VC firm Mangrove Capital Partners has invested in Beaucoup.ru, a group purchasing site for all things health and beauty. The word comes from Yakov on the Quintura blog (Mangrove has also backed Quintura).
According to Yakov, the deal size is approximately $1 million, and Direct Group and Global Buying Group reportedly also chipped in.
The copyright infringement provisions of the UK’s Digital Economy Act have caused a lot of controversy, not least amongst tech entrepreneurs who face being stifled, when small, technology-driven businesses are core to the future growth of the UK’s economy.
The Act creates the potential for disconnection resulting from the Act’s guilty-until-proven-innocent system. It also means less public wi-fi because of the extra costs on wi-fi providers. That means less innovation bubbling up from the primodial soup of entrepreneurs and developers and much less flexible working when everyone needs that right now.
Plus it also means a threat to sites that permit user-generated content and web locker and software-as-a-service platforms. Why? Because the Act’s web blocking provisions let copyright holders get a site taken down for taken down for inadvertently hosting a small amount of copyrighted content.
Which is why we’d encourage you to go and give your feedback on this issue to the government’s newly created feedback process on legislation.
With Facebook’s recent campaign to “fix” its somewhat byzantine privacy controls – or at least the negative PR surrounding them – and an obsession to become more like Twitter, maybe Zuckerberg and co. could learn something from the UK-born Friends Reunited, that old skool social network of the Dot Com era.
The site, which has been through many a revamp itself, most notably after it was sold to the broadcaster iTV for £120m who subsequently offloaded it at a huge loss to the D.C. Thomson-owned brightsolid, recently rolled out new privacy settings that bridge the gap between Facebook’s originally closed ethos and the public sharing nature of Twitter.
Now when you ‘friend’ someone on Friends Reunited, you’re actually given two options:
