TechCrunch Europe has learnt that the startup, famously co-founded by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, put its UK subsidiary into liquidation at the beginning of this month. The reasons that are given are not all too surprising: the liquidator says the company has “failed to sustain a significant share of the internet video industry and was unable to address this effectively through a re-positioning of its services.”
We’ve also learnt that the office furniture of Joost UK Limited, registered in England and Wales with number 05821718, has apparently already found its way to another startup, namely Songkick (also based in London).
Whoa! Easyvoyage, the European travel site, has announced a second leveraged buyout of €31.6 million. That makes it the largest financial transaction in France and the 5th largest in Europe for this year, apparently.
The two new financial investors are UFG and GIMV. The initial shareholders Frederic Chevalier, Jacques Maillot, Francis Reverse, and Mogador Participations will maintain their position. Jean-Pierre Nadir, Founder and CEO now holds 40 per cent of the shares.
This second LBO follows an LBO of €9 million in December 2006. Easyvoyage has doubled revenue year-on-year.
[UK] Shazam’s funding today from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers could put it onto a path to IPO. The very cool way to find out the name of that track you like in a noisy bar, has reached 50m users. It’s aiming for 100 million by the end of next year.
The amount of funding has been undisclosed, so what size of that IPO would be is anyone’s guest. The cash for Shazam’s fourth fundraising is coming out of KPCB’s $100m iFund, which was launched in March last year aiming at mobile companies. Shazam also has investors DN Capital and Acacia Capital Partners. Shazam has raised about $20m to date.
[Berlin] Seedcamp Berlin winner PaperC has secured its first round of funding. Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen (TGFS), a state run venture fund by the German state of Saxony, has invested a six digit Euro sum with the option to also take part in a second round in 18 months. PaperC will use the funding to invest in its platform and to scale up marketing. They are also backed by business angels like entrepreneurship professor Günter Faltin and Christophe Maire, founder of Gate5 (now Nokia Maps), and now Saxony’s venture fund.
PaperC is a platform where users can read academic books in full text, free of charge. If users purchase a page for a nominal fee of €0.10, the text can also be downloaded and printed, or worked on online. Furthermore, PaperC retails print books via the publisher’s online shop. “Looks useful for scientific/academic papers. Could well do with partnering with someone like Mendeley or Academia”, was Mike Butcher’s take after their five minute pitch at the TechCrunch Berlin event in June, 2009.
Monday night was a dark time for Internet users in Sweden. For about an hour the Swedish Internet failed, meaning it was impossible to access any websites with a domain name ending in .SE (that’s about 900,000 domains folks). No one seems to know how the problem occurred, except that it happened during routine maintenance work. It makes you wonder how easy it would be to shut down the whole Internet.
Even Danny Aerts, the CEO for .SE, told Swedish news agency TT that he wasn’t sure how the error occurred, but that the problem is being investigated.
So the background first: Giant oil business Trafigura is accused of dumping toxic waste off the Ivory coast of Africa, allegedly causing harm to the local population that frequents those shores. In most countries the legal system has not bothered to hear Trafigura’s claims that it’s been libeled. But the UK still has libel laws which were written over a hundred years ago. These are more than friendly to the “injured” party. Thus wealthy companies and individuals regularly mount actions there that other countries wouldn’t even give 5 minutes of court time because they are so blatantly self-seeking. In the last couple of days The Guardian newspaper was subject to a judge’s gagging order preventing it from even reporting the fact that a question about Trafigura had been asked in Parliament, traditionally outside the constraints of gagging orders and libel law. This potentially set a huge and backward precedent.
What happens next? The gagging order, links to Wikileaks and plenty of other information about the case was repeated on Twitter. Last night and today the entire issue trended on Twitter with hashtags including #guardiangag #guardian #carterruck (Carter Ruck was the law firm representing Trafigura) and of course #Trafigura.
With the traditional media gagged, the new media had kicked in. That created a story which plenty of trad media outlets and blogs outside the UK could not ignore and started reporting on.
In other words, this kind of censorship is over. And I hope that British Libel law will change as a result. It must now move into the 21st Century and reflect new technology. After all, there is now a new defence. Feel libelled? You can defend your case just as much as the other guy online. Except of course if you are dumb enough not to register @carterruck, for instance.
Online cash trivia gamester Amuso has closed its latest round of funding with a $1.5 million investment from Mangrove Capital Partners, the principal investor at its launch in 2007, alongside a series of angel investors. It will use the cash to expand in the UK and US. It’s also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi, both former Directors of Strategic Partnerships at Google. Bill Houghton, former Director of Products at AOL Entertainment, is Amuso’s new Head of Products. Amuso’s development lab is in Barcelona.
Cash trivia games are worth more than $3 billion globally, and Amuso’s speciality is launching them on social networks via flash widgets. On TriviaStar competitors can play the free version or make small cash deposits, payable via SMA or PayPal, from which partners take a transactional commission. The remainder is used to fund cash prizes for winners. Amuso says conversion rates from play for free to play for cash represent one in ten for an average $1.50 entry fee.
[Lebanon] Back in March, 2008 we first wrote about Woopra the realtime web analytics startup that originated from Lebanon which, unlike Google Analytics, offered a desktop application to track websites visits as they happen. Since then Woopra has been in beta, upgrading its desktop app and offering a web version .
Today Woopra has come out of beta and introduced paid accounts, thus monetising its service. Previously it relied only on banner Advertising displayed at the home screen of its desktop app. This now means paying users do not need an invitation to the beta. It also means the removal of the 10,000 page view per day limit. Woopra is planning to add new features in about a month that will include a new Desktop version.
[France] On stage at last year’s Le Web an argument broke out between co-founder Loic Le Meur and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington over whether Europe was capable of producing a ‘big win’ Web company or whether Skype was, perhaps, just a one-hit wonder. Like heavyweight fighters, both of them traded some heavy blows in subsequent blog posts. But during the live on-stage Gilmour Gang, one company was mentioned by Le Meur which left the rest of the assembled staring blankly: Vente-Privee.
Probably the reason it prompted such sideways looks however is that this is not a classic web app startup, but an ecommerce hub. Vente-Privee began in France in 2001, but has only recently become a powerhouse of a new wave in Europe: online private sales clubs involving designer fashion brands, otherwise known in the fashion retail industry as the “overstock market”. Its success has lead to a bunch of clone sites, while Vente-Privee itself is on target to €650m in turnover globally this year. In other words Europe is not out to lunch – as Arrington put it – it is out to shop.
[Turkey]Markafoni, the first Turkish player in the wave of private shopping clubs in Europe, is planning to start operations in seven other countries by the end of 2010. Markafoni is planning to operate in Ukraine and Greece first, and looking at other markets.
Markafoni was founded in June 2008, and also now operates in Australia under the name BrandsExclusive.
Tolga Tatari, one of the cofounders, told us the company, which has 600,000 members in Turkey, has seen a seven-digit turnover in September and since then has been cash flow positive. Tatari says that 85 percent of its members sign in to the site every month. Markafoni has 60,000 visitors per day and a 30-person team in Turkey.
[UK] If you employ celebrity PR Max Clifford to help advertise your business you might end up with neat quotes stating that your niche of the industry is going to grow with 500 percent by 2012. Online storage might be the next big thing, but 500 percent sounds a tad excessive. Livedrive doesn’t seem to think so and is pushing forward with new partnerships. This time with ISP BeBroadband.
The company is the brainchild of entrepreneur Andrew Michael, who started his first business Fasthosts when he was 17 and later sold it for about £60 million. He’s since gained notoriety for throwing lavish Christmas parties and getting into legal disputes with posh casinos.
[UK] Presumably missing the obvious opportunity to launch “SkyTunes” to compete with the slightly better known iTunes (I guess because of the legalities) the UK broadcaster Sky is launching SkySongs some 15 months after it said it would.
Kicking off next week on October 19, the service will have all the major labels and 100 independents – but its four million catalogue compares badly with 7digital’s, for example. But then again, we are not really talking about Sky service here. We are talking about a re-skinned MusicStation /Omnifone. Omnifone is an independent provider of music services, with MusicStation being its main product. It’s won lots of industry awards, apparently.
[France] Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million. The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.
Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a ‘legitimately’ free music search engine back in August 2007.
In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.
This is the same Larry Dignan who is editor in chief of ZDNet, which is the same ZDNet that yesterday published a blog post accusing Yahoo of passing the names and email addresses of thousands – sorry, hundreds of thousands – of bloggers to the Iranian authorities during the country’s recent election.
Poor old Larry. One can only imagine the warmth with which he was greeted when he arrived at Yahoo’s event. “Hey Larry!” his hosts may perhaps have said “go fuck yourself.” And their suggestion wouldn’t be entirely unfair, given that the story – written by ‘lawyer and technology writer’ Richard Koman, was a steaming pile of horseshit.
Facebook finally gets its own ‘face’ for Germany: The sleuths of media newswire Kress Report got wind that Facebook could hire the advertising expert Scott Woods, who previously headed the Last.fm office in Hamburg. His new job is to build up contacts with brands and advertisers in Germany, as he already did for the music site. It was only last year that Woods got appointed as senior vice president and managing director for Germany at Last.fm. His Xing profile says that he stopped working there in February of this year.
Since March 2008 German Facebook members have used the website in their own language. But the social network never showed ambitions to open a local office. Woods’ assignment as an advertisers’ contact is seen as a first step in this direction. He built up the Hamburg office for Last.fm from where he oversaw marketing, advertising and business development in Germany and Northern Europe. Before that he had worked as head of strategic partnership and business development Northern & Central Europe at Google.
At the very same time Twitter has announced its roll out in German, as well as in French, Italian and Spanish. Like Facebook they are looking for free ride from users translate. “We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first”, says the blog post. The company will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well.
GooSync, the synchronisation service that lets you sync a mobile with Google Calendar, tasks and contacts using SyncML, has been going since 2007. But though it’s been running a premium and free version, it’s now dumping the latter entirely. Not an unsurprising move given the growth especially in mobile data use of apps like this, especially with the iPhone.
The company said “Given the exponential demand for GooSync over the last 12 months, it has become increasingly more difficult to continue this high level of service to both Premium and Free users. It is therefore, with regret, that we are now discontinuing our Free service.”
It’s been a long old time since we checked in with Bristol based Coull, the application which helps brand owners create their own video portals and interactive video content.
The startup has now has secured additional funding of £500,000 and hired Vaughan Denny the former head of rich media sales for Google Europe.
Quite some years ago I was a young journalist sent on assignment to Munich to cover a conference. As many conferences are, it was not exactly rich with stories. But there was an upside. The Oktoberfest was on and I managed to sneak out to enjoy the echoing halls of the festival, drinking beer, singing songs and eating fantastic food. Munich is a beautiful city, rich with history and surrounded by incredible mountain scenery. But like all European cities in the 21st century, it cannot rest on its laurels. It’s now taking its place as a hub in the network that is the European tech entrepreneurial scene.
Thus TechCrunch Europe is hosting TechCrunch Munich at the Sun Microsystem offices in Munich on 20 October, from 2pm onwards, followed by networking drinks. We’ll be hearing startup pitches and speakers in this key German city in the startup ecosystem, focusing on a number of current and relevant themes for the tech community. Tickets have already been going fast, so get the last ones here.
Tournay, who joined as CEO just a couple of months ago, tells Capital.fr that the venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. He expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010, and says DailyMotion currently serves 1 billion video views per month.
Spotify will soon branch out even further into Sweden – the market from which it emerged in the first place. The company has signed a two-year cooperation agreement with Swedish telecommunication service provider Telia. The partnership will, among other things, launch Spotify mobile phones and new services for TV and computers. That’s an interesting new sideline for the startup and is sure to boost revenues.
In a couple of months Telia plans to launch a specific mobile phone with Spotify for its customers. Currently the application runs on the iPhone, Android and Symbian S60. Plans to bring Spotify to Telia’s TV-customers and launch new computer services are more vaguely described as happening sometime in the future. [Update: TechCrunch reports INQ is building the specific handset, and that will probably roll out to other markets]
The once immensely hyped and heavily-funded video company Joost continues its unceremonious journey to the deadpool.
Whoa! 
[UK] 
[Berlin] Seedcamp Berlin winner 
Monday night was a dark time for Internet users in Sweden. For about an hour the Swedish Internet failed, meaning it was impossible to access any websites with a domain name ending in .SE (that’s about 900,000 domains folks). No one seems to know how the problem occurred, except that it happened during routine maintenance work. It makes you wonder how easy it would be to shut down the whole Internet.
Online cash trivia gamester Amuso has closed its latest round of funding with a $1.5 million investment from Mangrove Capital Partners, the principal investor at its launch in 2007, alongside a series of angel investors. It will use the cash to expand in the UK and US. It’s also hired Ned Walley and Rabin Yaghoubi, both former Directors of Strategic Partnerships at Google. Bill Houghton, former Director of Products at AOL Entertainment, is Amuso’s new Head of Products. Amuso’s development lab is in Barcelona. 
[Lebanon] Back in March, 2008 we first 
On stage at last year’s 
In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.
It’s been a long old time since we checked in with Bristol based 
Quite some years ago I was a young journalist sent on assignment to Munich to cover a conference. As many conferences are, it was not exactly rich with stories. But there was an upside. The Oktoberfest was on and I managed to sneak out to enjoy the echoing halls of the festival, drinking beer, singing songs and eating fantastic food. Munich is a beautiful city, rich with history and surrounded by incredible mountain scenery. But like all European cities in the 21st century, it cannot rest on its laurels. It’s now taking its place as a hub in the network that is the European tech entrepreneurial scene.
