[France] Location-based search and discovery service Tellmewhere has raised a further €550,000 of funding. This brings the total raised by the Paris startup to €1.4m. The new round was led by Stephane Romanyszyn, founder and CEO of entreparticuliers.com, the leading French real estate website.
The new funding will be used to support Tellmewhere’s international expansion, with version 2.0 of the service reaching the UK and USA “in the coming weeks”.
Tellmewhere offers a mix of local reviews, mobile social networking and location-based discovery. Users can search for places (and businesses) nearby, rate, write and read reviews, and send alerts to friends in their social network letting them know that they are nearby. It competes with the likes of Qype and the various localised versions of Yelp, along with Gowalla and Foursquare but without the gaming element.
The service currently targets the iPhone with a dedicated app, as well as a browser-based generic mobile version. Registered users of the iPhone app total 450k (mostly from France). An Android app is planned for early next year.
A new £125m VC fund for companies in the North East of England has been announced which will target early stage companies, including a focus on technology related startups.
The JEREMIE Fund ((Joint European Resources for Micro to Medium Enterprises Initiative) as it will be provisionally known, is a combined effort between The European Investment Bank (£62.5m) and the European Regional Development Fund 2007-2013 and One North East (£62.5m), with the aim of creating thousands of new jobs in the region. The new fund is expected to support over 850 small and medium-sized companies over the next five years.
Earlier this month, we reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.
This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010.
For the past 18 months Jemima Gibbons has been interviewing people in the UK, Europe and the US for a new book on how social tools are changing the way we work. The book, entitled Monkeys with Typewriters, is published by Triarchy Press and is out now. Here are her favourite quotes:
“We can no longer separate strategy from execution.” – Russell Davies, Really Interesting Group.
It’s so easy to put an idea online. Why develop something behind closed doors when you can throw it out into the community and get free input and feedback? The idea may take a completely new direction, but it will be more relevant.
“I found that email was appalling; there were so many ‘broken trust’ implications in it – bcc was evil: ‘I trust you so much that I’m going to have a conversation with you, with your boss watching, but I’m not going to tell you’; cc was ‘cover your arse’ – the behaviour was appalling again.” - JP Rangaswami, BT.
Email was a popular pet hate among interviewees. Whether Google Wave will replace it as the standard communications tool is another matter.
[UK] Spinvox, Spinvox, Spinvox. It promised so much but in the end delivered only so much. Like a latter-day Boo.com it hyped its magical voice-to-text service to the stars, apparently built on highly advanced technology, but in the end it has not lived up to the expectations it went all out to trumpet.
Nuance, possibly the leader in speech-to-text processing, and with 40+ carrier relationship, is reportedly picking up Spinvox in a $150 million sale which might be completed before Christmas. But there was no source on the Sunday Times story and Spinvox tells us they aren’t commenting at all. The Sunday Times is often used as a vehicle to float ‘sale rumours’ which are actually designed to flush out more bidders.
[Greece] Truth to be told, there aren’t many Greek startups who are lucky enough to raise Venture Capital money. While TechCrunch Europe reported back in June that a new Greek seed level fund called OpenFund had launched to try and address the problem, Greek property listings site, “Spitogatos“, has shown the way. The startup has raised €750k from Oxygen Capital, an Athens-based VC firm.
Spitogatos claims to be the largest property listing website in Greece and Cyprus with more than 125,000 unique visitors per month. The site features around 130,000 property listings (for sale and rent) in both countries. The startup also says that more than 2,500 registered real estate agencies in Greece upload their property listings to the site, meaning that the vast majority of content is provided by companies rather than private individuals.
[UK] The Guardian has launched its long awaited iPhone app, which is designed to give a better reading experience on Apple’s iconic device than the UK newspaper’s standard desktop or mobile offering.
The app isn’t isn’t free, however, unlike most of The Guardian’s content, costing a one-off payment of £2.39 for which readers will be spared ads (for now) and get a raft of smartphone-optimized features. These include basic customisation of the newspaper’s ‘front page’, support for audio, and perhaps most notable, off-line browsing – although early App Store reviews suggest that the app is still a little buggy and lacks some obvious social media functionality.
[UK] It’s not long out but Google Chrome is getting a major marketing boost in the UK. Today there are wrap-around cover adverts in the free Metro newspaper which circulates across the UK to morning commuters. We’re also getting reports on billboards appearing all over the country and online marketing on Facebook and other sites.
We’ve seen Twitter reports of the newspaper ads appearing in London and Manchester, but it looks like it’s across the whole country, which would give the campaign a total Metro circulation of over 1.3 million. Circulation of the Metro paper in London alone is 738,000. This is a big footprint.
[Spain] In Spain we’re struggling to recover from the recession. We’re behind our European neighbors and our unemployment rate is now 18%. A recovery is apparently coming, but in the meantime, people shuffle along, cashing unemployment checks, desperately looking for work and figuring out how to save here and there. A number of initiatives are mushrooming to help us do this. Television programs, individual blogs, comparison shopping sites, you name it. Yunait, an idea born to Pablo Elosúa and Santiago Perez, isn’t something you’d call innovative or a breakthrough. They haven’t received seed funding (yet) and don’t have major news to tell. But their idea is simple and well timed. In fact, they’re getting quite a bit of press coverage in Spain.
I don’t want to write about Le Web this year. Really I don’t.
This time last year, while I was still at the Guardian, I stumbled back to my Parisian hotel room at the end of the first day of the conference and fired off a thousand words rounding up the highs and not-insignificant lows of the event. Those words, along with the title my editor added to them - Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! – have followed me around ever since.
The truth is, I’m bored with Le Web. I’m bored with the expectation that I’ll be reviewing it again this year. I’m bored with Loic’s clever (and relatively successful) ploy to get me on-side by asking me to moderate a panel called The European Gang. And most of all I’m bored with Maslovian jokes about heat, food and wifi.
But fortunately this year I’m not at the Guardian. And fortunately twenty-seven-thousand of my TechCrunch colleagues were in attendance at LeWeb 09 to provide proper coverage of the event so I don’t have to write an entire column about it. Was it worth going? Sure – I was in London anyway, I didn’t pay for my ticket or accommodation (I stayed in a friend’s family apartment) and it’s always fun to dick around in Paris with my friends. Should you have been there too? That depends.
If you’ve ever been to a conference in the Valley then you’ve seen most of the stars – Marissa Mayer, Jack Dorsey et al before, so probably not. All of the big announcements – the PeekFon, Jolicloud’s netbook OS, Twitter’s upcoming Chirp conference, and the company’s imminent acquisition by Google – were covered by TechCrunch Europe. If you live in Europe and can’t justify a trip west, then sure. It’s was a really professionally-put-together conference, with A-list speakers, giving a taste of America without having to get on a plane. You’ve probably already had to make the same decision about Eurodisney.
Beyond that, there’s not really much I can say – except that the administrative problems from last year were resolved (kudos Geraldine and Loic) – if anything it was too warm, and the only wifi problems were in the speakers’ hotel. The only speakers I saw were Yossi Vardi who looked like a mad old uncle who had just discovered YouTube, and Queen Rania of Jordan whose speech was my highlight of the conference – not for the content (which was clearly written by someone else) but rather for Loic’s brilliantly obsequious “fank you your majesty” response. Good to see the French bowing and scraping to royalty again. That can only end well.
Yesterday some of Europe’s most influential and active seed/angel investors got together in London for a ‘summit’ organised by Seedcamp, the pan European early stage startup programme. We understand the morning of SeedSummit (press weren’t invited) was devoted to frank exchanges between the investors about the current stage of early stage seed funding in Europe, with the afternoon reserved for a more public showcase of Seedcamp startup pitches.
Held at the offices of NESTA in London, the event was outlined by Seedcamp’s Saul Klein on his blog.
Attendees included around 60 people, including high profile investors like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu.
Aside from being a great event, Le Web has thrown up a new discovery.
We came across this guy “Scoble Jr“, like some kind of re-incarnated Boy Dalai Lama, singing a song in a Paris Irish bar (if that’s even possible). The song was about something called the FriendFaxFeed. This is a new realtime app with which “you can fax a friend an call it a feed”. Enjoy:
[UK] GigJunkie, a site that helps UK music fans discover gigs and purchase concert tickets, has announced a partnership with AOL-owned Bebo.
The new collaboration sees the launch of the ‘Tour Dates‘ application, which enables British Bebo users to get a heads-up of when their favourite bands are playing nearby and of course purchase tickets. It does this by looking at the artists listed in a user’s Bebo profile.
The app isn’t just aimed at music fans, however, but also record labels themselves who can use it to push tour dates directly to interested punters. Atlantic Records have already begun doing so, along with independent label Visible Noise. It’s all part of Bebo’s play to “build an ecosystem around music”, says David MacDonald, Bebo’s Business Development Director Europe.
I’ve spent a wonderful week in Paris, attending the infamous Le Web conference put together by Loic Le Meur and his amazing wife Geraldine. But while the event kicked off only on Wednesday, I arrived in the French capital on Sunday noon, and my motivation wasn’t tourism.
I was cordially invited by the organizers of the Traveling Geeks tours, who bring together bloggers and industry pundits from all over the world to travel all over the globe looking for great stories from equally great tech startups and established companies, to join them in the days before Le Web.
[Netherlands] I’m not sure if this qualifies as domain name squatting but the motivation is the same.
Dutch web design company Baidu Europe – not to be confused with the Chinese search engine of a similar name – has put their domain names, brand names and trademarks up for sale on eBay. The starting bid has been set at $250,000 but the company is aiming for a much bigger payout of $1.7 million dollars after the 10 day auction has ended. However, at the time of posting – day 3 – not a single bid has been received.
[UK] Plug in SEO, which provides website owners with a set of tools to help with search engine optimization, is offering a money back guarantee. Users won’t have to pay a thing if their traffic doesn’t increase month on month. That’s quite the promise and should go someway to countering the poor reputation that much of the SEO industry has, which frankly is plagued with cowboys. Just mention the word SEO on Twitter and see how many monkeys jump on your back.
Fittingly, the London-based startup was a finalist in this year’s “Recession-Era” Seedcamp, as Mike Butcher called it, which was notable for the number of companies focused on offering its customers time or money savings and not afraid to utter the word “revenue” in their pitch. Talking of which, Plug in SEO’s pricing – presuming a website’s traffic does increase – certainly stretches the definition of fremium.
[Ireland] KildareStreet.com, a website that hopes to keep Irish politicians in check, has been announced as the winner of the inaugural €5,000 Outvesting fund.
The fund was a grassroots effort started by James Corbett and John Keyes and designed to highlight the lack of very early stage funding for startups in Ireland. Donations were solicited by Twitter at €50 a pop, with those that gave money becoming part of the voting panel.
So the Le Web Startup Competition is over for another year. Instead of sitting on the sidelines reporting the event, as I was last year, this year TechCrunch Europe was asked to co-organize it with Le Web. So, with together with Loic Le Meur, Ben Metcalfe and Geraldine Le Meur we filtered down the hundreds of applicants to the final 16. Although we didn’t concentrate exclusively on it, it was nice to fit in startups that were broadly releated to the realtime theme. It was great also to see the Le Web startup event veer back to its roots as a venue for very early stage, rough and ready startups, as well as a launch-pad for more fully-formed plays that have literally launched for the first time at this event. The whole thing was live blogged on TechCrunch Europe, where you’ll find posts on every startup that presented.
We had four sessions, with four startups each session. Startups were given points for pitch and company/product, the scores aggregated and ranked and then deliberated over by myself and my co-host Ben Metcalfe. Ben is based in San Francisco, CA and founder & CTO of Plato’s Forms, a forthcoming communication platform for journalists, bloggers and corporate communication professionals.
Simple communication gadget Peek is making its way to Europe, courtesy of Spain-based Fon, whose founder and CEO Martin Varsavsky is making the announcement later today at the Le Web conference here in Paris.
Prior to his stage appearance, Varsavsky shared the details of the distribution partnership on his widely read blog.
The price of the PeekFon will be €99, and the service will cost €12.9 per month. No roaming charges, no contract.
[UK] Is Twitter good for business? That’s one of the questions that a recent poll of 1,200 UK businesses, conducted by Accredited Supplier, hoped to answer.
While those surveyed were bullish about Twitter’s future – 48% think that Twitter will be the world’s largest social media property by 2020 – UK businesses seeing a return of investment are currently in the minority. Just 16 percent. The poll also reveals that many are utilising Twitter in a rather half-hearted way, although countering this, a significant number of respondents said they would be willing to pay for additional business-related functionality.
[France] Location-based search and discovery service Tellmewhere has raised a further €550,000 of funding. This brings the total raised by the Paris startup to €1.4m. The new round was led by Stephane Romanyszyn, founder and CEO of entreparticuliers.com, the leading French real estate website.
I don’t want to write about 
