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Euro Ventures - Friday, May 26, 2006

The Week In Euro Tech Ventures

- Read the a:c euro interview with Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, the co-founder of vpod.tv, a nine month old European online video publishing and distribution service provider. We talked to him about his business model and the firm's strategy after he announced a €5.1M first round commitment from Innovacom.

- Europe had more IPOs activity than the US had last year, the first time since 1998.

- Video: Mangrove Capital, one of Skype's first round investors, is a very secretive fund -- doesn't publish its portfolio and doesn't do PR -- so vpod.tv's interview at the Innovate Europe conference this week with founding partner Mark Tluszcz is a bit of a scoop. What's he looking for? A better search technology.

- See the a:c euro interview with Peter Clarke at EE Times.

- Vencap International's list of the current crop of European VC-backed tech pioneers:

- Norway's Trolltech has filed to go public on the Oslo exchange. Trolltech is a developer of software development tools for Linux phones.

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

- Swedish startup Rebtel generated some buzz at Innovate Europe last week. Rebtel requires users to enter their contacts' names and numbers and then assigns each party a local phone number to call. The local number is sent by text message to each party.

- France's Tagsys Moves To US, Raises Pre-IPO Round. French RFID systems developer Tagsys has raised $35M in what it hopes to be its last round before going public.

- Orascom Telecom WiMAX of Egyt and Worldmax of the Netherlands will be getting some capital and tech know-how from Intel.

- Chic, Euro cell phone designs from Jaguar and Diesel.

- A UK mobilephone service startup 82ASK, which charges £1 to respond to any question by text message, gets angel funding.

- Sweden's Idevio has developed a new mapping engine that claims a greater than 10 x improvement on the compression and publishing of digital maps.

- Paris- based Galileo Partners has invested €2.1M into open source software startup Talend.

- Benchmark Europe Backs Classmates Clone Bebo.

- Scottish Equity Partners is close to closing a new tech fund with a remit to invest in the UK mainly. It would be its 70-times return-on-investment in semiconductor manufacturer Wolfson Microelectronics, that has helped the Glasgow and London-based firm garner commitments of €120M on its new fund that will back between 25 and 30 companies.

- The Viscom IPO in Germany raised €54M, which was exactly the amount the industrial inspection systems company was aiming for.

- University spinoff, Light Blue Optics, in Cambridge, England, has reached the demo stage of its match-box sized personal beamer. Its tech will allow a mobilephone, laptop computer, personal media players such as the video iPod, and digital cameras can project videos, photos, or clips forviewing on a larger display area.