart ball business. The deal actually closed a while ago but we only learned about it when we asked Johannes Vaananen, co-founder of the 15 month old company, to tell us a bit about his new startup earlier this month.
With an undisclosed amount of capital, Finland-based Ball-IT has developed a pingpong ball-sized Bluetooth-enabled remote control device for Windows and Mac applications.
Support for smartphone applications is next.
The Ball-IT device is not a direct desktop mouse replacement. "Rather it is a multi-purpose device," said Vaananen. Indeed, he sees consumers using it for motion-controlled gaming, interacting with 3D applications, surfing Internet and menus on Home Theater Personal Computers, and as a logging pedometer. It contains newfangled silicon accelerometers, magnetometers and pressure sensors (MEMS devices).
More details than these about the product were not provided as Vaananen said he is under NDAs with first customers. But products from an OEM should be available in the first half of the year, if it goes according to plan.
Readers familiar with the mobilephone market will know Vaananen as the founder and CTO of MyOrigo, a company that hit trade press headlines three or four years ago with its pioneering smartphone designs that enabled zooming, panning, and scrolling without a mouse, and simpler interactivity in general (see image left).
But innovative UI features have seen slow uptake by the world’s cellphone manufacturing companies -- just ask Tao Group, Surfkitchen and their peers how long it takes to win a contract -- and MyOrigo was acquired by US-based F-Origin, where Vaananen stayed unitl September 2005 when he left and teamed up Juha Rytky (CEO) to create Ball-IT.
The firm's business model involves both licensing the technology and its software to original equipment manufacturers (OEM), as well as manufacturing in partnership with an EMS partner for OEM's that in turn will handle sales channel logistics.
The Finnish startup has come quite far in a short time but making it big is going to be a challenge. We've seen companies like Anoto, also from the Nordic region, come to market with new ways to interact with computer applications, but it has struggled to get growth.
But unlike Anoto, Ball-IT is going beyond the PC. And there European startups have a better chance. The reportedly fast market uptake of France’s Nabaztag (also known as the WiFi bunny) from Violet SA (See Neteco link below), as well as the growth of TomTom on the back of GPS navigation gadgets, and Bluetooth gadget innovators, such as Parrot SA, has us thinking this way.
For techie a:c readers, you can get a software development kit that includes a Smart Ball to work with sometime in the first quarter from Ball-IT.
Read - Nabaztag doit montrer qu'il y a une vie après le PC (neteco)
Posted at 10:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Ubiquisys And Cisco Rumor
Unstrung is citing unnamed sources that Cisco is mulling an investment in Ubiquisys, a UK-based developer of smaller cellular basestations for home and small businesses.
It is less than six months since the startup announced raising $12M round from a "triple A" European syndicate: Accel, Advent, and Atlas. But it is moving quickly judging from the steady newsflow. In the past few months it announced partnerships with the likes of Sony (for the design and manufacturing of the basestations), and Netopia, a soon-to-be Motorola-owned company (for product-enhancing software), along with a few others such deals that will make the gear easier to install and compatible with several telco standards.
It would make sense that it is raising more capital and getting it from strategic investors is clearly one way to go.
Read - Cisco Eyes Home Base (unstrung)
Read - Triple A First Round For Ubiquisys (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:20 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 23, 2006
Seed-Funded WiVOIP Startup To Seek Financing
Earlier this month Add Partners announced a seed investment in a Luxembourg-based wireless VoIP (WiVoIP) start-up, called Wireless Technology Partners. We followed up for a couple of reasons. It was Add Partners first very early stage investment for several years, and two, the announcement brought attention to WTP before it even had a website - if you wanted to know more you couldn't just link through.
So we asked Niko von Huetz, an investment director at UK-based Add Partners, why the early announcement? After telling us about the "rare and unique" opportunity to assemble a team of this quality with "perfect market timing", he explained why.
"By announcing the seed round, it is a way to signal the firm will be raising its first round of VC soon. The startup aims to raise €3M in VC early in the new year," he said.
The deal is also part of the firm's “warehousing program” for its next fund, and it signals that the fund, AddTwo, will be launched shortly.
von Huetz gave a bit of insight into how Add Partners works the early stage. "We tend to go in very early when adding new firms to the portfolio. The founder, David Parsons [an American living in Paris] is an IP [internet protocol] and wireless voice expert, but it is also his first time as CEO and you don't want to have a badly groomed venture when it comes to Series A round," said von Huetz.
Using Skype and other VOIP services on WiFi isn't as seamless, secure, and user-friendly as it could be. WTP hopes to change that with solutions for carriers, handset-makers, and service providers.(Pictured left: the Skype Netgear phone).
Just in case readers missed the press release, the company is developing VoIP solutions for handsets equipped to handle wireless LAN communications. The solutions, it claims, will solve some known integration and quality problems with IP telephony on mobile Wifi handsets, as well as considering security, and cost of implementation. The firm's business model is based on licensing its solutions.
von Huetz says that the WTP team has the directly relevant experience required and they're "the only team" developing this particular set of technologies for WiVOIP.
"The press announcement provides enough information to draw the attention of potential customers, including handset makers, network operators, and resellers," responded von Huetz. There is more information available but only under non-disclosure agreement, he added. The a:c euro doesn't do NDAs, so we'll just have to wait and see what WTP will deliver.
Read - Wireless Technology Partners Secures seed funding from Add Partners (press rel.)
Posted at 06:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 22, 2006
Open Source In Mobile - What You Need To Know
The a:c euro didn't make it to the Informa Open Source in Mobile conference in Amsterdam in early November but Andreas Constantinou of mobile industry consulting firm Vision Mobile did, so we asked him if he heard anything that might affect a:c euro's readers.
He put together a short report in reply that highlights recent open source developments and a quick analysis. Constantinou concludes there is a huge opportunity but one that comes with double-edged risk.
Read on below the jump.
Open Source in Mobile gathered over 100 industry attendees. Presentations were given by the who's who of execs active in open source for mobile phones: Panasonic's Yukio Yagi (General Manager), Vodafone's Phil Carter (Head of Terminal Platforms), Motorola's Christy Wyatt (Head of Ecosystem Dev), A la Mobile's Pauline Alker (CEO), Trolltech's Adam Lawson (PM, Qtopia), Nokia's Ari Jaaksi (Head of Open Source Software Operations), OSDL's Bill Weinberg, ARM's Philippe Robin (PM Linux) and Black Duck's Doug Levin.
The event's mystery speaker was Sean Moss-Pulz, the visionary father of FIC's OpenMoko, who chose to break the news on the open-source platform at the event.
Open source has the potential to disrupt conventional ways of doing business in mobile, by engaging external communities to reduce total cost of platform ownership, reduce time to market, and speed up innovation in creating new mobile phones, which is why is it currently a hot space for VC activity.
However, as any open source veteran will point out, using open source
- is not free,
- does not guarantee hordes of external developers contributing code to your product
- most often needs seed funding (most successful O/S projects have commercial backers)
- requires extra care in defining the business plan, and working your way around licensing issues.
The flurry of activity in open source is evident in the many recent announcements in the area:
- Nokia's Maemo project is continuing to grow and Ari Jaaksi announced the Sardine device which would follow the 770 Internet tablet, both based on Maemo.
- In July Motorola pledged that more than half of the manufacturer's mobile phones will use Linux within 18 to 24 months. (Image above is the Motorola Linux Model e680 and here a screenshot).
- Motorola has further open sourced their implementation of MIDP3, i.e. next-gen Java for phones. At the open source conference, Christy Wyatt also said that sales of Motorola's Ming have reached 1% of total phone sales in China, an impressive feat.
- Last week Sun announced details of how it is going to open source J2ME and J2SE implementations, marking a major twist in Sun's Java saga.
- Earlier in November Adobe announced it has open sourced ActionScript 3, a core part of Flash, which is now hosted by Mozilla and will find its place into future Firefox browsers.
- Handset manufacturer FIC announced OpenMoko, the first fully open source Linux phone software platform, that competes with Purple Labs (owned by ODM Vitelcom), MontaVista's MobiLinux, WindRiver, Trolltech's Qtopia and Applix's BTO service.
- In late October Access Linux Platform announced it is open sourcing its application framework, a critical part of the phone software stack.
- Linux tools vendor Open Plug announced it had secured a $15m Round B funding in early October
- A la Mobile was started in June by entrepreneur-in-residence Pauline Alker with $3.5m seed funding and is believed to be looking to secure another $10m to fulfil its promise of 'the Red Hat of mobile'.
- In October, private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital announced it had acquired a controlling stake in a privately held U.S. company Celunite , reportedly for $30 million. Celunite is a Sunnyvale, California-based provider of Linux-based open-source technology, which is still in stealth mode.
In this flurry of open source activity around mobile handsets, what are the opportunities for VCs?
Open source has the potential to be as disruptive for mobile handset software, as Google has been is for mobile operator 'closed garden' strategies. In other words, if you bank on the right player, the potential for returns are huge, as Linux and open-source software are garnering industry backing and market share.
However, the potential for failure in open source projects should not be understated. A la Mobile and Open Plug for example are very ambitious and high risk propositions. Investors and VCs looking at open source need to have both a very good understanding of handset technologies and the risks associated with open source licensing.
Read - VisionMobile (Andreas Constantinou blog)
Posted at 10:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 14, 2006
Renzoo Launches Voicemail, Email, Messaging Freemium Services
Getting email and other popular Internet applications onto cellphones is high on the agenda at handset manufacturers like Motorola, which just paid half a billion for Good Technology's push email tech, and Nokia, which acquired Intellisync, last year for similar reasons. It looks like the cellphone-makers have their eye on the service revenues that email messaging can bring them on top of selling the hardware.
A London-based startup, Renzoo, also has its eye on mobilephone messaging services but ones that are not yet being offered by the big names.
Renzoo is all about keeping up with what's in multiple email and voicemail accounts.
Renzoo was founded in London in 2005 and is a spinoff of a Croatian company called Alterbox, which develops messaging solutions for telco customers. According to Renzoo founder, main shareholder, and CEO, Denis Kotlar, Alterbox has more than 150,000 subscribers using its telco based messaging solutions.
That market know-how and experience, Koslar is applying to Renzoo, his third startup but first consumer-oriented venture.
Prior to founding Renzoo and Atlerbox, Kotlar founded Envox Group, a voice solutions developer for VOIP and the Web software developers, where he was CTO. Envox raised over $8 million in VC, including an investment from Intel Capital and has more then 90 employees, operating in Boston, Sausalito, London, Stockholm, and Zagreb, said Kotlar.
Renzoo supports email but is best suited to those that only want some of their email coming through to the handset - not power mobile emailers that cannot live without their Blackberry. It supports users with multiple email accounts and multiple voicemail accounts - putting fixed line, Skype, and mobile voicemail all in one place. The company says that users can also open attachments, such as PDF, audio, MSOffice, and video files on their phones.
We didn't have time to try it to see how easily it is to open, play, and store files once received.
Renzoo is based in the UK, where it is having its initial launch, while its software development division in Croatia.
The service is free to start with and comes with 200 credits (£2 worth) when users sign up. Its Premium package costs £6 per month, comes with 5GB of storage and 1000 credits, which is the equivalent of receiving 100 mobile alerts, it says.
The plan is to sell directly to end users, as well as through ISP’s, alternative telcos and system integrators. A WAP (wireless access protocol)-enabled phone is required to be able to use Renzoo, which is pretty standard nowadays and the advantage to that is that no client download to the phone is required.
Zagreb Is Located Inland From Croatia's Attractive Adriatic Coastline
(Image Sources: Croatialifeproperty.com
Read - Under The Radar Profile : Renzoo
Read - Renzoo Features
Read - Renzoo Launches (press rel.)
Posted at 01:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 08, 2006
Baracoda Raise €6.7M To Grow Consumer Bluetooth Biz
France’s Baracoda SA raised €6.7M from existing investors, according to Neteco. Its French backers are Seventure (formerly Spef Venture), Siparex, Crédit Agricole Private Equity, and iXcore SAF, a privately owned investment company. Based in Marly-Le-Roi, with offices in New York, Baracoda, makes Bluetooth modules for its own line of bar code scanners. 
The new capital, however, is to finance the growth of ComOne, a consumer oriented Bluetooth peripheral maker, it acquired in 2005.
Its business is a lot like Parrot SA, which was VC-backed and floated this year and in fact, Baracoda recently recruited one of its top execs to manage its North American biz units.
ComOne has hit a good vibe developing Bluetooth USB sticks and keyboards, but also things like a Bluetooth enabled streaming audio gear, which it sells through mobile network operators.
Founded in 2001 by two freshly minted PhDs, Baracoda emerged from an incubator at the l'Ecole Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.
Read - Baracoa leve 6.7M Supplementaires (neteco)
Posted at 04:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Ready For Hacking - Taiwan's FIC With Open Source Cellphone
Interesting news coming out of an Open Source for mobile conference in Amsterdam this week. FIC, a Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturer, says it will ship early next year a new Linux cellphone, one that is meant to be hacked.
The Linux-flavoured platform the FIC phone uses was developed as an open source project, dubbed OpenMoko.
A presentation by OpenMoko's project leader at the conference said that the software supports multiplexing, which means that you can take a call even if you are browsing the Internet. That combined with the open-ness is the basis of a good sales pitch and one that will likely find resonance with cellphone users looking for an alternative to carrying both a Blackberry and handy due to issues like that.
The FIC phone comes with push email syncing from Fonambol, an open source startup whose Italian founder shifted to the US.
Linux as an alternative OS for mobilephones has been talked about for a while, but so far a market leader has yet to emerge. European software company, Trolltech has been investing in developing that part of its business, since it went public, and several independant startups in the US are also active, adding their platforms to those from Symbian, Qualcomm, Motorola (TTP Com), Microsoft and the Java environment for cellphones, to name a few.
We were talking to Andreas Constantinou, an industry consultant at Vision Mobile, last week about this topic. Afterwards he sent along a report he published with ArcChart (sponsored by Trolltech) that analysed the market (He also has a good blog about mobile trends - see link below.)
Constantinou writes:
" We believe that 2006 marks a turning point in the history of Linux as a mobile phone platform, not only due to Motorola’s recent commitment, but also the wealth of products and support services from a growing commercial community. Longer term, we believe Linux-based platforms will prevail over many of today’s credible contestants, as will Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
Read - Andreas Constantinou blog
Read FIC to sell cheap, hacker-friendly Linux (Linux Devices)
Read - Italian Fonambol Founder On Five Things (a:c euro)
Read Collax moves to us (a:c euro)
Posted at 10:11 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 01, 2006
Ekahau's Location-Enabled Wireless Play Raises $16M
Finland's Ekahau has raised $16M to expand its wireless sensor network solutions business from strategic and VC investors. The company was founded in 2000, and has developed a range of software and hardware to support tracking and finding of items inside a WiFi network.
From what we can see, it has made some headway in the healthcare market. We figure it helps emergency room personnel answer the question: where did the morning crew leave the darned defibrillator?
Read - Ekahau Secures $16 Million in Additional Funding (press rel.)
Posted at 09:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobilephone Software Firm Picsel Nabs £25M
The UK's Picsel Technologies, a software company that develops a suite of products to create, publish, and display content on mobilephones, has just raised £25M from undisclosed investors, we learned today reading Library House' weekly free newsletter, which also said Picsel's sales are up to £13M now.
According to its website, Picsel secured first round funding in 2001 totalling $11m from SOFTBANK Europe Ventures and BancBoston Capital. It raised a second round a year later of $6m from a consortium of Japanese investors, including Yasuda Enterprise, CSK Ventures, Mizuho Bank and the Morito family.
More recently, the firms says, Picsel secured a large scale non-equity loan agreement with Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad (MDV), the finance arm of the Malaysian Government.
It was co-founded and is led today by Imran Khand in 1998 after he founded two other undisclosed ventures. Before that he was involved in economic development activities with the Scottish government.
Read LibraryHouse Newsletter Issue 33
Posted at 09:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 26, 2006
France's Medialive To Protect Content In Japan Mobile Deal
We've got our eye on Paris-based Medialive SA, a digital media copyright protection technology vendor. The startup impressed the a:c euro last year when it raised $4.2M from Reston, Virginia-based Nextel, a wireless operator, and a French seed stage fund, on the back of convincing Nextel of the value of its innovative content protection solution.
This kind of thing is happening more than it used with Euro startups, but it is still rare enough that we notice it.
Medialive's Founders Might Be Brainy But They Can Explain To The Rest Of Us How Their Tech Works
Founded in 2000, Medialive developed “heavily patented” copyright protection software that is cheaper and easier to implement than existing encryption-based technologies. What makes it stand out is that its “digital keys” are still slim enough to fit on the tiny chips that are used for security inside mobile phones (so-called SIM cards).
The company just announced that Primeworks, a Japanese mobile content platform provider has signed up to use its technology. There are a few competing solutuions for mobile networks out there and an agreement is not a guarantee of revenues, but the fact that it has a foot in the US market and one in Japan suggests that Medialive is getting somewhere in a global market.
Read - Medialive Signs Major Contract In Japan (press rel.)
Posted at 08:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 23, 2006
Tele2 Takes Stake In VC-Backed Spring Mobile
Tele2, an alternative telecoms operator active across Europe, has acquired 49% of Spring Mobil for €16M (SEK 150M) with an option to acquire the remaining shares in the first quarter of 2009.
Spring Mobil is an innovator in the mobile networking market. On the back of acquiring a GSM licence in Sweden, it launched a service providing businesses with their own dedicated digital cellular basestation. The "OnePhone" solution works with standard GSM/3G phones, in combination with a small GSM/3G network inside the customer’s office. Calls outside the office are served via an MVNO agreement with Tele2. To date, Spring Mobil has signed long term contracts with around 400 enterprises, the firms said.
Spring Mobil was founded by BrainHeart Capital in 2002 and is headquartered in Stockholm.
Read - WebWire® | TELE2 Acquires 49% Of The Shares In Spring Mobil
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October 19, 2006
Spodradio Raises $10M -Benchmark Joins BayTech
Spodradio's founder Mikko Linnamäki let us know that his startup has raised $10M in its second round of financing just ten months after closing the first round, bringing in new investor Benchmark's European fund. The deal wiil be announced today. Baytech its first round investor also came back for this one.
Stuttgart-based Spodradio has developed software and a platform that enables mobilephone users to listen to their favourite radio stations and view related content on their handsets.
Since its first round it has signed "hundreds" of German radio stations and is now set up to offer four kinds of radio content - traditional broadcast radio, podcasts by subscription, and two newfangled ones called radio on-demand, and personalized radio, according to the firm's CEO and founder.
The new investors were brought in to finance the expansion of the business beyond Germany. "We wanted a Trans Atlantic investor in this round," commented Linnamäki, reflecting a common sentiment among entrepreneurs that have taken VC money from Benchmark in the last year.
Linnamäki declined to give us revenue figures, but confirmed the startup is generating sales - and that he is finding demand among mobile network operators who want the service particularly because it gives them a revenue sharing agreement and one where they don't have to worry about managing the billing and delivery aspects.
Read - Spodradio = Digital Radio + Podshow + Swabian Dialect (a:c)
Posted at 07:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 17, 2006
PacketVideo Acquires Berlin Startup TwonkyVision
PacketVideo, a San Diego-based mobilephone software company, has acquired Berlin-based TwonkyVision, a developer of middleware for home entertainment networking. The US startup says it intends to continue to support TwonkyVision's products, as well as to add to the capacity its own product line to enable mobilephone and home entertainment electronics “convergence”.
There was no disclosure on the price paid.
TwonkyVision is a six year spinoff of the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany. Its software is traditionally used to enables things like file transfers between an Xbox and a Mac, or streaming music and video to a Sony PSP from a PC.
The Berlin office of TwonkyVision will become a base for PacketVideo in Germany. The US company also has a base in Southern France and recently opened an office in Finland.
We think that the employees pushed for this deal because they felt silly saying that they worked at a company called Twonky.
Read - PacketVideo Acquires TwonkyVision (press rel.)
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October 12, 2006
Paris' Actimagine Bought By Adobe
Actimagine has developed codecs for mobile video that are not tied to Mpeg or other standards. These solutions allow displaying movies, music clips, video ringtones, games, splash screens, and ads.
Actimagine has also patented a strong DRM solution that allows protecting any content when stored on a memory card. It targets the consumer electronics and telecom markets.
In July 2005, Actimagine raised 3M Euros from US-based GRP Partners.
Posted at 05:24 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 11, 2006
Lagardère Spins Out CellFish Media To VCs And Raises $50M
Cellfish Media -- A Lagardère company -- has raised $50M from Trio Capital, Telecom Media Fund (Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec) and an affiliate of Desjardins Venture Capital . The company's portfolio of mobile content runs the standard gamut of music, games, lifestyle, info-tainment, and community aps. It claims agreements with over 200 media, brands, says it did more than 200M transactions in 2005 and more than $116M in revenues in 2005. The new investors now own 30% of the company.
Posted at 06:15 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 08, 2006
OpenPlug's Risky Mobile Ambitions
We took a closer look at OpenPlug’s €15M second round of financing, a deal led by Munich-based Baytech. It is an interesting and risky deal, something that did not really come across in its funding press release, nor via its website.
OpenPlug is operating in the fiercely competitive mobilephone software market - a market that has seen more flops than high flyers. The initial progress looks good. It has grown in four years time from zero to 60 employees in France, Taiwan, and Romania on the back of a mere €3.6M in venture capital.
OpenPlug develops Linux-flavoured software that sits near the real time operating systems that run inside mass market phones.
Its claim is that it enables the makers of cellphones to add a basis for applications that users expect, but without the fussy tweaking and expensive development times that has been the norm in the past. It also enables configuring and adding new apps over the air.
But this strategy means it is playing a linear end game. Either it convinces handset manufacturers of high-volume featurephones, as well as low-cost phone, to adopt its platform, which will enable it to make hundreds of millions in royalty license fees, or it doesn’t. There is no in-between, in our opinion.
Towards that goal, OpenPlug has already won over at least one of the big names. The CEO declined to disclose the name so we couldn't independently confirm that point. But he says that phones running its software are to be shipping by early next year.
It also has strategic partnerships with Texas Instruments (which is the number one chipset supplier to cellphone makers) to pre-integrate its software on their chipsets, and a similar deal with NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductor.
But the French startup is not exactly operating in an uncontested market segment. Other similar platforms exist, such as BREW and AJAR, from Qualcomm and Motorola (through its TTPComm acquisition) respectively, as well as several other US and Japanese software vendors.
Making the whole thing more risky is that the number of handset manufacturers is shrinking and it is dominated by five manufacturers: Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, and BenqMobile. (See Gartner report below). They share almost 80 percent of the worldwide market for mobilephone in 2005. The other 80 vendors share the rest of the market.
With BenqMobile, the old Siemens mobilephone business, on the brink of bankruptcy, and some of the second and third tier handset manufacturers are reportedly not paying their bills with other software suppliers, its target market just got smaller.
OpenPlug has been led since founding by CEO and co-founder Eric Baissus, who along with a team of co-workers spun out of a Texas Instruments’ R&D lab on the Cote D’Azur - it's the TI research lab that develops TI's code for digital cellphones supporting modem comms and low-level handset management, as well as Java, games, Bluetooth, and UI applications.
Baissus is aware of the risks and seems confident of his firm's chances. He told us:
We operate in tough market, with a decreasing number of actors. The stronger will stay in place. We believe that they cannot keep a leadership role without relying on outside firms for innovations [for their product development]. Technology provided by external suppliers, like us, is going to be important for them. We offer more flexibility than our competitors and a faster time to market - once the handset manufacturers have certified our software. For every new model, the lead time gets shorter.
OpenPlug achieved the design-in win and chip partnerships without investing a lot in marketing and sales, so some of the new capital will be used for that. Some will be used to provide support to its customers that expect intensive local support as they want to go to production rapidly. And it also plans to develop some hooks into its software for application developers, a strategy that would give it an even bigger “upside”, say its backers.
Read - Gartner Says Top Six Vendors Drive Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to 21 Percent Growth in 2005 (gartner)
Read - http://www.open-plug.com/pdf/Open-Plug_Press_Release-USD15_million_series_B_funding.pdf (openplug PR)
Posted at 08:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 02, 2006
Dublin's Mobile Aps Co. Zamano To IPO on AIM
A listing by Ireland-based mobile application start-up Zamano is expected to take place in late October. Zamano had revenues of about €10M in 2005 from services including games, text message dating and premium rate texts. The firm's investors include Quinlan Private Capital, the investment house owned by financier Derek Quinlan.
Among Zamano's applications is a WAP publishing tool
Posted at 10:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 26, 2006
Why Rebtel Raised So Much VC
The short answer probably would be, because it could. But we asked Index Ventures, which invested alongside Benchmark Capital's European fund in Rebtel's $20M A round, why a company offering global mobile calls at local rates, a service that has already launched with a system that routes much of its cellular voice service over IP networks, needed such a large first round.
Rebtel's Founders Hjalmar Winbladh (l) and Jonas Lindroth (r)
Did the size mean that the VCs took a big majority stake? They are not saying.
Does it need a lot of capital to market the service? We could understand FON, another Index Ventures investment, needing to raise a double digit million first round, afterall it is subsidizing its Wifi routers at €15 a pop. But as far as we know, Rebtel doesn't have that kind of expense, beyond the cost of buying a bunch of phone numbers in each of the countries in which it's active.
So we asked Index's Danny Rimer what's up. He answered:
It's a globally operating company and we want to grow into multiple territories quickly. And we want the management team to have enough capital to focus on the opportunity, and not have to go out in six to twelve months to raise another round of financing.
Rimer also said that some of the capital would be used to develop value-added services that will make using Rebtel more attractive.
We've been eyeing Rebtel since Innovate Europe earlier this year when vpod.tv’s Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz got
Chris Shipley, the organizer of the event, on video saying that the hottest company this year was Rebtel.
We figure that Benchmark and Index are counting on Rebtel’s founders, Hjalmar Winbladh and Jonas Lindroth, having a greater risk-taking appetite with Rebtel than the norm.
The founders might be eager to develop a longer lasting success than with an earlier venture, Sendit. The two co-founded in 1994 the mobile messaging software firm and took it public. It was then acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 1999, which did not do much with it afterwards.
In the meantime, Windbladh was involved with StartupFactory, a Swedish early stage venture firm that was active between 2000 and 2003 that backed some interesting early stage companies (it was acquired by its cornerstone LP, Investor AB, in 2004).
Rebtel's service is going to be a boon to mobilephone users that travel or that have people they want to communicate with frequently located abroad and don't want to go the WiFi Voip route.
It's complicated compared to state of the art PC-to-PC calling but the high rates charged for mobile international calls will probably give users a lot of motivation to go through the contortions.
The only real hurdle we see to this enjoying rapid take up is that users have have to pay to use it up front. Part of Skype's popularity, for example, was because it was free and you could use it immediately without digging out the credit card or tapping the PayPal account.
There are now several well-funded startups poised to make cellphone use cheaper, with a few more in the pipeline - like Swiss startup Vipera, which is currently focusing on making data service cheaper, and it has not raised venture capital yet.
Read - Rebtel's Mobile Calls At Local Rates (alarm:clock)
Read - Rebtel Dials UP $20M (press release)
Posted at 12:04 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 25, 2006
Mobile Cohesion Grows With Mobile Value Added Service Boom
Mobile Cohesion, a Belfast-based developer of software used to manage partners of mobile network operators, has raised $4.8M in a second round of funding, ledby Enterprise Equiy and joined by existing investors Cross Atlantic Partners, Accel Partners and Viridian Growth Fund.
As mobile network operators add more multimedia content, more estoreric text messaging services, and value added features for customers, they have to manage all the suppliers of these new services, share the revenues with them, and that kind of thing. That is where Mobile Cohesion's software comes.
It's software is in demand by established telcos, but also MVNOs which are sprouting up all over the world. The new capital is to help it meet demand abroad.
Sigurdur Saevarsson, VP Product management, Richard McConnell, COO, Mobile Cohesion; Denis Murphy, Chairman, Mobile Cohesion; Brian Cummings, Investment Manager, Enterprise Equity (l to r)
Posted at 02:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Telepo Real Mobility With Nokia Phones
On the back of satisfying the toughest customer in the mobilephone market, namely Nokia, Telepo has raised €4M from Accel Partners in exchange for a minority stake.
The 3-year old startup's software converges fixed and wireless VOIP services for businesses all the way out to the smartphone, typically Symbian devices. It is profitable, had sales of €3M last year and expects to double that figure this year, according to co-founder and CEO Lars-Michaël Paqvalén, who was an early investor in Hotsip (acquired by Oracle) and its CFO for a while.
Before that, he was co-founder and CFO at Gambro AB and CEO of Hansa Business Solutions.
Companies like IBM host Telepo's software to sell as a service to businesses that want to add mobility to enterprise applications and to save on the costs of mobilephone use.
Nokia has also acquired licenses for Telepo's software, which enables some nice productivity and cost-saving features, such as over the air configuration, least cost routing, and seamless switching between WiFi, GSM, and fixed networks (users do not have to remember to change the phone settings to use a WiFi network, for example, the software does it for them automatically).
Posted at 07:30 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 21, 2006
Barcelona's Southwing Financed - Bluetooth Bonanza
Showing that not just France and the UK can create quick growing Bluetooth startups, Barcelona-based Southwing has raised €5M from funds managed by Riva Y Garcias, to finance expansion plans and for continued R&D. The investors sent us the news this morning.
Founded in 2000, Southwing makes Bluetooth headsets and hands-free kits for cars. Like Parrot SA in France, which makes the same category of Bluetooth product and recently floated, Southwing is also reporting strong growth. It had sales of €9.5M in 2005, a figure that is expected to double this year. Headquarters are in Barcelona, with offices in France, UK, Germany and USA and the company has 45 employees.
It has earlier investors, namely Nauta Capital and Debaeque Venture Capital. The new investor said it acquired a minority stake.
Posted at 10:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 14, 2006
Truphone's Cheese-y HQ And Its Wifi-VOIP Service Launch
Truphone, the British startup that offers VOIP software for WiFi enabled smartphones, launched in beta mode this week. We can't review it because we don't have a Nokia smartphone - we're either too cheap or too poor to buy one.
But we can write that it's hiring and that it might be an interesting place to work. For one thing it seems to have a dedicated early stage backer in the form of Alexander Straub of Straub Ventures, which definitely adds a bit of adrenaline to starting up the business. (More on that below.)
For another it offers good salaries (not sure if it also has stock options) and if you like cheese, its headquarters will appeal.
Truphone is (surely) the world's only tech start-up based on a working organic farm. Crockhamdale is a hand-made sheep's milk cheese, Wensleydale style. Delicious to eat, but quite tricky to find.
Truphone's HQ its located in Edenbridge, Kent in the South of England.
Image source: ecard hever hotel, edenbridge, kent
It has a brand manager job on offer. The requirements offer a clue about corporate culture. The manager should be "very new media savvy – you know your RSS from your elbow and can hold your own talking about blogs, Flickr, Digg et al; Smart and keen to learn/contribute; Marketing aware with two years experience" and there's a Product Test Manager job on offer that's paying about double what you'd get paid in Germany or south of France for the same title.
We wrote a post on Truphone a while ago and since then Straub informs us that of all the alpha-trial users, he's the one that has racked up the most minutes on his two Nokia smartphones.
The service, like others offering IP services on the phone, requires the user to download a free client and subsequently enables free phone calls to other Truphone users and to some fixed line numbers in the UK, US, Canada and a few other countries during the beta trial.
He also talks up Truphone at industry conferences and took the time to add to our first impression of Truphone.
This suggests to us that Straub is the kind of investor you'd want to have on board. There are not too many VCs in Europe that call themselves early stage investors who work like that. He's one of them.
Another is Mangrove Capital. Its partners, such as Mark Tluszcz who works closely with portfolio firm Allpeers, the company that recently lauched a P2P filesharing plugin for the Firefox browser, do it too. Just Google his name plus Allpeers and you'll see why we say that.
One other, who we see doing it is Barry Maloney of Benchmark who is racking up the air miles and talking up Bebo, the social networking site for teenies.
Read -Truphone Backer Touts Free Mobilephone Calls Over WiFi (alarm:clock euro)
Read - Barry Maloney On Bebo Business Models (e-consultancy newsletter)
Posted at 06:57 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 13, 2006
iLoop Acquires Danish Inaphone
San Jose, Calif-based iLoop Mobile has acquired Danish mobilephone marketing software company InAphone Group A/S. The size of the transaction was not disclosed. The two companies had been working closely for some time and already had an extensive product partnership in place.
Inaphone, based in Copenhagen, emerged as a result of a merger of SSG ApS and InAphone A/S. The former SSG founder and CEO is now head of European business for iLoop. Inaphone developed a platform that included a gateway, content management system (CMS), sales channel, and content library. We were unable to determine if either SSG or Inaphone had raised venture capital by the time we published today.
Read - iLoop Acquires (businesswire)
Posted at 06:20 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 10, 2006
eWave Enables MMOGs-For-Mobilephones - VCs Sign On
The High-Tech Gründerfonds, a €262M fund created by KfW bank, the government, Siemens, BASF and Deutsche Telekom, has invested €600K in eWave Interactive, an eight month old startup that sells enabling software for hosting massive multiplayer online games (MMOGS) on mobilephones.
The company is a spinoff of 10 year old Navus, a developer of specialized software. Both firms have same founder.
The new capital wil be used to hire staff to code new product features, and to establish itself in the market. It already has a deal with e-sports in Hamburg, which makes Flash-based browser games onto its mobilephone platform. Over the next year it will grow the business in its home market and prepare to enter the Asian market and expects to raise capital to make that move.
The startup's products include
-- eWave GameServer is a comprehensive platform for massively multiplayer mobile games using GPRS or UMTS.
-- eWave LicenceServer is a powerful tool for copyright protection of video and mobile games.
-- eWave Synapse is a next generation AI engine based on argumentation technology.
Read - Geschäftsideen im Wettbewerb (Uptech Network news)
Posted at 07:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 07, 2006
Triple A First Round For Ubiquisys
UbiquiSys, cellular communications hardware company, has raised a $12m Series A round from Accel Partners, Advent Ventures and Atlas Venture.
This deal comes almost a year after the Swindon-based company raised seed financing from Atlas and Advent.
We think it’s only coincidence and not a requirement for investment that the VC firm’s name begin with an “A”.
The Ubiquisys ZoneGate Box Is Targeted At Consumers With Cellphones And A Broadband Connection
UbiquiSys expects to have its boxes in market trials in 2007 and the new capital is meant to finance that effort.
For cellcos, and ultimately their subscribers, the company's products solve a problem with using 3G phones at home where costs of providing indoor cellular coverage have been prohibitive on the side of cellco, and the battery power consumption has turned off consumers (apparently it takes a lot of power to get signalling from 3G basestations).
What is more, it will enable VOIP services from cellcos.The idea is that cellcos will better be able to compete with the emerging WiFi and wireless VOIP innovations emerging on the market if they have such systems to sell.
It sounds like a good idea since 3G is being deployed in many large sized markets and cellcos need something to fight off the growing number of startups in the Wifi/VOIP area.
There is another startup we've covered that has similar gear, 4G Systems over in Germany, which was founded back in 2002 and has some early stage financing behind it too, although its core features concentrate more on cellular data services, as we understand it.
Posted at 02:04 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 05, 2006
Miyowa More Mobile Instant Messaging
Miyowa, a 3-year old French provider of mobile messaging services, has raised €3M from Techfund and Sophia Europlab. Update: TechCrunch wrote in to say that they broke the news yesterday about Miyowa's funding, before the firm issued its communique, which we received this morning. See link to TechCrunch's scoop below.
Miyowa runs mobile instant messaging services for the likes of MSN Live Messenger in France, Skyrock (a French radio station with a large blogging community), and Silicon Valley-based mobile games developer, Digital Chocolate. It also supports Hotmail, the MSN email service, on the mobilephone. Its services are a key part of the business model of France's new MVNO operator CGBC, which runs the TEN brand, and is backed by AXA Private Equity.
Miyowa's plan is to use the capital to develop better mobile "community" services.
This one looks a lot like Mangrove-backed Nimbuzz. Although positioned differently, Miyowa offers pretty much the same things, except it's doing it as a white label service. Another potential competitor would be Swiss startup Vipera, backed by business angels, but Vipera is not as far into commercialization as either of these two.
Rodrigo has a video clip of an interview he did with Miyowa's founder. See link below.
Read - La société française Miyowa lève 3 millions d’euros (TechCrunch Francaise)
Read - Pascal Lorne (Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz blog)
Read - IM mobile : le français Miyowa lève 3 millions d'euros (NetEconomie )
Posted at 02:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 04, 2006
FON Clone Tomizone Launches With Kiwi Investors
Tomizone has just launched a FON-like service in New Zealand with plans to launch in other countries. Like FON, which is based in Spain and backed by Sequoia, Google, and Index Ventures, Tomizone developed software that is copied onto a personal WiFi router, which in turn enables users to share their broadband internet connection with Tomizone subscribers.
Its billing technology enables sharing of revenues betwen the company and the people who create the network.
According to press reports, it has raised some venture financing from a fund called K One W One, headed up by a local entrepreneur-turned-VC, Stephen Tindall who founded The Warehouse Group, a retailing chain that is publicly traded in New Zealand.
His fund is apparently acquiring about 25 perceont of the alternative WiFi network operator for an undisclosed amount.
K One W One (K1W1) has stakes in several emerging companies, including Phitek, Neuren Pharmaceuticals, Deep Video Imaging and Esphion.
Tomizone was founded by Steve Simms, former general manager of Reach Wireless, software expert Max Lock and former Cadmus Technology director Phillip Joe, according to Stuff.
Read -Tindall's high-tech hot tip (stuff)
Read Tomizone (Wikipedia)
Posted at 10:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 21, 2006
Mangrove Backs Nimbuzz: Free Mobilephone Instant Messaging Service
Nimbuzz, a Netherlands-based mobile service provider, which launched in Beta today, is offering free instant messaging to mobilephone users. The a:c euro interviewed Evert Japp Lugt, CEO and co-founder.
The company behind the service is Buzzaa Media Group, and its backer is Mangrove Capital Partners, now famous for having backed Skype in its early stage.
Jaap Lugt told us about how he met last year with the Mangrove team to discuss the business concept after developing a prototype with his own capital ( from the sale of a previous venture).
The plan was not to raise VC money, but he decided to do it, he said, after he got the feeling that he was "not the smartest person sitting at the table" . "It's the first time I've seen smart money [in the Benelux region]," he said. 
The amount Nimbuzz raised is not disclosed but Jaap Lugt said it was "significant". The deal went through about 8 months ago.
Nimbuzz enables registered users that have installed its Javaphone client to have free messaging. It's based on the Jabber IM platform and offers open access to MSN Messenger, GTalk, and Nimbuzz contacts. The plan is to make it available for Symbian smartphones soon.
Communications are over IP and users access the Internet via the network operators' gateway. We said the service is free from Nimbuzz but the user will be paying some kind of monthly fee to his service provider. Our operator, for example, includes data traffic up to 2MB per month at no extra charge to our monthly package.
We tried both the messaging and the voice call application and can report that it works. Helpful features, such as tones to indicate incoming messages, and being able to ring up a contact (Buzz feature) to notify that you want to chat, shows that they've thought about how people actually use their phones. Voice quality was as good as Skype.
Nimbuzz plans to offer premium service to its users, including Nimbuzz to mobilephone and fixed line voice calls, conference calls, voice messaging, and related services.
This is not Jaap Lugt's first venture. He also founded @media, which developed a Palm Pilot data comms application for the pharma market, which he sold to NOB Mobile in 2000. After leaving NOB Mobile he's also been an active angel investor. One of the conditions of Mangrove's investment was that he agree to lead the company, which employs 10 in Amsterdam.
Posted at 06:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 31, 2006
Mobile Music Download Startup Targetize Says Tech Validated, Wants To Raise More Money
In its latest press release, Targetize, based in Herzelia, Israel, reports its first big European client for its Anysong application, namely Universal Mobile Music's service which now runs on KPN's Dutch mobile network.
Targetize also said its looking for $5M in a new round of financing at a “higher valuation” than last time from private investors and VCs.
Read - Music Industry Giant Select Targetize Mobile Search and Discovery Solution (prnewswire)
Posted at 07:01 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 17, 2006
Mirics Handles Alphabet Soup Of Digital Broadcast
We posted a while ago about some research into the plethora of standards emerging for broadcasting content to mobilephones and portable media device and how startups that made the wrong choice could be at risk. In the meantime, startup chip company Mirics has turned the standards battle into an opportunity, developing a smart radio frequency chip that can receive several competing protocols, such as DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T, DAB-IP, MediaFlo, DAB, DRM and even AM/FM, it claims.
It just raised a first round of financing from Pond Ventures of an undisclosed amount. It was also seed funded by Pond.
An insight into what its VC has been doing to help the firm grow was in the press release.
--- many of the key hires Mirics made were introduced by Pond.
--- Pond introduced the firm to a "significant" number of customers and partners in the US, Europe
--- spent a "lot of quality time" with us helping us drive the strategy forward.
This is what all early stage VCs should be doing. If they're not, then all the startup gets in exchange for its equity is expensive money.
Read - Pond Ventures announces its first major investment in the mobile broadcast market (Press Release)
Read - Standards Battle For Mobile TV Puts Startups In The Crossfire (a:c euro)
Posted at 03:17 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 12, 2006
Apple Muscles In On Polar's Bodytronics Sports Niche
Its US-based Apple and Nike versus Finland-based Polar and Adidas. It's a battle of the brands. It US versus Europe. Actually it is just a new line of pedometer sensors with wireless connectivity.
But we're posting about these new consumer electronics products because we are thinking that the competition might just create market demand for some of the newfangled wireless sensor network devices and systems in the works at European startups targeting personal area network applications.
The iPod is at the center of the Nike/Apple sports play.
Apple has introduced a pedometer plug-in for the iPod, which brings it into competition with Finland's Polar, a company that has long been able to dominate the techie sports market or the bodytronics market, particular in the pulse monitor category. Pedometers are a fairly recent addition at Polar.
At Polar it is the watch-like computer at the center. It has named its pedometer sensor the "foot pod" which is also attached to the runner’s shoe.
For those that like a high dose of tech with their sports.
Read - The Nike+ iPod Partnering Strategy: Develop Unique Lifestyle Relationships
Read- Tune Your Run (apple PR)
Posted at 07:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 07, 2006
Mobitween Taps Angels, Has New Biz Model For Flash Games
Mobitween, a developer of Flash games for mobile devices has raised a first round of financing from private investors, "all mobile entertainment industry veterans", according to CEO and founder Philippe Chassany. He told us that he will use the proceeds, under €1M, to accelerate its international development mainly within Europe and North America. If all goes well, a round of venture capital will be raised to enter the US market within the year.
Founded in 2004, Mobitween has developed a platform that has enabled it to churn out over 100 simple Flash (from Adobe) games.
Chassany is early to market with his Flash games as they run only on the higher end (more powerful) smartphones, but several sales agreements with mobile operators suggests there is at least some early market demand.
One thing Chassany mentioned is his plan to try out an innovative business model for games sales. Typically, games developers get squeezed pretty tightly in the agreements with mobile network operators.
He is naturally not telling us what the biz model is, but if he has one that works then it could enable a winner here.
Read- Mobitween Funding (press release)
Posted at 12:13 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Italian Founder's Five Point Plan For Open Source Success
People keep asking Fabrizio Capobianco, an Italian serial entrepreneur who now heads up Funambol, a hot open source company that delivers Blackberry-beating software for mobilephones, the wrong question.
They ask how he created a profitable open source firm and achieved 500,000 downloads, which leaves him no choice but to answer that he was "lucky".
What they should be asking is : what are the five things you need to consider if you had to start up an open source company from scratch again? He provides the answer in his blog.
Read - How do you create a successful open source company? (funambol blog)
Posted at 11:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 06, 2006
Parrot Gives Europe Another Bluetooth IPO Winner
We're a couple of days late in reporting this but it's worth noting that French Bluetooth gearmaker, Parrot, successfully listed on the Euronext last week. The venture backed firm now has a market cap of €236M.
Parrot's founder and CEO, Henry Seydoux, is now a multi-millionaire, at least on paper, as he owns a good 35 percent of the company's shares, while the VCs together have about 17 percent.
This makes a second successful venture-backed IPO in the Bluetooth wireless sector for Europe. The first biggie was Cambridge Silicon Radio, which now has a market cap of £1.54B.
Read- Parrot to IPO (a:c euro)
Posted at 12:01 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 28, 2006
Austrian RFID Firm Raising $15M
Austria's Identec Solutions, which makes RFID-based tracking and tracing solutions, is raising another $15M in a deal led by RFID Invest AG of Lichtenstein. It is to use the capital for investing in R&D efforts in the area of system development, standardization, and global markets.
It also wants to invest in new applications for its long range RFID gear, such as the one undertaken with Boeing and FedEx, which it says involved equipping MD-10 freight aircraft with active RFID tags to track the longevity and manage parts inventories. Until now, Identec has mainly been involved in vehicle tracking and container tracking projects.
Read - RFID Provider IDENTEC SOLUTIONS Secures Financing Package (press release)
Posted at 03:04 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 21, 2006
WiFi Bunny Maker Taps Banexi Ventures
Violet, the company behind the Wifi bunny known as Nabaztag, has raised an undisclosed amount of VC from Banexi Ventures. The Nabaztag is a bit of a phenomenon, where supply has not been able to meet demand, which is one reason the firm needed VC.
It Has Spawned a Community Of Owners That Write About And Make Videos Of Their Bunny In Action
How the company describes the smart bunny:
Nabaztag means “rabbit” in Armenian. Violet’s Nabaztag is an object connected to the Internet via WIFI,
which reacts with sound, movement and colors to informations exchanged on the Web...[It receives and relays] market updates, weather forecast, traffic reports, email alerts and reading of emails (Nabaztag offers text-to-speech function), reading of RSS feeds from any online site, alarm-clock, broadcasting etc.
Read- Thanks to Banexi Ventures Partners, Nabaztag is ready to conquer the world !(press release)
Read - What It Takes To Sell WiFi: Bunnies and Social Routers (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Zyb Gets Storegate's Vibe
Last week we wrote about Storegate. This week Zyb is on the radar. Actually it's in Under The Radar.
Both companies are out of Scandinavia and both want you to backup your mobilephone data on their servers. Storegate charges a minimum of £1.49/month, while Zyb is free.
As a company, Storegate has a wider range of storage services available and a white label online storage business model, in addition to cellphone backups.
Zyb has just the one service and it is free but it has Morten Lund (of Skype early investor fame) as a co-founder. [Update: it has free backup and file sharing services and a premium service for syncing with Outlook, iPods, and MSN] It's main strategic investor is Excitor, which develops secure mobile messaging software.
Read: Cell phone backup gets sexy (Under The Radar)
Posted at 08:50 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 20, 2006
Wifi Telco Founder Looks To Raise VC For Expansion
Ben Van Dongen, a 42 year old Dutch entrepreneur, just might be running the leanest alternative telco in Europe.
He says his two year old company is already profitable, employs just 3 people, and has more than 3,500 broadband subscribers in Amsterdam. Its second city network is being built in Barcelona using the free cash flow from the Dutch business. 
The soon to be launched iZingo brand (the company is called Hotspot Holding based in Amsterdam) is positioned as a wireless broadband Internet access provider, targeting the consumer and small business market.
It is not a hotspot service provider business model, points out the founder, it's a telco business model with juiced up WiFi as the carrier.
Pictured here with members of his team: Gert Bos (l) and Carl Harper (r), Van Dongen (m) is poised to take a piece of the growing broadband Internet access market, enabling things like wireless VOIP, wherever he decides to deploy one of his WiFi networks.
Having proven that the business model works, Van Dongen is looking to grow internationally. He will be raising venture capital to do so.
Here are his thoughts on the competition that we jotted down in a recent interview.
What about Wimax - isn't this the market that Wimax operators want to target?
"Forget Wimax, it's not going to be a mass market application until 2012 -- reasons: there are three Wimax frequencies and no end user devices yet.) Compare that to Wifi, which has one standard worldwide and today 600 million enduser devices," said Van Dongen.
This sounds like a challenging of the way that FON and France's Ozone, are attacking the WiFi telco model?
"It's better than FON, because the subscriber does not need a fixed broadband connection to the Internet in addition to a WiFi card.
The entrepreneurs said: "You buy broadband Internet for less then DSL and you can use it anywhere you want (at home, in your ofice, at hotspots or outside)."
What about muni wifi?
"It is different than muni-wifi business - [iZingo] operates without any government or state subsidies. "
The a:c notes that a robust architecture has been enabled that can support a range of broadband and voice services built using wireless mesh technology from a hot Dutch startup called Hopling Technologies.
This is 42 year old Van Dongen's third WiFi startup. He also founded Picopoint Technologies in 2002, a supplier of software to manage subscribers, billing, and management of WiFi networks and roaming onto WiFi networks and Wjoy in 2004, a traditional hotspot operator, both still in business.
Posted at 11:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 19, 2006
Nanoradio Ramps Up Tiny WiFi Chips
On the back of design in wins with undisclosed "tier 1" manufacturers, Sweden's Nanoradio, specialized in wireless LAN chips, is ramping up.
Nanoradio was founded to target the emerging market for low power wireless chips, increasingly in demand by makers of mobilephones, wireless headsets, MP3 players and digital cameras.
Such chips have to be super low in power consumption so batteries don't run down too quickly. And it appears that Nanoradio's two chip solution fits the bill.
The financing for the ramp up to volume production has just been announced with an $11.5M Series B internal round. The venture-backers hold a majority stake in the two year old company founded by Pär Bergsten (this is his second venture after a career at Ericsson).
Read- Nanoradio Completes (press release)
Posted at 09:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 14, 2006
IPO Planned For Bluetooth Gearmaker Parrot
Parrot, a French developer of Bluetooth mobilephone accessories, announced it has been approved for an IPO on the Eurolist (from Euronext) IPO.
The venture-backed company is expected to raise between €91M and €103M. Its backers include Sofinnova Partners, Spef Venture, EPF Partner, SGAM Alternative Investments, and CIC Capital Prive.
These have been patient investors. The firm raised its first round of VC in 1995. It also still has its founder, Henri Seydoux, as CEO.
Its achieving quick growth with annual sales in 2005 of €80.6M up from €9.2M in 2004. It has a 9.5 percent margin.
Read- Entretien avec Henri Seydoux (boursier.com)
Posted at 05:06 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 13, 2006
Give Me My Location Now, Right Now
The a:c euro doesn't spend a lot of time in Thai back alleys (and we still have a penchant for maps printed on paper), so we're asking: are there a lot of tardy but impatient executives that spend time in Bangkok's narrow biways (or other dense urban environments) that need to know their location with a high-degree of immediacy?
The question came to mind after reading the latest white paper from Swiss navigation module-maker u-blox, which has developed an "assisted GPS" solution for cellphones and navigation devices meant to establish the users location more quickly and with more reliability than in the past.
Here's the intro to the pitch:
You're lost in a narrow street in Bangkok, trying to decipher street signs in Thai characters. You need to get back to your hotel, grab your bags and head to the airport fast or you'll miss your flight. You try using the personal navigator on your PDA but the regular GPS receiver inside cannot establish a position because signal conditions are bad due to high-rise buildings all around you. You know it normally takes your GPS receiver at least 30 seconds to pinpoint your location....you simply can't afford to wait.
Read -Assisted GPS: Instant positioning anytime and under any signal conditions (u-blox)
Posted at 07:29 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 08, 2006
Fangtek Raises VC For New Audio Chip Work
Fangtek. Ltd, a developer of MIDI and MP3 audio chips, has raised $12M in a Series C round. The Shanghai-based company will use the capital to invest in the development and production of new audio processors based on emerging standards, such as MP4 and TV-out, for the mobile device markets.
The financing was led by Qiming Venture Partners, as well as international VCs. DFJ ePlanet Ventures, IDG Technology Venture Investment, New Frontier LG Venture Fund and Kibo Technology Advancing Capital.
Read - Fangtek Successfully Concludes Financing Round of US$12 Million
Posted at 03:21 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 05, 2006
Russo-German Wireless Startup Bought By Australians
Publically-traded Jumbuck from Australia is buying Germany's Wap3. Wap3’s majority shareholder was Russia's Red Pyramid, which powers the game portion of Wap3's offering. Wap3 makes chat and games for mobile phones. The company recently signed a deal with TMobile for corporate users.
iMode for Avis - Made Possible By Wap3
Posted at 11:12 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 02, 2006
Float Raises €10M For Mobile Marketer YOC
YOC's share price climbed slightly on its first day of trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Its IPO share price gave it a €33.3M valuation and €10M to invest in international expansion, including opening an office in Poland and plans for small acquisitions.
The largest shareholder in the company is now founder and CEO Dirk Kraus with 25%. He has an 18 month lock up. The company, which develops advertising campaigns and content for mobilephones, employs 53 and had sales of €5.3M in its last annual figures.
Read - Börsendebüt von YOC AG geglückt
Posted at 03:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 01, 2006
YOC Mobile Marketing Startup To Float
Berlin-based YOC, a mobilephone marketing startup, is hoping to raise some fresh capital next week on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange's to fund growth.
The six year old firm's bookbuilding range gives it an implied valuation of up to €36M and the stock will be listed on the Entry Standard exchange (lightly regulated).
YOC (your opinion counts) employs 50 and achieved a positive EBIT for the first time in 2004. It has annual sales of €5.3M and claims it's on a 50 percent a year growth rate for both sales and profit.
Its product line is similar to those of rival startups Flytxt's and TXT4's and includes text messaging-based advertising solutions and some mobile content (ringtones, casual games etc).
The startup's lead bank on the IPO is Sal. Oppenheim.
Read - Neuemissionen: YOC (finanzen.net)
Posted at 06:45 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 24, 2006
The Jag Mobilephone
After panning Siemens' vision-in- pink effort to design a phone for women, ARCchart, a wireless market research and consulting firm, commissioned Ocean Observations to design fashion phones based on the brands of Diesel, popular clothing line, and Jaguar, the lux automobile brand.
The project was not sanctioned by either of the two companies, so Ocean derived design platforms for GUI and industrial design from their own research.
They say it should "only be seen as a study" but it shows the way that some people believe phones are going.
This might get people to buy new phones, but we're not so sure it will make them use the services more. There needs to be some serious improvements on phone configuration for Internet access, not to mention more thought into pricing plans.
We think that the new breed of virtual mobile network operators (MVNOs) emerging here and elsewhere will be doing some disruptive things. The alarm:clock euro has been contacted by a few of the founders of such startups and we will be profiling these agents of disruption in the coming weeks.
Read - Pink is the new grey
Read - Ocean Observations: our work
Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2006
Ask Us Any Question As Long As You're In The UK
A UK mobilephone service startup says : Ask us Anything...
82ASK gamely offers to answer anything, except something illegal or offensive. Some examples:
Where can I buy a pink silk tie in Leeds?
In its interim results what was mmo2’s half year revenue and profit?
The service, only available in the UK at the moment, replies to users by text mesage. The answer costs £1.
Re5ult is the company behind 82ASK, and was founded by Sarah and Thomas Roberts, two former investment bankers. It is angel and founder backed. Business must be good because the company is hiring and has a few jobs on offer for what it calls "Textperts", people that sort through the questions sent in and answer them in a concise way, only 160 characters to work with, we note.
Posted at 03:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Intel Capital: Wimax Telco Tycoon
If Wimax takes off the way that Intel is hoping, it won't just be a chipmaker anymore, it'll be a shareholder in a number of growing alternative telecommunications companies, practically a telco tycoon via the efforts of its corporate venture capital arm, Intel Capital.
We're saying that becuase Intel Capital has just announced backing two more municipal telecoms operators that have Wimax ambitions.
Both Orascom Telecom WiMAX Limited, a joint venture with Orascom Telecom of Egypt, and Worldmax, a joint venture with Enertel Holding of the Netherlands, will be getting some capital and tech know-how from the chip giant.
The deals are conditional on some undisclosed approvals and criteria.
These two follow several others in the UK and in Germany earlier this year (follow links below).
Intel's hoping that Wimax is going to be deployed all the way from the backhaul to the end user device.
Its kickstarting the market for Wimax chips has the side effect that several startups, such as US-based Aperto, an access network systems provider, along with UK-based PicoChip (Pond Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, among others), a wireless chipmaker, and Ubiquisys (backed by Atlas Venture), a wireless network access box-maker, may feel market demand earlier than they could have normally expected.
Read - Intel Capital Extends WiMAX Investments Worldwide
Read -Intel backs second Wimax (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 07:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2006
Streaming Map Tech From Sweden
When someone steals your car or your boat, this startup's technology can show where your gear has gone.
Easygard (shown here) is one product that is based on a new mapping engine developed by Swedish startup, Idevio.
It claims a greater than 10 times improvement on the compression and publishing of digital maps. In fact, it says it reduces the size of topology databases by 90 percent.
Since Scandinavia has a few freshly capitalized VCs, we're wondering why this startup has escaped their purview.
Read - RaveGeo Powers Easygard
Posted at 03:27 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 21, 2006
Difficult Times For VC-backed Esmertec
Mobilephone software developer, Esmertec, is now valued at SFr 79M after its share price fell by over 50 percent on Friday on the SWX Swiss Exchange. When it floated last September, one of the first venture-backed IPOs here since the bubble burst, the market valued it at SFr 288M.
The stock was positioned as a high growth venture, so when it issued a press release on Thursday that said that growth was not on track, the market reacted.
Check back. We're looking into the latest turn of events at the acquisitive seven-year old mobilephone software developer.
Posted at 07:27 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 19, 2006
What It Takes To Sell WiFi: Bunnies and Social Routers
We've been watching vpod.tv's coverage of Innovate Europe and this little WiFi guy was the buzz of the show.
It's the heart of a social networking service called Nabaztag, from French startup Violet,
which was founded by this straightalking guy, Rafi Haladjian,
who is also the founder of this Wifi telco,
which competes with this Wifi telco,
which doesn't have a bunny, but does have one of these.
It's Friday and we didn't have the bandwidth to find out what Fon means by "social router" (the WiFi router above), so if any Foneros read this, do tell.
Posted at 11:47 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 18, 2006
Ring2 Will Be Ringing Up VCs For Blackberry Conf Calls
Ring2,which offers audioconferencing services and software to manage calls, is going to be seeking funding this year to support "anticipated growth", according to a report in Computer Business.
The UK startup's software enables the initiation, muting, device switching, invitations, and general management of conference calls from a Blackberry device or a PC. It is integrated into its audioconferencing call service, which charges about 25 cents a minute for conf calls.
Shot from slick animated demo which offers a quick understanding of Blackberry app features
Ring2 was founded in 2003, raised an undisclosed first round of venture capital and seed funding from angel investors. It is London-based with an office in San Francisco.
Can innovation on the front end be enough to attract new customers to the Ring2 audioconferencing service? Is it a big enough market opportunity for VCs? We are not sure, but we'll keep our eye on Ring2.
Read- Ring2 Launch Conference Calling For Blackberry (Computer Business Review)
View - Ring2 Demo
Posted at 03:47 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 17, 2006
ClicMobile's MoSoSo Demo
Vpod.tv has a good video interview with Alex Kummerman, the founder of ClicMobile, based in Paris and Geneva.
Here's a startup that has managed to combine location based services and social networking and actually demonstrate it working in the short video interview. No slideware here.
It's a cellphone application that works on all phones, says Kummerman. It enables users to find folks in their contacts list that are in the vicinity, as well as friends of friends. Since it's using the cell network for the positioning part, it works in a wider radius than some of the other similar mobilephone apps we've seen in this category. Nice interface too.
Biz model is revenue sharing of text messages and ads. Kummerman's blog gives this type of app a new category. It is called MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software), doncha know.
Posted at 06:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 08, 2006
Agillic's Cellco Micro Marketing Software
Agillic, a Danish software company has raised about €5M from Amadeus in the UK and Vaeketsfonden, along with private investors, according to Unquote News.
The startup's software is targeted at mobile network operators and MVNO for use by their subscribers and customer relationship management teams. It's a category called Selfcare and Customer LifeCycle Management.
The idea is for the mobile operator to identify market segments, even micro markest segments, and automate customer self-service.
The company was founded in 1999 under the name Wavetech and switched to the Agillic name in 2005 in anticipation of global expansion. Lots of jobs on offer as the firm expects to double in size this year.
Read -Agillic Secures
Posted at 09:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Cameraphone Zoom Contest
Over at the a:c, cameraphone zoom lens startup, Rhevision, gets coverage for its funding news. That deal makes three such ventures to attract VC in recent weeks. All three are racing to deliver zoom lens technology to cameraphone manufactures.
The other two to receive financing in the past few months are out of Europe, namely Varioptic and Eyesquad. Each has a similar size and form factor, but very different technical features and underlying technologies are being used.
(Image Source:Samsung)
The race is on.
Read - Do cellphones need zoom (alarm:clock)
Read - Varioptic funding
Read - Eyesquad funding
Posted at 05:59 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 03, 2006
Connecting The Dots On Marco Börries Connected Life
We were wondering whatever happened to Marco Börries, the young German entrepreneur that sold his office software company, StarDivision to Sun Microsystems back in 1999.
He was a bit of a legend in our part of Europe for his vision of creating a complete office suite meant to compete head on with Microsoft, and for using what was in 1999 a novel business model for productivity software applications, it was free for personal use. (The reason we were thinking along this line is an interview we did with the founders of Sproutit in Prague, whose business software and vision reminded us a little of Boerries'.)
Turns out, he's at Yahoo, heading its Connected Life division (mobile, TV and video business) as we found out from an archived post on MocoNews.
We knew he had raised venture capital and formed Verdisoft in 2001, and had operations in Hamburg and Silicon Valley, but the a:c euro missed Yahoo acquiring it back in early 2005.
MocoNews excerpt:
At 16, he dropped out of high school in Germany to establish StarOffice, the Microsoft office suite alternative; he sold that company to Sun Microsystems in 1999, joining Sun where he continued open desktop efforts Solaris and evangelized open source through GNOME.In 2001, he founded VerdiSoft to enable his vision of the connected life between PC, TV and cell phone. Yahoo bought VerdiSoft last February, bringing Boerries in as a top executive; the results started to unfold publicly at CES. Boerries’ responsibilities: mobile, digital home, PC client, broadband relationships — “pretty much everything beyond the browser.”
There are not too many European entrepreneurs that have sold not one but two startups to Silicon Valley giants, so we're asking how long will it be until an enterprising VC convinces him to leave when his contract is up and start another venture, maybe one that will make it to IPO this time.
Read - CES 2006: Interview: Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo
Posted at 09:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 26, 2006
Cameraphone Lens Innovator Brings In Third Round
France's Iris Capital has led a €16.4 million ($20M) third round for Lyon-based Varioptic, a developer and manufacturer of a new kind of lens for cameras and cameraphones.
Align image right with flowing text
The firm has been executing on its milestones, according to is steady flow of press release, and this round confirms that. It brings the total amount raised to about €28M, plus an undisclosed amount from Japan's NIFVentures. Its seed stage investor is Paris-based Sofinnova Partners
This is the second cameraphone lens deal this month. (See link to Eyesquad funding below.)
Founded in 2003, Varioptic has developed a liquid lens technology that reduces the number of moving parts, doing all the things that conventional lenses can do but consuming less power, being more robust, and lighter. Target market is cameraphones, but the tech can be used in other types of devices too, says the firm.
Varioptic has yet to sign a volume design-in win but claims more than 100 pilot projects with lens module manufacturers and mobilephone-makers.
The last time we talked to Varioptic, the firm was telling us about its sound IP and patent portfolio. That is because there had been some reports in the trade press about a dispute with Philips, which also has a lens with similar technology. We're trying to find out if it has been resolved.
Read - Varioptic Secures (press release)
Read - Eyesquad funding (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:12 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 25, 2006
3i and iSource Back Screen Tonic's Mobile Internet Ads Play
Screen Tonic, a five year old French developer of software and services that enable mobilephone advertising, has just raised €5.5M. Its products are targeted at mobile network operators that run mobile portals with ads such as sponsored links, banners and video ads on their mobile website. So far it has been quite successful in the French market. The new capital will be used to go internatioanal.
The 3i partner on the deal thinks that it is just a batter of time before this becomes a lucrative ad channel.
We like the way ScreenTonic has partnered with the major mobile carriers in France offering them the dual opportunity to raise additional revenues and increase mobile internet traffic. We anticipate Mobile Internet Advertising accounting for a significant portion of mobile data business in the future. This is just the beginning for the industry.
Posted at 12:23 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 24, 2006
Startup's Cardboard Antenna Boosts WiFi
Here's something for all those Fon Foneros and muni-WiFi networkers out there: a small flat antenna, basically a piece of coated cardboard, that claims to double the range of WLANs. It's from a UK company called Tritium.
The Flatenna has been designed by engineers and tested by community wireless broadband users. The Flatenna was created by the need to connect over larger distances for very low cost. The Flatenna is styled to look good in your living room, office or on your window ledge.... The Flatenna itself is legal and does not contravene EU regulations, however the user must ensure that output from the system as a whole is within local limits. It's highly effective at extending the range of wireless networks, cutting down interference and controlling the reception area.Link - Flatenna Products (Tritium)
Posted at 07:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
VC-Backed Oplayo Acquired By Slice Wireless
Here's a trans-border deal if ever there was one: Australian Slice Wireless joined up with Prague-based U-Turn Media to acquire the Finnish mobile content platform provider Oplayo. There was no dislcosure on price paid.
U-Turn was founded in 2001 and is specialized in video delivery to mobilephones. Slice provides a publishing and payment platform for content providers targeting wireless devices.
The last time a:c euro talked Oplayo, it was reporting a million downloads of video files to mobilephones per month (last September). Shares in the startup were sold by its backers, Holtron Ventures, Zouk Ventures, Blue Run (formerly Nokia Venture Partners) and SAC Participations.
Read - Oplayo Under New Management (press release)
Posted at 02:37 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 20, 2006
Intel Capital Goes It Alone On AdaptiveMobile Round
It's rare for Intel Capital to lead a VC deal, much less go single handedly into a new venture. But that is what it has done with Ireland's AdaptiveMobile, a mobile security and filtering software developer. Intel invested €4.6M ($5.5 million) in what looks like a first round of funding for the three year old firm. Its software products are targeted at three markets: mobile network operatrors, companies, and mobilephone subscribers. Mobile anti-virus software is not a puny little market, so where were the Irish and European VCs?
Read - AdaptiveMobile Raises (mobile europe)
Posted at 02:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 19, 2006
Standards Battle For Mobile TV Puts Startups In The Crossfire
Several European startups could be affected by a standards debate for mobile TV, according to a recently published research report from GP Bullhound, an investment banking boutique in the UK.
The report analyses two competing standards for delivery of mobile TV, one based on technology emerging from the broadcasting industry, and the other coming from the telecommunications industry.
GP Bullhound's analysts believe that DVB-H (the broadcasting industry's standard) will win.
That would be good news for Europe's venture-backed contenders, such as Dibcom, UDcast, and Envivio (spinoff from France Telecom). But it's bad news for IPWireless and Norway's Mobile Media Company.
For an argument against DVB-H winning, there is a paper published by The Mobile Media Company, which is the firm behind the BBC World Mobile TV service in Norway (pictured here). It is for purchase only so the a:c euro can only point you in that direction.
Read - Making Mobile TV Possible
Read - Mobile TV and Radio Report (mobile media company)
Posted at 12:36 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobeon Expands Investor Group
Mobeon, a Swedish mobile messaging software firm, raised $13 million this month from BrainHeart Capital and the Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund. The new capital injection splits the firm's shares now between Ericsson with 21 per cent, BrainHeart Capital with 49 per cent and Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund 30 per cent. Prior to this the firm was owned by BrainHeart and Ericsson only.
Mobeon sells its software to OEMs, both hardware and software firms, as well as network operators, to enable advanced messaging applications based on Internet Protocols, such as videomail, voicemail, and unified messaging services. The capital raised will be used for R&D, and some small acquisitions.
Read - Investing in Mobeon´s success (press release)
Posted at 11:55 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 18, 2006
VC-backed Orthogon To Go To Motorola
Motorola said today it is acquiring Orthogon Systems, a British venture-backed wireless equipment provider for an undisclosed amount.
Orthogon, which has been shipping product since May 2003, makes point-to-point broadband wireless systems, also known as 5.8 Ghz Ethernet bridges. The equipment wirelessly connects networks between buildings, as well as connecting other types of network nodes, such as cellular phone base stations to fixed networks.
The firm raised its last round of VC in late 2004, with Motorola's venture arm leading an $8M round, along with early investors Atlas Venture and Carlyle European Partners. Part of the financing was venture debt provided by Lighthouse. At that point in time, the firm was not yet profitable. Prior to that the firm, which was founded in 2000, raised about $28M.
Posted at 03:56 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 17, 2006
Otodio To Raise VC To Read You Your Paper
UK startup, Otodio, will be making its pitch for a new text to speech application in the coming months, according to its recent press releases. Its business idea is that newspaper subscribers will pay extra to be able to listen to, as well as read, their favourite broadsheet.
It is not the first firm to develop text-to-speech applications, but it is the first in recent times to try to push its tech as a new standard file format, specifically made to enable consumers to listen to the contents of a newspaper while on the move.
The Otodio files will be delivered to mobilephones, digital (or satellite) radios, portable audio players, PCs or other digital devices.
We're not sure if that is a hardware or a software upgrade that would be required. If it's a hardware change, then we wish them good luck, but if it's a simple software addition, then it sounds feasible.
Otodio's web site does not reveal much about its business or early investors, but its latest statement says it may be trying to raise $3.5M in order to "help accelerate revenue generation with and alongside its first client contracts". The first commercial trials are expected in Europe by mid-2006.
Its clear target market differentiates it from several more established rivals, such as ReadSpeaker and Svox. Founded in Sweden in 1999, ReadSpeaker went to market with its product in 2001, targeting its text to speech at websites to improve accessibility for blind or sight-impaired users. It recently announced support for reading blogs too. And it is multilingual. The firm claims to be profitable and growing at a quick pace.
Another potential rival is Swiss-based SVOX, which also has a proven and a multilingual solution. In its early years, it flirted with the mobilephone market, with a couple of text-to-speech apps, although not the exacts same thing as Otodio proposes, but it quickly changed to the automotive sector where it had a better chance of generating sales and volume contracts.
Another potential rival is Swiss-based SVOX, which also has a proven and a multilingual solution. In its early years, it flirted with the mobilephone market, with a couple of text-to-speech apps, although not the exacts same thing as Otodio proposes, but it quickly changed to the automotive sector where it had a better chance of generating sales and volume contracts.
This is the second venture together for co-founders Simon Gall and Peter Bond. Their previous company is a DVD/CD repair franchise called PerfectPlay.
Maybe the time is right now for something along the lines of what Otodio is promoting, in light of the popularity of digital audio downloads and podcasting and how that is starting to change consumer behaviour and expectations.
Read - OTODIO now ready to accelerate (Tornado Insider)
Read - Founders Profile with more info on Otodio (soflow)
Posted at 04:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Former iTouch Business Unit Raises VC For Mobility Apps
Blackbay, a British software company targeting mobile workers, which spun out of iTouch when it was acquired by Japan's For-side.com last year, has raised £3.5M ($6.1M) from Close Venture Management in the UK.
The capital will be used for product development and to fund the wireless data solutions company’s sales and marketing drive. The firm has been delivering wireless solutions for parcel delivery, field technician, and logistics for over 12 years as a business unit of iTouch. Its customers include Parcelforce, Dyson, and Konica Minolta.
Its head office is in the UK, with offices in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.
Blackbay's chairman of the board is Avi Azulai, who until last March was the managing director of iTouch, a provider of mobilephone content that employed 350 and had annual sales (2004) of £78M. iTouch was acquired by an acquisitive Japanese mobile content firm called For-side.com. The price paid was £180M.
Read - GP Bullhound Completes Private Placement
Posted at 06:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 12, 2006
Startup Prepares To Launch Shirt That Hugs
Forget interactive TV, this startup has interactive clothes. Today the alarm:clock euro has an exclusive interview with Ryan Genz, CEO of CuteCircuit ltd, the startup that has developed a shirt that can send and receive a hug, or a sqeeze, via text messaging on mobilephones.
Genz founded CuteCircuit, along with Francesca Rosella, as a design and product development lab in 2004.
The firm has several projects, but the Hug Shirt is the one it is currently planning to market. CuteCircuit's electronic textiles, are more touchy feely, we would say, than the various iPod jacket and backpacks we've seen that were developed using technology from two other European startups, Eleksen in the UK and Interactive Wear in Germany.
a:c:Do you plan to manufacture the shirts, or license the technology to a bigger brand.
rg: We are working towards a production of "The Hug Shirt". This will be the first product that we bring to market. There have been surprising inquiries for licensing the technology from industries we would have never expected. We are in talks with various partners to see what ways they might use the technology. We have several patents pending for wearable technologies and telecommunications software.
a:c What is your biggest challenge business-wise at the moment?
rg:The Hug Shirt will be the first product from CuteCircuit, so we have a huge challenges ahead of us. It's hard to put my finger on one thing, and say 'this is our big challenge'. But money is something that would make a lot of gears turn more smoothly. Up ‘till now it had always been a great challenge to communicate the value of innovative fashion. But we've definitely noticed a sudden shift in 2006, with a marked increase in the interest towards wearable technologies. That is very positive!
a:c: You are an Italian founding team, but work in London, why?
rg: The founding team is part Italian and part American. We have two other CuteCircuit offices, one in the USA and one Italy. We recently opened the new office in London because it brings us closer to finance and business partners, and to technological resources.
London has a rich design culture and people are really interested in fashion experiments and innovation. This is a big advantage: to know that the ideas we have are getting communicated. People see it as a real innovation, worth investing in.
a:c: Do you plan to raise venture capital? If so, how much?
rg: Yes, we are raising venture capital for the production of "The Hug Shirt", but I can not be more specific at this time.
a:c: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Read Related Posts- Eleksen Zips Up New Round (a:c euro)
Read - The locate-me jacket (a:c euro)
Posted at 03:21 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 11, 2006
Eyesquad's Cameraphone Lens Breakthrough Attracts Early Stage VCs
BayTech Venture Capital has led a €4M Series A investment in Eyesquad, a developer of micro-imaging optics gear targeted at cameraphones. Co-investor on the round is the Spanish venture capital firm, Adara Ventures. The capital will be used for R&D and to boost marketing.
It is still in stealth mode, so we rely on some input from its backers. Eyesquad has developed components that are the same size as existing cameraphone optics but deliver the kind of Zoom, Auto Focus, Close Up functions that digital still cameras have, without adding new moving parts and drivers.
Its edge is enabled by innovation in lens design, lens engineering and imaging software alagorithms.
The firm is headquartered in Munich, Germany, with R&D center in Tel-Aviv.
Posted at 05:14 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 10, 2006
Irish Cibenix Looking to Raise VC for US and Aisan Expansion
Cibenix, which just licensed its software to Sybase for its mobile product line, hopes to raise €6 million in venture capital investment to fund an expansion plan in the United States and Asia, reports Irish news site ENN.
The Irish startup, which raised a small €1.2M round in 2004, develops software that enables mobilephone users to find and subscribe to mobile content as a more flexible alternative to the "walled garden" approach that has until now been pretty much the standard approach by mobile network operators.
A screenshot of a Cibenix-enabled smartphone
It mentions RSS feeds, targeted pieces of web pages, personal photo galleries and audio and video podcast, as typical content that users will be able to access.Cibenix was founded in 2001, and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. It competes with the likes of SurfKitchen, a venture backed startup based in the UK.
Read - In the papers (ENN)
Posted at 10:39 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 04, 2006
Wifi Voice Startup Barablu Joins The Fray
We posted a list of startups (see link below) with plans to disrupt mobile network operators voice and data businesses. Today there is another one to add to the list, Barablu, which is based in London.
The offer is for free voice calls on mobile networks. But there's a catch.
The catch is that Barablu only works with Wifi enabled cellphones and the calls are free only on IP-networked devices, such as PC users or other Barablu users. In that sense it is a direct competitor to the soon to be launched Truphone. (See a:c euor post below).
The Barablu also has options to purchase location independent numbers and calling plans for non-IP connected users.
We are with the startups that aim to make mobile communications and believe that the market expects that mobile calls and messaging will undergo a Skype-like pricing disruption, so the market is with them too.
But if they are looking to grow with the alacrity that Skype did, the founders have to be aware that they are in a tougher market. When Skype launched there had literally not been a decent new web-based communication service in two or even three years prior. It is a lot more competitive now.
The majority of calls made on Skype can be made for free, it worked in dozens of countries immediately, and it had a familiar user interface, that is, if you used instant messaging, using Skype was easy. Will that be the case with these wireless-targeted services?
What is more, Skype was a second if not a third generation IP Telephony application. But the disruptive entrants in the mobile market are the pioneers for providing IP communications services over mobile networks. And cellphone networks are not exactly as stable, open, and established IP platform that the fixed network is.
For example, flat rates for mobile Internet access are not yet ubiquitous, and the handsets are not easy to configure for Internet use.
Some of the new players work only on WiFi-enabled phones or expensive smartphones, which will also limit the takeoff.
We're not saying that the mobile market opportunity does not exist, it does. But we do believe that it will not open up as dramatically and quickly as it did for Skype and its rivals.
One thing we note is that the burgeoning of new products and services will probably drive demand for publishers that provide consumers with info, such as comparisons of rates and service information, with a focus on mobile telephony, such as MeilleurMobile, TelTarif.de, Comparis.ch, uSwitch.co.uk, and the like.
Read - Startups sink fangs
Read - Truephone backer touts free
Posted at 05:43 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 03, 2006
Keynote buys German mobile network testing firm Sigos
Keynote Systems, a US-based provider of services that improve online business and communications technologies, has acquired Germany’s SIGOS, a supplier of network testing gear for mobile network operators, for €25M ($30M).
Keynote will pay an earn-out up to an additional €8M if milestones are achieved this year. The deal signifies a pretty good valuation for SIGOS, about 7 times trailing year's revenues (total price used for valuation includes half of the earnout stated).
SIGOS has approximately 55 large enterprise customers, 65 employees, and annual sales of $10M expected in 2007. It was founded in 1989 and had only one investor, BayBG, which it bought out in 2003. It is reporting a growth rate of 20 percent over the past three years.
Posted at 02:35 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 30, 2006
Scatterweb Founders Get Financed
Startups in the wireless sensor network (WSN) market in Europe are attracting early stage funding. The latest is Berlin-based Scatterweb which has raised an undisclosed amount from High Tech Grunderfond, a German state-backed investment vehicle. An early investor in the one year old company is eVentureCat GmbH.
The deal follows Particle Computer and Ubisense, two other WSN ventures, to raise capital in recent months.
The ScatterNode is about the same size of a book of matches.
The university spinoff has a range of wireless sensor networking products, including stand-alone nodes that can be equipped with displays or cameras, a USB stick node, and a gateway product.
Read - ScatterWeb bekommt Risikokapital für weiteren Unternehmensaufbau (scatterweb)
Read - Ubisense (a:c euro)
Read - Particle Comptuer (a:c)
Posted at 12:40 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Startup addresses vagaries of publishing docs on mobiles
We heard about a Finnish startup, Max Rumpus, this week from its Swiss seed round backer. It is the company behind Maxdox a software application used to publish documents on mobilephones. It looks like a product for an unmet need in the wireless market.
HP uses MaxDox to produce pint-sized documents for the mobilephone platform.
MaxDox screenshot with its functionality featured (Click image to enlarge)
It's offering a consumer and a business version of the application. The consumer, or personal version, is free to download.
Max Rumpus was founded in 2001, by Stephen Lee, who now heads up marketing, and Mika Huhtamäki, currently the firm's CTO, both of whom previously had gigs at Wapit! The firm's CEO, Tero Kalsta, worked for Jippii, a mobile content developer, whose European business was acquired by the UK's iTouch in 2004 for up to €30M.
The Leningrad Cowboys' hairdos are as pointy as their shoes
Wapit! you may recall was one of the stars of the hype that surrounded the launch of the Wireless Application Protocol (aka WAP). It was VC-backed and got a lot of press attention -- mainly because its flamboyant PR exec, Mato Valtonen, was a member of the gimmicky Leningrad Cowboys -- but because WAP was crap (for mobile Internet access), its business ultimately flopped.
Max Rumpus has financed software development, its first product was a mobile messaging alert program, targeted at businesses, by providing consulting services. It then launched in 2003 the first version of Maxdox, and brought in seed investors.
In January it raised an undisclosed amount in a first round of venture capital, led by Innofinance, a Finnish VC, after being backed by seed investors prior to that. Today it is focused purely on developing the Maxdox Mobile Publisher software business.
If things go right for this startup, it could do for the mobilephone what Adobe and its free readers do for PDF documents on the desktop. If that doesn't happen then it has a chance to develop a smaller sized business making its software availalbe to brand marketing agencies as part of a set of tools that would enable publishing to the mobilephone platform.
Read - Innofinance assists Max Rumpus to strengthen its sales
Posted at 07:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 29, 2006
Flytxt Raises $2M To Focus On Mobile Ads
Yesterday we wrote about TXT4's financing round, and today we have one of its competitor's Flytxt, also hailing from the UK, announcing that it will focus its business on mobilephone marketing tools. In the same statement, it said existing investors IVC, Herald Ventures, and Gordian Investments have put in $2M to fund the effort.
Flytxt developed the mobilephone marketing campaign for Unilever's Pot Noodle food product.
Flytxt has been in business since 2000. Looking at its press releases over the years, it originally planned to deliver mobile advertising tech, but when the bubble burst it revamped and went to delivering multimedia and texting messages. Other mobile advertising startups went out of business during that time or got acquired for a low valuation.
It seems that the firm, and its rivals, feel that now is the right time to focus on enabling ads targeting mobile phone users. A typical ad campaign from Flytxt involves consumers sending a text message in response to ad or a pitch on the package of a food or drink item. Its software enables the brand owner to measure and plot the response to its campaign.
Read -Flytxt Strengthens Senior Management Team (press release)
Posted at 01:18 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Startups Sink Fangs Into Cellco Margins On Voice and Data
While US VCs are backing long distance voice startups, such as JaJah, a host of startups in Europe are aiming for the mobile network operators' cash cows, their mobile voice and data services.
You could almost feel sorry for Europe’s telcos and cellcos, almost. What with Skype and dozens of others offering VOIP services that attack long distance revenues, and groups like FON rushing their hotspot and broadband mobile services. But the incumbents’ high rates for mobile voice and data services, just make them such easy targets.
Here is a quick list of some of the recently launched, or about to be launched, services that the alarm:clock euro has come across this week.
Hotxt (UK) - flat-fee text messaging service for UK market. Works with Java phones and requires a user to install client on handset. Hotxt is backed by Cambridge Angels and Bridges Community Ventures.
Atelplus (Germany) – Cheaper wireless voice calls with a patented least cost routing system. It is not yet launched but we’ve talked to the founder. The user will have to install a client on the phone. Only works on high end smartphones, although founder says he plans to roll it for lower cost Java phones. Bootstrapped.
Vipera (Switzerland) – Develops software that enables its customers (and the firm itself) to become a virtual mobile messaging network operator, undercutting cellcos text messaging service and photo messaging. Vipera has already launched ShootNSend to take photos on the fly and transmit them via mobile Internet service (GPRS), bypassing the pricey picture messaging service (MMS) from cellcos. It also hosts and enables an Italian mobile blogging platform, and sells its messaging technology platform. Bootstrapped.
Sofanet (Germany) – Wifi networks to share broadband connection between neighbors. Bootstrapped.
Posted at 12:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Japan's Index Corp Buys Wonderphone
Japan's Index Corp, a media and telecoms company, is to buy mobile TV and games distribuor, Wonderphone in France through its French subsidiary Index Multimedia. Index has made several acquisitions in the mobile content sector such as Mobliss (US) in 2004, Skyinfo (China), Yarosa (NL), and 123Mutlimedia (France) in 2005.
We just posted on Wonderphone's progress last week, noting the firm's ability to generate sales in the mobile TV market segment. So why sell? Market research firm, Ovum, believes it had to do with thin margins and a need to pull in a strategic investor with an international footprint.
... despite its success story, WonderPhone had two main problems. Firstly, its size was rather limited (70 employees) for addressing worldwide distribution and getting involved in various activities (platform management, production, post-production). The Index acquisition should remove this issue. The second issue is the question of the level of the profits available for a middleman specialising in mobile video, sandwiched in between rights owners and mobile operators. Small margins could be the reason why Plaisance decided to exit the market so fast. . (Ovum)
Read - Index Multimedia Announcement (ITNewswire)
Read - Vincent Poulbere: Index acquires WonderPhone to strengthen mobile video offering (Ovum)
Read - Wonderphone In The Money (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 11:41 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Cambridge's Ubisense Raises Funds for Location Tagging
Ubisense has raised $3M from Cambridge Angels and Cambridge Capital Group. Ubisense was founded in 2002 by four location technology experts from the Laboratory for Communication Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
Its sensor product uses ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to locate people and objects in real-time to an accuracy of 12 inches (30cm) in 3D.The company targets military and healthcare fields but has nifty ideas such as sensors to aid in personal shopping:
"A shopper is passing the tinned vegetable section the digital assistant can pull up a special offer with recipe ideas from specific manufacturers. The shopper could then add the item to the cart and purchase with an ecoupon rather than worrying about paper coupons."
Or in entertainment:
"By placing Ubitags on actors or objects on film sets or stages Ubisense can help lighting and special effects engineers get an accurate location of actors at any time."
Ubisoft's Sensor
Posted at 06:46 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
London's Empower Interactive Gets Big $18M Round
Empower has raised a US$18M round of funding that was led by Scottish Equity Partners and supported by existing investors Argo Global Capital, Cazenove Private Equity, DN Capital and IDG Ventures Europe. The news follows from an 80% increase in revenues for 2005.
Empower designs messaging and multi-media systems for mobile operators that provide for billing and managing of high volume SMS and MMS applications.
The company was founded in 2000 and has mostly European customers including Orange, WIND, Smart, Starhub, Telkomsel and Etisalat.
Posted at 06:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 28, 2006
Advertisers get texting channel
Ads and billboards often have telephone numbers or URLs so that consumers wanting more information can follow up. Now TXT4, a London-based startup, makes it possible to add a text message address to the mix.
TXT4's tech in action on this Sony Ericsson ad, which tells consumers to write a text message containing the word SHOT and send it to this address:84118
It is not the first startup to offer this kind of service in Europe, but it's the first to focus on it as an advertising product and make the service its main revenue generator. Two VCs have stepped up to back its expansion beyond the UK, Oxford Capital Partners and Noble Fund Managers
The company’s aims to go global with its "automated response management software" and it will target large brand name firm. It estimates the addressable market is worth about £750M.
Read - Oxford Capital Partners and Nobel Fund Managers invest £1.25m in TXT4 (Tornado Insider)
Posted at 12:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 22, 2006
Nvidia's Buy Of Hybrid Graphics Gives Nexit An Exit
NVIDIA, a graphics processor vendor, announced it will acquire Finland's Hybrid Graphics a developer of embedded 2D and 3D graphics software for mobilephones and PDAs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Hybrid is owned by key employees and two VCs, Investor Growth Capital, which invested in 1998 and Nexit Ventures, which invested in 2002. According to Red Herring, it raised a total of €2.5M.
The Finnish company, which was founded back in 1994, has a long list of clients including Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Online Entertainment, Texas Instruments, Renesas, Philips, Bitboys and Esmertec.
Read - NVIDIA Corporation to acquire Hybrid Graphics (press release)
Posted at 05:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 21, 2006
Interpeak acquisition an exit for Nordic backers
Two years after becoming profitable Interpeak, which develops and sells IPv4 and IPv6 security software targeted at mobile devices, has been acquired by Wind River for $20M.
Swedish Interpeak might have been identified as one of the 40 fastest growing tech companies in Europe last year by Deloitte but the deal size shows that middleware vendors are just not valued as highly as say a consumer-oriented dotcom company these days. Interpeak grew by more than 2000 percent in the period that Deloitte tracked it. Last publicly available annual sales information said it did €2.24M in 2004.
The six year old software firm raised at least €3.3M in VC. Its backers are Nordic-based, SEB and Ledstierman (owned about 20 percent).
Read - Wind River Acquires Interpeak (press release)
Read - Deloitte Top 50 (Embedded Computing News)
Posted at 07:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 20, 2006
Wavecom firms up its M2M shift with acquisition
France’s Wavecom said today it acquired Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications' machine-to-machine communication business unit for €32.5M. The French wireless equipment maker, once a tech stock high-flyer, originally made mobilephone systems. After several years of losses it restructured its business, returned to profitability in 2005, and has shifted its focus away from cellphones to the higher margin M2M business, targeting industry, point of sales, and automobile applications.
This acquisition is in line with that plan. Its current market cap of €166 is just slightly higher than last year's sales of €130M.
Posted at 02:53 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 16, 2006
MobileTV Startup Wonderphone In The Money
Mobile TV is the target application for a good number of recently funded chip companies in Europe. But the a:c euro has been wondering if Mobile TV is going to be one of those permanently "emerging", in the same way that videoconferencing has been “emerging” since the very early nineties.
A bit of the answer to that question is provided in an interview on VNUnet.fr with Philip Plaisance, founder and CEO of Wonderphone in France (pictured below).He said his mobile video content company achieved annual sales of €15M last year. That’s a pretty good revenue for a firm that is barely three years old.
Plaisance is proving that maybe Mobile TV is more than a tantalizing mirage, despite the company name.
Plaisance comes from the TV and film industry. He built up a group of film and television content companies, including home shopping networks, reality TV shows, stock photography catalogues, films, and programming. When sold the group in 1996, it had 1,500 employees and annual sales of $100M. That means he knows something about content and distribution.
In the interview which was mainly focused on his application to the authorities in France for a license to broadcast television, he gives some insight into the mobile video content market. Here’s our summary from the French text.
- France is number 3 worldwide, following Japan and South Korea.
- One quarter of 3G (third generation cellular) users consume 25 minutes a month of mobile video content.
- His firm’s portal has more titles than competitors which he believes is a key to his success.
- While TV streaming is the first application new 3G phone purchasers try, Plaisance says that content will be consumed when consumers want it (on demand).
- It’s still not clear what type of audio-visual content consumers will pay for
-He’s not convinced that it will be adult content, suggesting the screen “is perhaps a little small”.
Wonderphone does some production work, but mainly it aggregates thousands of videos, short films, cartoons, and adult content, then sells it to mobile network operators, 70 of them in 40 countries.
Wonderphone is currently applying for a license in France to deliver mobile TV as a “push and store” service. The operator pushes the programs to the phones where they are automatically saved for the user to view at leisure. Covering its bets, the firm recently launched Manta, a mobile games portal. It employs 70.
Read - Télévision sur mobile : la France ne doit pas perdre son avance
Posted at 07:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 15, 2006
Icera = soft radio chips +3G wireless -excess packaging
With third generation cellular and HSDPA network rollouts underway in the US and Europe, the market demand is emerging just as Icera is in a position to deliver the supporting chips to cellphone industry manufacturers.
As a result, Icera, which was founded in Bristol, has been able to close a $40M round, bringing the total VC funding to $82.5M since it was founded in 2002.
Unusually for a chip co, Icera has no pics of its chip, but it did have some nice photos.
Icera's founder, Stan Boland, is on his second chip startup with this one. His last, Element 14, a DSL (broadband over telephone lines) chip company, was acquired by Broadcom for $642 million.
Competitors include Qualcomm, Huawei, and Freescale Semiconductor. Its edge against the competition, the firm says, is a software-based radio modem on the chip that can be tweaked (software-defined radio aka SDR) if some parts of protocol changes (e.g. speed of throughput or frequencies) post-integration. And it claims a comparably small size due to the radio frequency chip and the processor being sandwiched in the same chip-package.
It brought on board new investor Amadeus, in addition to existing VCs. The investment suggests that Amadeus is making some progress on raising its new fund. We hear it has been fundraising for a few months now.
Read - HSDPA Network Rollouts (3G Organization)
Read - Icera adds a further $40m in funding (Icera PR)
Posted at 12:29 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
More Wireless eBay Auctions
Over at the a:c a report entitled Wireless Ebay Auctions, profiles gnumber’s latest round of financing, a small one. Gnumber is the company behind UnwiredBuyer, an Ebay mobilephone application.
Besides gnumber, there is Abidia, also in the US, with its AuctionAnywhere application (it also supports overstock.com) and several European software firms that have developed applications targeting mobilephone users.
For example, Munich-based Zesium recently launched Mbid24 and Myspike Mobile, launched by Preisauskunft.de, a Karlsruhe-based company, which received recognition from Ebay for developing the most “innovative buyer software” last year.
Zesium's Mbid24 Javaphone screenshot
Since Germany is Ebay's largest market outside the US, it is not surprising that the startups targeting the wireless user are based there.
The prices for the apps vary. UnwiredBuyer is free (it makes a commission from Ebay through its affiliate marketing scheme). Mbid24 has a subscription model and light version that's free. mYspike has a one time licensing fee. Both European vendors sell software that works on the lower priced Java phones in the market, as well as higher priced smartphones and PDAs.
Javaphone screenshot from Myspike
Each one offers a different level of integration with the eBay platform. For example, UnWired Buyer uses text messaging to update buyers and carry bids. Mbid24 and Myspike are more deeply integrated, offering access to photos, search, and management of bids.
What we’re wondering is if there great potential for delivering applications to Ebay users, why hasn’t the auction giant developed the tools itself? Was it not aware of the market demand? Does it believe that the startups can do a better job at marketing and perhaps bring in a new set of users?
With CEBIT on this past week, the a:c euro has had difficulty reaching our usual sources and the firms involved to get details on their financials, but as soon as we do, there will be more on this.
Read - Wireless Ebay Auctions
Posted at 05:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 13, 2006
Musiwave founder starts up Eyeka with VC funding
French entrepreneur Gilles Babinet, who sold his last venture to Openwave for $121M in September, has started up Eyeka with €4.2M from Ventech, the same VC that led investment in his previous company, and DN Capital in the UK.
BusinessWeek has a video interview with Babinet, made about a year ago, when he was promoting Musiwave's US expansion
The funds are to be used to recruit a team and develop its product that is only being sketchily described as a platform for consumers to manage, optimize and value the photos and video they generate from their cameraphones. And Eyeka is going to do it in a way that mobile network operators can make money on it.
If we learn more about how a startup can both help consumers to optimize multimedia and earn mobile network operators more money from the same consumers, two seemingly opposing promises, it’ll be in a new post.
Babinet co-founded the company with Franck Perrier, who was CEO of Roger-Viollet, a photographic archive company and prior to that with Corbis France, a stock photography agency. Prior to joining Corbis, he was with BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi for more than a decade.
The firm’s founding CTO is Yves Languepin who held the same position at the online wineshop, ChateauOnline, for the past six years. And prior to that he founded IVAO, a company that developed photo and video services, which was acquired by France Telecom in 1994.
Read - Gilles Babinet Announces (Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz blog)
Read - Eyeka lève 4,2 millions d’euros (EETimes)
Posted at 02:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
In-building cellular gets a boost
Several venture capital firms and Intel are betting that mobile network operators are going to do all they can to make sure that WiFi networks (with VOIP enabled) have some competition in the enterprise and small office/home office market, and have therefore invested £8.5M ($14.7M) in the latest round of finance for ipaccess, a manufacturer of in-building cellular basestation equipment.
The syndicate includes Scottish Equity Partners, Intel Capital Corporation and French VC, Rothschild & Cie Gestion.
"The product portfolio that ipaccess currently offers, and the technology it has in development, is strategically important to mobile network operators… to compete effectively with vendors offering unlicensed WiFi devices and solutions." Jean-Michel Beghin of Rothschild
The startup is a manufacturer of this small-sized in-building cellular base-station, as well as the gear carriers need to manage it all.
The new capital will be used to fuel its entry into residential or consumer markets, as well as introduce so-called 3G (third generation cellular) products for home and office use. It also sells through system integrators into the enterprise and campus market where the cost of using its technology amounts to less than a euro per customer per day, according to the firm.
Its 3G access point for the home is expected to sell for about €200, according to a webcasted interview with the firm’s MD Stephen Mallinson.
Ipaccess was founded in 1999, employs 85 and is a spin-out from TTPCom, a publicly traded UK firm that long been developing software stacks for cellphones.
Read- ip.access Secures £8.5 Million Funding to Accelerate Growth (press release)
Posted at 11:36 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Wimax is hot –Wimax is not
Venture capital firms that have invested in Wimax chip companies might be getting nervous these days if they were hoping for an exit this year as some potential acquirers say they're not buying.
On the one hand market research firms, such as RNCOS from India, are bullish:
"WiMAX and other emerging high-speed wireless technologies will capture more than 42% of the wireless broadband business over the next few years, whilst 3G will have to content with less than 59% of the market in 2009."
And there is some market pull, with several operators in Europe tapping Wimax, while in the US Clearwire is deploying an “early version of Wimax”. Clearwire has raised some $1.1B in the past year for network investment, according to press reports.
But on the other hand, potential acquirers, such as Broadcom and Agere, are not showing much interest. Electronic News reporting from an industry conference last week provided some insight into the chip manufacturers’ attitudes:
“The markets for UWB and WiMAX are immature and our strategy is to engage in high volume markets … and the markets will be served by existing technologies. 802.11n -MIMO-enhanced WiFi - will be out before UWB, because it is compatible with 802.11 a, b and g.”
And Agere’s CEO was quoted as saying that WiMAX startups will never be able to gain the really lucrative customer wins.
“They’ll never have a tier one customer; they’ll never have a competitive cost-base, and they’ll never have a significant IP base.”
A lot of capital has been invested in Wimax silicon with exits still not visible.
Since Intel is the biggest proponent of Wimax, it is not surprising that its rivals are not jumping on the bandwagon. But we still wonder what the exit activity will be like for startups in the sector.
Some VC-backed Wimax and Wimax-related startups are listed here.
Sequans
Picochip (Recently brought in AT&T as a strategic investor in addition to VC)
Cambridge Broadband (Active in East Asian, its backhaul equipment supports Wimax, in addition to other wireless networking protocols)
Orthogon Systems (Sells Wimax compatible gear for backhaul application)
Alvarion (Products include Wimax gear targeted carriers, alternative telcos, mobile network operators, and private networks)
Read- Clearwire raises $360 million (Seattle Times)
Read- Wireless firms stand back as start-ups thrash it out
(Electronics Weekly)
Read- Wimax Forecast (RNCOS)
Posted at 07:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 06, 2006
Truphone backer touts free mobilephone calls via Wifi
An investor in the company that has developed software called Truphone, which enables VOIP on certain mobilephones, said on Friday that the firm's software will be offered to users for free and that it will be targeted at soon to be available WiFi enabled mobilephones running the Symbian operating system, that is, high-end phones or smartphones.
Straub believes he is sitting on a winner with his investment in Truphone
Alexander Straub of CAP Partners spoke briefly on his investment in Truphone during a panel discussion at a private investors' conference in Zurich, hosted by BrainsToVentures, a corporate finance boutique.
Straub touted his firm's market opportunity and its potential to eat into voice minutes sales of mobile network operators. The high prices mobile network operators charge for cell phone calls make it a soft target for those that can offer a cheaper alternative.
Enthusiastic about Truphone he might be, but reckless he is not. He said that when hedgies in London had asked him if they "should short Vodafone to zero", he pushed back, and declined to agree with that notion.
Because Straub was surrounded by investors afterwards, we could not confirm details about how Truphone will actually generate sales.
Nor could we confirm this with him but we believe Truphone is actually the name of a product, and that the company Straub invested in is called Software Cellular Network (SCN). We believe this is the case.
SCN was founded in April 2000 in the UK and it was the company that introduced and distributed the Truphone beta software last year. The official regulatory database for UK companies has no record a firm called Truphone.
An early version of the Truphone software has been available to a limited group of users since mid-last year. These users require a Bluetooth connection from the handset to a PC with Internet access, fixed or wireless. And it works only on Nokia Series 60 phones (Symbian OS).
For those who are over-excited about the market, insiders note that there are a lot of competitors eyeing it. According to Balaji Bal, co-founder of mobile software startup, SurfKitchen, there are at least three startups, including UsefulApps based Israel. What is more, he told the a:c euro, Skype, which has been available on PocketPC platform for some time now, could easily be moved sideways to enter the Symbian market.
Posted at 09:13 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 01, 2006
Hamburg startup = Broadband Internet + Alphabet Soup – Wires
Business angels are backing a new wireless hardware startup in Hamburg, 4G Systems. The German company develops and sells boxes and PC cards targeted at broadband Internet users (home office and small office) that want to access the Net via the latest high speed wireless networks being rolled out by Europe's mobile network operators.
This box has everything, even an alarm clock.
We're talking about the one that goes by the typically telco user-un-friendy name of HSDPA. In the US, Cingular Wireless launched it in 16 cities in December. In Europe several telcos, T-Mobile and O2 are each rolling it out in several countries.
We're aware of HSDPA because it is a market targeted by yet another European startup that the a:c euro has been tracking for some time, Icera Semiconductor.
Enough background. 4G's most intriguing product (shown above) is one that supports not only HSDPA but a veritable alphabet soup of wireless services available today (UMTS, GPRS, Edge plus WLAN), plus it can route voice calls. It is meant for Internet users that don't have xDSL or cable access in their region. It can also be used for building an impromptu wireless Internet access point.
With a product line like that 4G Systems can sell to consumers looking to route themselves around the fixed networks (the ones that own the so-called last mile) and the incumbent telcos. The firm says its first supplier contract is with T-Mobile.
4G Systems is hiring too. Jobs are open for a quality control expert (ISO 9000/9001 ), networking engineers, and C+ developers.
According to Swiss corporate finance boutique BrainsToVenture, which is in tight with angel investors in Germany and Switzerland, the startup raised an undisclosed amount in January.
Posted at 07:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 24, 2006
Cellphone recycling startups find growth
Over at the Red Herring is a feature story about ReCellular describing the US company's mobilephone recycling business. It reminded us of Fonebak in the UK, which raised £27M in 2004 from Bank of Scotland and subsequently floated on the AIM, the junior market in London in 2005.
Fonebak works with charities, retailers, and businesses to collect and recycle mobilephones in Eruope
Within two years of its launch in 2002, Fonebak had sales of £27 million and it had some 200 people working at plants in UK and Romania, as well as sales office in Belgium, France, and Spain. Last year its sales reached £38M with £2.5m pre-tax profit.
Read - Old phones ring up new profits (Red Herring)
Posted at 03:32 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile network optimizers - roll ‘em up, roll ‘em up
Consolidation in the European mobile networking sector seems to be underway, at least among businesses whose products enable cellphone companies to save money by optimizing equipment, software, and service offerings. This is a different part of the supply chain than the M&A taking place in the mobile content and application end of the market. We think the entry of private equity investors, as opposed to venture capital investors, are driving the rollups.
Companies that develop software like this ...
As well as those that can make diagrams like this and then translate it into cost-saving for cellcos are being acquired.
Five, mainly small-sized, deals in the segment have been announced so far this year, include Tietonator’s acquisition of Sofnetix, a Finnish UK-based wireless and mobilephone software developer (this is the 12th small acquisition by one of Europe’s largest IT companies in the past 14 months or so).
Also announced yesterday, Actix Ltd , a mobile network engineering firm, acquired Radioplan GmbH, a Dresden, Germany-based provider of automated network optimization software. It is spending some the new capital it raised recently. According to PE Week, Summit Partners led a £40M round of investment in Actix last year.
Last week, Mach, which is backed by private equity investors, acquired End2End Networks. Esmertec, a Java for mobilephones company acquired Cellicium, which makes self-service apps for mobilephone customers. It saves cellcos money in administering client services.
And in January, Spirent Communications acquired SwissQual for its network voice and data testing technologies for $70M.
With other companies in this niche of the market, such as Anam, Apertio and Aircom having recently raised large rounds, it is likely we see a few more such transactions this year. Both Aircom and Anam have private equity backers and PE strategies tend to include rollups as way to add value to the venture.
Read - Actix acquires Radioplan (3G UK)
Read - Airwide pulls private equity (alarm:clock euro)
Read -Esmertec acquisitions (alarm:clock euro)
Posted at 06:19 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 15, 2006
Munich Mobile Agency 12snap Bought by NeoMedia for $22M
NeoMedia Technologies (OTC BB: NEOM) has paid $22M for 12snap, a Munich-based mobile phone marketing agency. The deal sounds good at first blush, however, 12snap had raised over $39M since 1999 from firms Apax Partners, Argo Global Capital, Cdb Web Tech and BlueRun Ventures.
12Snap Created An Mobile App To Promote the Movie Madagascar
Posted at 09:50 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
VC Euros flowing to RFID startups
We’ve posted about the growing amount of venture money flowing to proven online ventures, now it is time to look at another segment, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
We tracked eight investments in the past few months. By our definition, that's a trend.
The eight deals do not include investments in startups that are developing RFID chips made using polymers or semi-conducting plastics such as Printed Systems GmbH, recently funded by Degussa, or PolyIC (its RFID chip is shown here), funded by Siemens and Leonhard Kurz GmbH&Co. KG
The size of the deals tend to be smaller than the online and semiconductor VC investments, but the number of transactions is on the upswing. The finalizing of industry standards and the radical drop in RFID chip price (from $4 to less than 20 cents) has a lot to do with confidence in the sector, say industry insiders.
Tracking uniforms with chips (Image: Tagsys)
Used until very recently RFID tags were mainly used to keep track of dirty laundry, library books, cows, and gas canisters. It is now becoming more sophisticated.
Applications are emerging as public and private organizations see RFID systems as a way to squeeze more costs out of the supply chain, as a better way of toting personal identification around, and as a storage place for e-tickets.
For example, French startup Tagsys says Pfizer is using its RFID technology to battle counterfeiters of its popular Viagra drug
(Does anyone really believe that those spam ads for “discounted” versions of the little blue pill are delivering the real thing?).
Balance Bourbeau, a Canadian vendor truck scales systems used Identec's long range RFID technology to manage timber assets and comply with government reporting requirements.
An editor we once worked for used to say: one’s an event, two’s wait and see, and three’s a trend, so eight deals for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) startups in eight months is a trend.The following is a quick list of recent transactions
Stockway (FI) – RFID software for developers-enables tracking via Internet – €3M (estimated)
Inside Contactless (FR)– short range RFID chips - €10.9 mln
Identec (AT) - long range RFID hardware for item and asset tracking - €3.4M
Idencom (CH)– RFID component for biometric passports - Swiss business angels- €1M
Safe-ID Solutions (DE) – an RFID systems for biometric passports (Infineon spinoff) -€7M
Tagsys (FR) – short range RFID labels and readers for item tracking -$12.2M.
Datamars (CH) – short range item and livestock tracking - undisclosed amount
RFiT (AT) – RFID software and gear for integrators (Infineon spinoff)– €4M
It looks like investors here think the time is right to fund the suppliers of chips, readers, and software. Notable is the interest in the data management software required to run an RFID application, which says that more of the technology pieces required to implement a real life system are being funded.
Whether or not any of these startups will emerge as a major player depends on the staying power of the VCs and the ambition of the founders. If the recent past is anything to go by, many will end up being tasty tidbits for deep-pocketed trade buyers.
Posted at 07:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 14, 2006
MSFT Buys Siemens-Founded, Paris-based Mobile Search Co. MotionBridge
This deal was done some weeks back, but Microsoft held on to it to spring at a telecom event this week in Barcelona. Of particular interest to Microsoft, we suspect, is that MotionBridge has recently launches a sponsored links ad service into its mobile search platform. MotionBridge seems like a very good buy for Microsoft as it has good ties with European wireless carriers including Orange and TMobile.
MotionBridge was one of the early stage startups funded by Siemens former mobile corporate venture capital team, known as SMAC. Siemens discontinued the investement activity several months ago and has been divesting itself of the portfolio. Microsoft probably was offered a good deal. The Redmond based giant has been making opportune acquisitions in the region. Late last year it acquired a VOIP software company in Switzerland, Media-streams, in a deal that did not make the founders massive fortunes, we hear.
Posted at 01:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Vienna's 3United Bought By VeriSign For $65.5M
VeriSign's M&A team must be getting tired. They have been jetting in between Silicon Valley and Vienna, Austria to close a deal to bring 3United into the VeriSign fold. 3United is one of the European market leaders in premium SMS services, m-commerce solutions, and mobile content.
3United's Founders - Working in the Shadows of Vienna's Beautifiul Palace of Schoenbrunn
Posted at 12:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 12, 2006
Finnish interactive TV to grow with 3i investment
3i Group acquired a 12.5 percent stake in RedLynx, a content developer targeting television, PC, and mobilephone markets. After looking at its web-site we now know the company behind one of the weirdest things on TV we've ever seen.
During off-peak times a private television stations broadcast a show where a bunny reads aloud messages sent in by viewers. It works like this, the viewer sends an SMS (text message via mobilephone) that says something like, “I love FC Basel”.
Then you hear a beep on the TV, the sound of a letter arriving in bunny's basket. He picks it up and reads the text, which is also displayed on the screen. The voice is computer generated and does not do well when it has to read messages that come in German, French, and English. The messages cost about $2.50 each to send.
RedLynx' cupid reads your love notes on TV
.
It also created the Rick and Monica talk show where viewers put the words in their mouths.
RedLynx shares revenues with the TV broadcaster. Founded in 2000, Redlynx employs 40, mainly in Helsinki. It's sales in 2005 were close to €3M. The investment is meant to fund the international sales
VCs in Europe have been making a few tentative investments in the interactive TV market. Munich’s Baytech Ventures has invested in Betty TV AG, which relies on modified remote control to interact with Swiss and German television and broadband TV programs, and BV Capital has invested in moreTV Broadcasting GmbH, Hamburg, which is targeting satellite TV broadcasters.
This is one of those markets that in the past got a lot of hype. So far, it has brought us bunnies reading text messages on TV and voting by phone on who should win the Eurovision song contest. We can only conclude that the killer applications are yet to come.
Posted at 10:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 10, 2006
Esmertec's rollup continues
Its share price performance may be less than stellar since Esmertec raised about SFr100M last year on the Swiss stock exchange, but its ability to do M&A in the highly fragmented mobile java software market is pretty solid.
Before going public, Esmertec, whose claim to fame is a small-footprint virtual machine that runs Java code on mobilephones, completed five low-budget acquisitions of rivals, snapping up Kada Systems, Insignia Solutions, Esmertec Engineering Services KK (formerly eValley Inc.), OOVM and the mobile division of CoreTek Systems, within a three year period.
It just completed two more deals. Today, Esmertec said it paid €9.5M for France’s Cellicium, the highest amount it paid for an acquisition to-date, we believe. Another €3M could be paid if milestones are reached in the next year. It was a cash and stock based payment.
Cellicium, which is profitable, makes so-called subscriber self-service applications used by mobile network operators. It is a new market for Esmertec to attack beyond the cellphone, and will be the basis of a new business unit.
Esmertec also said it took a 20 percent stake in Silicon Valley based Javaground, a mobile phone games developer and tools for games developers, which could rollover into 100 percent ownership next year.
Jean Schmitt, Esmertec's secret weapon
We hear that board member and early investor, Jean Schmitt, a partner at Sofinnova in Paris, is a driving force in Esmertec's rollup activity. We've talked to entrepreneurs who've been on the other side of the negotiating table with him and they say he drives a hard bargain.
Schmitt says he is just straightforward and makes only one offer (at least that is what he told us at a recent private equity investment conference).
Whatever his strategy or style, when it is combined with Esmertec's management, it seems to be successful.
Posted at 07:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 09, 2006
The Cloud Weighs In On FON
Since they both are trying to build wireless hotspot businesses in Europe, the alarm:clock euro asked Niall Murphy CTO, of The Cloud for a comment on FON's entry into the market.
Rather than feeling threatened, Murphy sees the upstart as positive, mainly due to the marketing-effect. But you can read his words below and form your own opinion.
And, yes we checked, The Cloud has no contractual agreement with FON, although it does have an agreement with Skype (a FON shareholder) to provide its chat service by default in its hotspots.
Niall Murphy, CTO, The Cloud
The recent announcement by Fon reflects the growth in the home WiFi market and, moreover, highlights the benefits of WiFi to consumers. The Fon business model is similar to Skype.
We see it as complementary to the activity that The Cloud is involved in in the UK, Germany and Nordic region. It will be really interesting to see what kind of pick up it gets, but , on the whole, it is an important development and a positive one for the market we operate in.
The more WiFi users there are, the better for us, as this drives the general acceptance of WiFi as a mobility tool and the inherent demand for connectivity by people who have WiFi enabled devices.
Posted at 03:43 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 07, 2006
Actionality raises funding to take commercials to the tiny screen
Actionality, a Munich-based mobile phone marketing technology developer announced today that Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures invested in its seed round. The deal actually closed at the inception of the company in April 2005 but was just made public today.
There was no disclosure on the size but a typical European seed round is €2M to €4M range.
The a:c euro was assured by the firm’s backers that Actionality is not delivering spam to mobile phones. This is something new. It is a technology that can deliver short, 10 to 20 second, commercials at the beginning or the end of a mobile game. For example, a Nike shoe ad at the beginning of a FIFA soccer action game.
The firm claims ease of use as it has automated the ad integration process. Commercials can be loaded into the server by either the games publisher, an Actionality employee, or the advertising campaign distributer.
There are three founders, one American, Scott Cullinane, and two Germans, Matthias Kunze and Thomas Lopatic. This is not the latter two’s first software company together, but it is their first venture-backed company. As soon as they make some screenshots available we will post again.
Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures is one of the few VCs investing in early stage companies in Europe these days. It invested in six last year alone, a couple of which have yet to be announced, we are told.
Posted at 04:46 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
FON due diligence extravaganza
Yesterday FON came out of viral marketing mode into the public eye when it announced its famous backers and relatively small financing round. Within a 24-hour period the business press and the blogosphere put the company, its business model, customers, legality, business partners, and technology under the microscope. Talk about an instant and massive due diligence effort.
We asked Danny Rimer of Index Ventures about it in an email.
a:c euro: Did you get similar feedback from your due diligence team?
Rimer: “Of course,” wrote Rimer, adding: “Skepticism is always rampant for controversial plays.”
Rimer is unfazed, it seems. Could be that he is getting used to backing disruptive upstarts. There was similar commentary when Skype announced its Series B round. Journalists (this one included) and pundits wrote: it’s been done before and failed. How is it going to make a profit? Its strategic partnerships are not as stable as it says. And what about the threat of regulatory backlash? So far, none of those issues have affected the value of the business.
Posted at 08:42 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 06, 2006
Apertio fills coffer before IPO
Mobile network infrastructure supplier, Apertio announced closing a $30 million Series B internal round. It is the firm’s last round before going public, it added without providing any further details. Apertio is just four years old and based in the UK.
Most of the firm's top management parachuted out of Lucent Technologies lab in Bristol back in 2002. At the time, Lucent was doing most of its R&D for third generation mobile networks at this site. (The Bristol region is as hot if not hotter than Cambridge for technology startups, but not as well marketed.)
Since then, under the leadership of Paul Magelli CEO, Apertio has raised about $38M in venture capital, and has managed to break into the carrier market. It received early stage financing from up and coming UK venture firm Eden Ventures.
It makes a number of Linux-based products that enable mobile network operators to move to an IP-based networking environment, a so-called converged network for voice, data, and Internet services. Unlike existing systems it can scale to 100M subscribers, it claims.
A classic Before and After shot from Apertio's marketing department
Apertio is one of the few startups gunning for this market, so its competitors are mainly the major telco equipment suppliers Alcatel, Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. US-based Stoke, also recently raised a monster round, with plans to target the same segment.
It must be doing something better than the big players as it has managed to sell to at least 10 telcos including, Orange in the UK, T-Mobile, True Corporation and AIS. The market it is addressing is worth about $2 billion, the firm claims.
Read - Stoke vs Fon (alarm:clock)
Read - Press Release (Sourcewire)
Read - About Bristol's high tech cluster
Posted at 12:08 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Sequoia, Google, Index Ventures back Varsavsky's FON
FON has just raised €18mln from a syndicate of investors that include two heavyweight corporates, Skype and Google, as well as two blue chip VCs, Sequoia and Index Ventures. It is the latest alternative telco venture from Martin Varsavsky. We've mentioned it several times in recent posts.
FON is a network of wireless hotspots in Europe. The infrasctructure is based on the end-users sharing their wireless LANs and broadband Internet connections wtih each other and paying subscribers. His business model has the potential to undercut rivals, mainly mobile network operators and alternative wireless Internet access providers.
Read - Dream-come-true plus funding news (Varsavsky's blog)
Read - Stoke vs Fon (alarm:clock)
Posted at 05:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 03, 2006
The Cloud Grows Blows in From The UK
London-based WiFi operator The Cloud is becoming a formidable company. This week it announced its acquisition of NetCheckiN (NCI), a German WiFi operator. This coincided with its closing of its third round of funding - bringing its total investment to over EUR20M - with existing investors, 3i and Accel.
The Cloud currently has wide area outdoor coverage in nine cities in the UK, with deployments in rail stations, hotels, airports, universities and parks. For example, The Cloud provides service to the 100 acre Cannery Project in London. The Cloud will also use the funds to build on its existing presence in Germany and Sweden.
The Cloud Provides WiFi To Prestigious Hotspots Like The British Library
Read - The Cloud's Latest Fundraising Round Brings Total Investment to Over EUR20 Million
Posted at 11:34 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 02, 2006
Anam Mobile Messaging Raises €14M
Anam Mobile, a mobile messaging equipment and software developer, announced raising €14M series B round today. The Irish company was founded in 1999 with funding from Mayfair Venture Capital but was basically re-booted in 2003 with new financing and a new management team that left Logica, one of a handful of leading suppliers and integrators to mobile network operators.
The deal was led by FF&P Private Equity Ltd, an institutional investor that typically invest in fund, as opposed to doing direct investments. Motorola Ventures, the venture arm of Motorola Inc, and early investor Mayfair Venture Capital also participated in the round.
In 2004, Anam acquired a smaller rival Aliope and now employs 70 people. The new capital is not for acquisitions says the firm, it is to be used for new product development.
Anam's website has lots of pictures of fresh fruit and goldfish, but it sells mobile messaging gear.
This is the second European venture of this sort to raise new capital in the past week. The other is Airwide Solutions. Last year it was games and applications. Looks like this year it is going to be the equipment and software that gets all the text, video, and image messages delivered to the right people and at a profit for the operators.
Read - Press Release
Read - Airwide in private equity round (a:c euro)
Posted at 12:32 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 26, 2006
Mobile messaging tech firm draws private equity
Things are looking up in the technology sector as European buyout funds, which pretty much steered clear of the sector over the past few years, return. Either that or the fierce competition in less risky sectors is driving prices into the nosebleed area, making technology deals look more attractive.
Either way, Advent International has just taken a stake in Airwide Solutions, a vendor of text messaging servers, as well as cellular phone security software. The deal comes one week after Metris, a measurement systems company, announced raising Euro 30 mln to acquire three smaller rivals with GIMV, a Dutch private equity firm leading the round.
Airwide, which was founded in 2004 through the merger of Schlumberger's Messaging Solutions based in the UK and Taral Networks, a North American startup, mentioned plans to pursue "strategic opportunities" with some of the $25 mln it raised. The latter is VC-speak for making acquisitions.
Our moles say that doing a rollup won't be easy. The mobile messaging equipment segment is ripe for consolidation, comprised as it is of many smallish companies that often have only a single product. Others that have tried say the challenge is convincing business owners to give up control of their small businesses.
It is unusual for an investor like Advent not to take a controlling interest. For this investment, it shared the deal with Airwide's four earlier investors. More usual is the kind of deal it did late last year when it acquired a majority of Aircom, also active in the cellular network market, but more focused on network planning and management. Advent said itself that Aircom is a "platform" company, which means it will be adding to it through acquisitions to build a larger company.
Read - Airwide financing
Posted at 12:03 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 25, 2006
Iqua= Bluetooth headsets + Former Nokians + Non-Borg designs
If you’re tired of looking like a Borg when sporting a mobilephone headset, then the colorful and small ones from Iqua will be of interest. At least that is what Eqvitec, a major Scandinavian private equity firm, which just invested Euro 2 mln in the startup's first financing round is hoping.
Iqua Ltd was founded in 2004 by a team of marketing managers that left their comfy cubicles at mobilephone manufacturer Nokia to start the company. It was the management team’s experience that attracted the capital. That and the fact that Bluetooth chipsets are becoming standard in cellphones. The theory goes is that it will create “vast market” opportunity for companies selling wireless headset, handsfree phones, and other accessories.
“They’ve got some new concepts and innovative designs that we think will be popular,” Jukka Jokinen, Investment Director, Eqvitec Partners told the a:c euro.
Its Bluetooth-enabled accessories have a Scandinavian design vibe going for them.
It looks like Nokia may have dropped the ball on growing its accessory business as co-founder and CEO, Juha Reima, was the vice president of accessories at Nokia Mobile Phones and worked there since 1988. Another founder, Jouko Häyrynen, Iqua director of business development, also worked at Nokia for two decades before leaving to act as a business angel and startup consultant and then found Iqua.
The two have managed to fill the startup's key management positions by recruiting from their former employer.
But Iqua enters a competitive market. Its products will compete against those from the major brandname phone-makers, as well as Plantronics and Jabra, another young company that is part of the Danish-based technology group, GN Great Nordic. It will be hard to keep ahead of deep pocketed competitors.
Having said that, often the teams that spin out of these European electronics giants create companies that exploit some good ideas that were languishing in the larger organization, and they appreciate in value rather quickly.
For example, this week Spirent acquired five year old SwissQual for $70 mln this week, whose founding team left Swiss telco equipment manufacturer Ascom to bootstrap the company to profitability.
And there was Microcell, an original development manufacturer created by a large team of ex-Nokians, which was acquired by Flextronics for USD200 mln (it paid $80 mln in cash and assumed $120 mln in debt with the purchase).
We are sure these deals did not go un-noticed by Iqua’s investors.
Iqua is trying to sell smart badge gear to companies for office workers. It is a combo-device that include ID badge, headphone, and wireless access to several phones. It can handle 40 hours of talk time.
Read- Iqua raises first round (Eqvitec)
