[UK] Stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”
The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.
Zkatter, which has received $1.5 million in Series A funding, is also developing iPhone and Android apps to work in conjunction with the standalone site, with the platform updated in real-time across all devices. So if you post an update on your iPhone, it will automatically show on the site. And Zkatter will be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can publish you updates to both social networks as well. There are additional features to the site but this is the general idea of what the Zkatter will be able to do.
Guest post: We’ve given Europe’s tech video bloggers a mission to hunt down European startups every Friday and get them to give an elevator pitch. We’ll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you’ve got a video blog about tech startups, get in touch. Thanks to Tiburon TV for this post.
[Sweden] During the last 24 hours the cream of Sweden’s tech entrepreneur scene have exchanged jeans for yukatas (Japanese bathrobes), chairs for bean bags and isolated themselves in a zen style hotel outside Stockholm. Why? To come up with 60 new startups and then take over the world, of course! Well, maybe that isn’t what they think, but the location definitely has a Bond villain feel to it.
You have to hand it to the Swedes. Not only are they in amongst the forefront of web entrepreneurship in Europe, thanks to companies like Spotify and others, but they’re also hungry for more. This is the second 24 hour business camp of the year (the first ever event was held in January). During the last camp about 52 startups were created. And now they’re aiming for more. In bathrobes. In Autumn.
[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation and Skills) of a strategy paper for the creative economy called Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.
If you liked ampersands, the Government’s creative industries conference, C&binet Forum was a great place to be. The logo sat everywhere, from the signs for dinner to massive “&” sculpture in one of The Grove’s lobbies.
Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.
The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.
I’m currently blogging from a boat, rented by Belgian social network operator Netlog to host about a hundred of their closest business partners for a presentation about their freshly redesigned website and a roadmap of what’s in store for the future.
In their presentation, co-founders Toon Coppens and Lorenz Bogaert introduced something other than the newly revamped site. The company has also been developing a separately branded social gaming platform called Gatcha! which was talked about publicly for the first time today.
[UK] Online film and TV aggregator BlinkBox has gone all arty on us, signing a content partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI) — bringing the total number of British TV and film titles on offer to over five hundred and the total number of “premium” titles available on the service to just under six thousand.
Seeing BlinkBox, arguably, go a little up market with the BFI partnership sits a little at odds with the company’s recent credit crunch-busting Pizza Hut promotion or its long term ‘viral’ marketing strategy whereby users can create movie clips – referred to as ‘Blinks’ – to share with friends via email or SMS. But hey, more choice is always welcome.
[Sweden] Voddler, the Stockholm-based online video offering that’s being described as “Spotify for movies”, has signed content partnerships with Paramount and Disney. A deal with Sony Pictures is also said to be eminent.
Voddler, Inc., the company behind the new service, was formed back in 2005 and has offices in Stockholm, Palo Alto, and Beijing. It’s thought to have taken around $16 million worth of funding from investors including Deseven Capital, Freja Ventures and Lotsa SA.
Right now the service, which offers add-supported streaming of movies and TV shows as well as premium paid-for content, is only available in a closed beta in the company’s home country of Sweden. However, perhaps now that more content has been secured, Voddler is beginning to open up.
Today, Netlog – the ‘European MySpace’ as they’re often referred to – is hosting a Partner Day at and around their global headquarters in Ghent, Belgium. The most important thing the company will be sharing is a look at their redesigned website, which has been in the works for about a year and is today being rolled out to a number of key countries. I got an exclusive preview of the revamped website from co-founder Toon Coppens, so here’s an impression of what it will look like and where they’re going with the social network.
Netlog currently sees about 250 million visits from 56 million unique visitors on a monthly basis and is handling half a million new sign-ups every week. Its main target has historically been young people (65% of its user base is between 14 and 24 years old) and with the redesign the company is clearly catering to that particular demographic, making the homepage much more visual and far less cluttered. You can see some screenshots of the impending new version below, along with a screen capture of the ‘old’ homepage.
[France] As my first post on Techcrunch Europe I thought it could be interesting to give you some insights on the French market, and especially the situation regarding fund raising. So here is a list of (almost all) French companies in the web industry that have raised more than €1 million in 2009.
Divided into three categories (Web, Mobile & E-Commerce), they are ranked by decreasing amount, and then by date. Despite all my research, I cannot guarantee that this list is 100% exhaustive, but I am pretty confident that this list covers 95% of transactions made in 2009. Don’t look for a source for each line, they were too numerous. But the main ones were company or investor websites, Journal du net or Neteco and blogs etc – and of course previous articles published on TechCrunch
[Germany] Serial founder and investor Lukasz Gadowski constantly taps new online markets. In his latest venture, the entrepreneur from Berlin ( who is best known for his part in the success of Spreadshirt, StudiVZ, Brands4Friends and many German startups) now has plans to emulate Citizen Kane and become a major league publisher.
The European is the name of his new online publishing venture for debate and opinion. More than 20 high class journalists will be using it to cover global issues. This could end up being the European Huffington Post (at least, for Germany).
Y combinator’s annual startup school event was held in Berkeley last Saturday and featured a stellar lineup of speakers including the founders of Twitter, Facebook and Zappos. The founders speaking were almost universally charming and funny, even Mark Zuckerberg who I was determined to dislike (he does look around 12 though). This reinforces my belief that charm goes a long way in business.
Jason Fried of 37 Signals gave one of the talks which seemed most relevant to European startups. His business partner is actually from Copenhagen and they worked together for 2 years before meeting in person. Here’s a summary of his presentation and a chat I had with him afterwards.
[UK] We’d been hearing whispers that Atlas-backed discount fashion buying club Koodos was looking at its ‘options’, but we’ve confirmed today that it was yesterday acquired by the e-trader group which specialises in the onwards sale of surplus stock. The price is undisclosed but it’s a cash and shares deal which we understand to be in the vicinity of less than £250,000. In other words, that is pretty cheap, especially for a VC-backed business. It had one undisclosed round from Atlas in June 2006 but has been looking for £3-6m follow-on funding since the beginning of the year.
While the Koodos operational team is staying on, CEO Miriam Lahage will be departing after a handover period.
E-Trader Group CEO Harvey Sinclair, a serial entrepreneur with exits, told me the sale came about because Atlas is “backing the E-Trader story. We’ve been talking to them at length and they buy into it heavily.”
However our sources say Koodos had run into severe trading difficulty recently, hence the sale. We put it to both Atlas and to E-trader Group that we understood Koodos had in fact had gone into administration. Atlas denied this. Sinclair told us Koodos had been “looking at a financing structure which allowed their business to work more efficiently.”
Google Powermeter, the search giant’s home energy monitoring tool, has launched in the UK today. While the environment stands to benefit – research shows that when users have access to detailed information about their energy use, household energy bills are reduced by up to 10% – Cambridge, UK-based AlertMe should also do quite well out of this. The VC-backed company has become Google’s first device partner for the service.
AlertMe is backed by leading clean technology investors including Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET VP, and Vantage Point, and in June 2009 announced an £8 million Series B round of funding bringing the total amount raised to £13 million.
Users who want to take advantage of Google Powermeter can purchase a self-installable AlertMe Energy kit and accompanying subscription (£69.00 for the hardware and then £2.99 per month). They’ll then be able to access their energy consumption data on Powermeter, sort of like Google Analytics but for energy, visualised on their iGoogle home page. AlertMe also provides its own web-based ‘dashboard’ that can be accessed wherever there is an Internet connection, including through mobile phones. Read More
VC investment in Europe has recovered after a record low in the second quarter but we’re not out of the woods, says Dow Jones VentureSource. Investors put $998 million (€730 million) into 201 deals in Europe overall. This is a 23% increase from the previous quarter, which was the lowest on record since Dow Jones VentureSource began reporting on the region in 2000. The UK was the No. 2 destination for venture capital behind the U.S. in Q3 with $393 million (£240 million) spent on 67 deals.
France had its worst quarter of 2009 and dropped 58% from the same period last year (55 deals), while in Switzerland, investors put $80 million (€59 million) into seven deals, on par with the previous quarter but still down on a year ago. Capital investment in Germany plummeted. Sweden had its best quarter of 2009 though venture investment was down 22%. Spain saw a dramatic 86% drop from the same period last year. Investment in the Netherlands rose 41% from the same period last year. It seems Amsterdam has startup fever.
[UK/Sweden] Streaming music startup Spotify has confirmed that its CTO has left, effective today. Andreas Ehn tweeted about his departure this morning, in a move which has taken observers by surprise. The company is currently prepping a big launch in the U.S., a watershed which would normally suggest that this is a moment to have all hands on deck. Losing your CTO right now is probably not the best timing, to put it mildly.
However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they’d “like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work” and “everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!” I’m sure this isn’t meant to sound back-handed but Ehn’s tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture.
Streaming music startup Spotify usually makes a big deal out of the fact that its service is so awesome and delightful (hey, it is pretty good) that it’s never needed to do any advertising or marketing.
Well that changes today because its first ever commercial television advert premieres today on TV Network Kanal 5 in Sweden. And here it is:
The Telegraph has published an article about some survey which claims social networks such as Twitter are costing British businesses at the very least £1.38 billion (approx. $2.25 billion) a year.
Shocking findings, I daresay!
Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could actually be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.
[Italy] Facebook has opened a commercial office in Italy to capitalise on the social network’s growth there. The news was picked up by majoritalianpublications, and it may have a significant impact on the ecosystem here in Milan, even if it’s only a sales and business development office.
Of course Milan, as a the commercial centre for Italy, is a no-brainer to start an ad-sales office. However, it does mean it won’t be plugging in much to the startup scene which is largely centred around Rome, where it’s cheaper to operate from.
[UK] 4iP, quasi venture investment fund from TV broadcaster Channel 4, is putting even further, undisclosed, investment into Audioboo, the ‘Twitter for audio’ startup. As part of the deal, UBC Media, the content and software supplier to the radio industry, is also effectively injecting cash into the forthcoming Audioboo Pro version of the startup’s iPhone app by buying 8 licences, though how much those cost hasn’t been released.
Audioboo has already sold a Pro version to The Royal Opera House, although that one sale won’t get it very far. However, they say media brands like the The Guardian, Channel 4 News, the BBC, TechCrunch Europe (well, me now and a again), The Telegraph and PaidContent have all used “Audioboos” style interviews as part of their content. I can confidently say that Audioboo is a great reporting platform because you literally just record the audio and upload from inside the app. The professional version allows one to queue uploads as well.
However, I have had equal success with the iPadio app which, like Audioboo, also tweets out a link to the audio. The difference between the two is that iPadio is really going after the internal corporate communications market, while at the same time giving away the app to create adoption. Audioboo is going after consumers and media brands.
Daniel Heaf, Investor for 4iP, said: “Our first round of funding helped Audioboo to market to prove both a user and market need. Now is the time to help Mark and his team fully realise that opportunity.”
No doubt Audioboo will use this PR opportunity to boost it’s attempt to fund-raise in the US, which I gather it’s off to do shortly.
[UK] We’d been hearing whispers that Atlas-backed discount fashion buying club 
[UK/Sweden] Streaming music startup 
[Italy] 
[UK] 