Berlin-based social gaming company wooga, whose “Brain Buddies” now has 2.5million users on Facebook (and it’s still growing by 100,000 a day), just closed a round of investment – terms undisclosed – from Holtzbrinck Ventures. It plans to develop several new games and launch them off the back of the momentum created by Brain Buddies.
Holtzbrinck is a good partner for wooga: they have experience in the social media space and are investors in StudiVZ, Germany’s largest home-grown social network. Read More
UK real estate startup Zoopla has confirmed our recent story by officially announcing the acquisition of the the PropertyFinder Group, which was put up for sale recently by joint owners REA Group and News International. Terms were undisclosed but we believe it was for £1.5m.
Under the deal, Zoopla.co.uk will take over and integrate the propertyfinder.com and other websites, benefiting from an additional 3 million unique visitors a month and revenues of almost £7 million a year. The combined group will power property partnerships with UK websites including MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Guardian, Tiscali, Sky and Virgin amongst others. This latest deal by Zoopla.co.uk comes hot on the heels of its acquisition a couple of weeks ago of ThinkProperty.com from Guardian Media Group. Atlas Venture, backer of Zoopla.co.uk, confirmed it approved of the deal.
It’s ironic that the day London is declared the Capital of Twitter (or at least the largest critical mass of twitter users in one place) that Twitter goes down. So where did everyone go as an alternative?
So used am I to Twitter and Tweetdeck that I suddenly found myself trying to use Facebook like Twitter. Instead of replying to the comments on my Facebooks status update that I was suddenly back in Facebook after a long time away – I found myself wanting to create more status updates and @reply individuals. Not possible.
Throughout the summer we’re running guest posts we like – preferably exclusive to TC Europe – written by people on the tech scene in Europe. Here’s an example. If you’d like to contribute get in touch. One email, pitch us the idea for a post in one paragraph. We won’t be running ‘trade-off’ style material as in ‘I have something I’d like to pimp, please include a link inside this thinly-veiled advert for my company’. The post needs to have internal merit. We’re looking for hard core contributions to the tech and startup scene in Europe by entrepreneurs and investors. We’re particular interested in problems that need to be solved, trends, criticisms, commentary and, hell, even something funny.
The latest Star Trek movie seemed like a great opportunity to get everyone in the London tech scene out for a geek-out session at a cinema. But despite talking to cinemas about private screenings I drew a blank. But there’s clearly a crowd-sourcing option here which is this: TechCrunch readers all buying tickets at the same cinema for the same day and screening time.
District 9 looks like your classic sci-fi fare (and by endorsed by Peter Jackson no less). So I suggest we get sourcing a good cinema in London where we can all pre-book tickets and (cough) it’s on a day I can come (i.e. not next week please). I don’t know when District 9 comes out but it’s in the “the summer” so I’m guessing August or at least it’ll still be out in early September.
Twitter was featured on the BBC’s Newsnight programme last night. There weren’t any great revelations about the service, however the confirmation from the CEO that London remains the top Twitter-using city in the world is pretty interesting. This was indicated last year, but it is surprising that, a year on, London has retained this top slot, which just goes to show how popular it is in the UK overall.
Aside from that, the report it did provide a sort of “101″ introduction to the service – although it was quite simplistic. That’s pretty much British TV reporting about tech in a nutshell.
Alberto Nardelli’s Tweetminster has been in the news a lot recently. In July, the company launched its brilliant Livewire service in partnership with the Independent newspaper, and a week ago we reported that the start-up had secured £100k in Angel investment. Not bad going for a company less than nine months old.
Now, Tweetminster has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to find “ten commandments” for UK MPs, amid growing public dissatisfaction with elected representatives and in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal. The ten commandments “will define a set of standards our elected representatives should adhere to in public life”. MPs are invited to participate in the campaign themselves.
We have 200 invites to readers to Kohive, a new “social desktop” puts several web applications into one interface. Users get what looks like a computer desktop with applications on the left and a tab panel at the bottom. Each of these tabs (“hives”) is a different space to invite people into, share content and communicate. So far so hippy.
However, Kohive claims a their interface allows for an unlimited number of uses since an infinite amount of web applications can be created and embedded into the platform like Google Docs, Google Wave, Google Mail, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, uStream etc. I’m afraid I’m unconvinced and there seems to be an absence of a… business model, unless its something obvious like premium services.
Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. Pipejump is a new sales cycle management startup with drag and drop features aimed at small company sales people and freelancers. It’s a kind of Basecamp meets Salesforce. It’s deceptively simple to use but actually pretty powerful in its simplicity.
Co-founded and developed by Applicake from Krakow (Poland) the venture is bootstrapped but, I understand, has already turned down some investment offers.
imedo, the German healthcare community launched in 2007, has continued its campaign of expansion across Europe with the acquisition in June of medsana.ch, one of the largest independent health portals in Switzerland. The deal follows imedo’s earlier acquisition of German medical resource site medizin-netz. medsana.ch and medizin-netz will retain their independence but become part of the “imedo Health Network”.
Among imedo’s features are a doctor recommendation service, “virtual hugs” (no, really) and online support groups. Another startup in imedo’s space in Germany is doctr.com, which allows patients to speak with doctors over secure video chat.
The Tomorrow’s Web conference in London this Saturday looks set to be a brilliant showcase of young talent in the UK tech industry. The conference will stage over nine hours of panels and discussions, with speakers like Nick Bell and Alex Tew. Anyone who’s interested in meeting some of the leading UK “teenagers in technology” (and some of us were teens once upon a time) should definitely make the effort to attend.
This is a guest post by Inma Martinez of Stradbroke Advisors (and blog), a consultancy which works with VC firms and startups in Europe and the US. Throughout the summer we’re running guest posts we like – preferably exclusive to TC Europe – written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch.
I spent the whole afternoon and evening yesterday evaluating a list of about 50 UK startups that will compete for the title of “European Tech Media Company of the Year” in a high-profile October event in London. Not that I haven’t been involved in similar processes before but the point that I want to highlight hereby is the absolute mental maze that we, the evaluators, got ourselves in for at least a good five hours. Amongst us were some of the highest profile investors, lawyers and execs in the entrepreneurial world.
The mind-boggling issue was to be presented with a list consisting of a mixture of early stage startups alongside companies trading for a large number of years as well as companies turning over about £100m per annum. To everyone’s amusement, a good number of companies dated back to 2000 – yes, almost ten years ago – and still no one in the room had a clue as to what was going on with their businesses because sales figures had not shown up in their applications, so they still looked to all appearances like pre-revenue or bootstrapped up to their eyebrows. So are we to still call them “startups” because they are either still unfunded, or showing very little footprint in their market? Which leads me to ask:
It’s still tough out there for funding but Munich start-up United Maps, which generates “maps for humans, not for cars”, has completed a second round of funding from existing investors, including the High-Tech Start-Up Fund. Terms were undisclosed.
United Map’s technology “matches and merges vector sets to produce hyperlocal maps on large scales between 1:5,000 and 1:1,000″. It licenses maps from companies like Navteq and Tele Atlas and creates routable vector maps from them, overlaying additional cartographical information and other data. The company plans to have rolled its services out beyond Germany by 2010.
Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report (PDF) published by the European Commission. The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last five years, demonstrated that new technologies are spreading fast across the continent but deep divisions remain and that particularly the elder and unemployed remain largely unaware of the existence of websites such as TechCrunch and FAILblog.org.
The commission’s study showed that 56 percent of Europeans had become regular Internet users by 2008, a jump of one third since 2004. Forty three percent of EU citizens currently use the web every day, while 75 percent use it regularly (“at least once a week”) compared to only 43 percent in 2005. Half of all households and more than 80 percent of businesses had a broadband connection last year and with 114 million subscribers the EU is in fact the largest world market for fixed broadband access.
When I walked in to SpinVox‘s plush Buckinghamshire offices this morning, flanked by the Register‘s Andrew Orlowski and Ben Smith and Dan Lane from The Really Mobile Project, the tension in the building was obvious. There were nervously exchanged glances and bad jokes from senior staff. A smartly-dressed James Whatleyeyed me reproachfully. But the guys managed to hold it together for long enough to usher us in to a conference room and ply us with pastries.
We were not asked to sign an NDA, but we were asked not to record anything that happened in the room. Ironic, really – and the reason that Ewan MacLeod from Mobile Industry Reviewdeclined the invitation.
CIO Rob Wheatley took us through a technical explanation that, while honest about the existence of human agents in the process, didn’t give away as many secrets as he made out (between the four of us, there wasn’t much we didn’t already know), before leaping to what we all came for: the demo.
So the rumors that Spotify is raising a new round of financing of around $50 million have been confirmed by TechCrunch. That gives it a valuation of $250 million. The money will come from Asian investor Li Ka-Shing and another venture firm, potentially Wellington. Our report from October that Spotify had raised €15.3 million from Northzone Ventures and Creandum at a €71.6 million pre-money valuation was close-sih. In fact it was €20 million, and – most interestingly – included investments from all the big music labels. That put the company at a €100 million valuation. Now, more rights holders are participating, pressured by lots of interest from other VCs. Spotify has 2 million UK users but in Sweden it’s rumoured to have at least 5 million 1 million, and a growing footprint in Germany.
Join TechCrunch Europe and Future of Web Apps in London in October for a pretty awesome two days. Some of the people appearing will be digg’s Kevin Rose, Britt Selvitelle (Twitter), Dave Morin (Facebook), Yehuda Katz (Merb), Francisco Tolmasky (Atlas) and many others. TechCrunch Europe will also be hearing pitches form startups on Oct 2nd at 3:10pm.
As part of our media partnership with FOWA, we’re offering a 15% discount to 10 randomly selected people who comment on this post. Alternatively you can book now Book now here.
Spark Ventures PLC, formerly NewMediaSpark, is an early-stage venture capital investor, operating in Europe for the last 12 years. That makes it an old timer on this nascent scene. But today its third-largest shareholder urged fellow stakeholders to vote against a proposed management buyout. Venture Wire reports that Vine Street Capital, which has an 8% stake, believes the deal is undervalued and rewards a management team that has engaged in “consistently loss-making investment activity” for a decade. At this level, this is a fairly explosive statement and would suggest something of a breakdown in relations.
Spark’s independent non-executive directors have replied with a letter to shareholders which argues that it would be “extremely difficult” for a new broom to sweep the old management team away and for a new team to deliver value to shareholders. They called fro a vote in favor of the buyout.
7Digital, which already has partnerships with Spotify and open source music player Songbird, has long been attempting to position itself as the home of non-DRM MP3 sales and it continues to do some interesting deals. The latest is an extended partnership with Warner Music that will see high quality MP3 music downloads from Warner Music added to the service.
Warner Music is the first major to sign a pan-European MP3 deal with 7digital. That means the retailer is now selling MP3s in a higher number of countries in Europe than any other service. As well as Spotify, 7digital has deals with Last.fm and AOL’s WinAmp. 7digital has a catalogue of more than 6m high quality DRM-free sound and video files in various formats, making it especially appealing to a young, tech-savvy consumer base.However the company is far from unseating iTunes as the market dominator. The site opened its API platform to developers in 2008, and streaming media applications were quick to capitalise.
In January last year the startup took £4.25 million ($8.5 million) in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital.
Locle, the mobile social location application has launched a set of APIs for third parties to leverage their location platform. Obviously this means that application developers can add location into their own apps via Locle’s API, which lets developers code their own front-end. Are they the first in the mobile location space to allow API access to 3rd parties? It’s possible.
The API is also revenue system in-built which contains location-based advertising, promotions and coupons and in-app micropayments and wallet. The API is also integrated with Twitter Facebook and OpenSocial, among others.
locle were a nominee this year in The TechCrunch Europas under Best Mobile Application (EMEA).
Berlin-based social gaming company wooga, whose “Brain Buddies” now has 2.5million users on Facebook (and it’s still growing by 100,000 a day), just closed a round of investment – terms undisclosed – from Holtzbrinck Ventures. It plans to develop several new games and launch them off the back of the momentum created by Brain Buddies.
UK real estate startup 
It’s ironic that the day London is declared the 
Alberto Nardelli’s 
Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. 
The 
I spent the whole afternoon and evening yesterday evaluating a list of about 50 UK startups that will compete for the title of “European Tech Media Company of the Year” in a high-profile October event in London. Not that I haven’t been involved in similar processes before but the point that I want to highlight hereby is the absolute mental maze that we, the evaluators, got ourselves in for at least a good five hours. Amongst us were some of the highest profile investors, lawyers and execs in the entrepreneurial world.
It’s still tough out there for funding but Munich start-up 
When I walked in to 
So the rumors that Spotify is raising a new round of financing of around $50 million have been 
Join TechCrunch Europe and 
