Sones, developer of the GraphDB graph database, has raised a ‘couple of millions’ of euros to expand its cloud computing business and open source community. Investors include KfW Bankengruppe, the early stage venture capital fund of Saxony, and T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. Back in 2008, sones had already landed an undisclosed amount of seed capital from T-Venture.
GraphDB supplements traditional relational databases and is currently available as a scalable cloud solution from Microsoft Azure and the Amazon Cloud. Basically, the technology is designed to bring together and link data from various SQL databases, enabling entirely new business applications.
Real estate startup Zoopla, which to date is funded to the tune of £7m, has launched a mobile app for Android.
Just like its iPhone counterpart that launched last July and saw over 50,000 downloads in its first two weeks, the free app incorporates an Augmented Reality feature to let house hunters search for properties for sale and rent and compare house prices by pointing the phone’s camera at a street to drill down into the company’s 27 million strong property database. Additional ways of accessing the same information include a more traditional list view, along with map-led search.
Travelmatch.co.uk has officially launched a new travel search engine, enabling people to search for holidays based on requirements rather than the usual criteria such as destination, date, cost and period of stay.
The site has been in development for a looooong time – since 2006 – and was funded in 2010 by Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and other investors including David Scowsill, former CEO of Opodo, and John Moulton, founder of Better Capital.
Saul Singer is co-author, with Dan Denor, of “Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.” I was given an early edition of this book a couple of years ago and it’s a brilliant read. It tells the story of how, hampered by an Arab nation boycott that makes regional trade impossible and with precious little natural resources, Israel managed to instead become a major player in the global business world, especially in technology. Israel has the highest number of startups per capita of any nation in the world and a very large venture capital eco-system which the government supported in a very far-sighted manner via the Yosma programme in the 1990s.
The book is a fascinating exploration of how Israel’s mandatory military and reserve service, a “critique” culture, ongoing inward immigration and a cultural embrace of risk helped bring this about.
I managed to catch up with Saul on a recent trip to Israel and record the below interview:
Zoombu is a UK startup which has made a speciality of aggregating transport solution ‘across platforms’ – in other words linking up trains, buses and airline time tables. As a result, during the ‘Ash Cloud’ incident in Europe last year, their traffic went up may times, we understand, as people frantically tried to find other means of transport. It thereofore makes sense that Skyscanner, a successful aggregator of airline ticketing, has acquired the startup.
Explaining the move, Gareth Williams, Skyscanner CEO, said “There are more ways to get around than flights only… Air travel is a complex area and we wanted to get that right before expanding into other transport options. So Zoombu is an ideal fit for Skyscanner.”
Three years ago WebMission was more than a simple trade mission taking Internet entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley. It ended up creating a great gel in the UK startup scene. Well it’s back and thanks to TechCrunch we’ve negotiated an extended deadline for companies to apply for Web Mission 2011 until Friday 21st January.
This year they are aiming at “Web Economy” startups in mobile, social, semantic and real-time web; Cloud2; social gaming; and 3-D/RealVR environments.
European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday.
The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point.
Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company recently hired 25 new employees to work on new endeavors inside Massive Media.
Index Ventures, among Europe’s best performing tech-focused VCs, is opening an office in Silicon Valley. Perhaps to some it may seem odd that Index didn’t have an office there before, given that so many of its portfolio companies (such as Etsy, Flipboard, Last.fm (CBS) and OpenX among others) have ended up with a large US focus.
In a blog post today the company says partners Mike Volpi and Danny Rimmer will be opening Index’s fourth office after Geneva, London and Jersey, in Silicon Valley.
The reason? “While we’ve been encouraged by the progress we’ve made, we feel we can do a better job of supporting the entrepreneurs we work with both in Europe and the US by having a permanent presence in the Bay Area.”
Based in Manchester, England, RockYou says Playdemic will operate independently as a subsidiary studio and develop Facebook games for a mainstream audience. Paul Gouge, Playdemic CEO and founder, will lead the studio as VP and General Manager. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
In what we’re sure will amount to a social media orgy, noted author, comedian and British cultural icon Stephen Fry is announcing the formal launch of Pushnote on Twitter at 2pm today. Fry, who became an investor in the UK startup in June of last year, has over 2 million followers on the microblogging service.
(Update: Still no tweet as promised by the PR company for Pushnote. Make of that what you will.)
(Update 2: Nearly four hours on, we have a tweet!)
Pushnote, which was soft-launched the same month (see TCEU coverage), consists of a browser add-on that enables users to leave comments on any site they visit. It’s not dissimilar in concept to Google Sidewiki, for example, and many others that have tried and failed, although Pushnote is intended to have greater consumer appeal.
Skobbler, best known for its free sat-nav app for iPhone, has entered the world of gaming. GeoBrain for iPhone and iPad is described as “a fun yet educational game experience that tests and trains geo-knowledge.” Basically, you spin a giant globe and answer questions to demonstrate your knowledge of the world. Fun, huh? OK, it’s probably no Angry Birds.
The idea is to build on Skobbler’s map-based app experience but to enter into new and potentially profitable genres: knowledge-based games certainly do well on the Nintendo DS franchise, for example. And it’s common knowledge that the sat-nav market is both saturated and becoming a commodity. In fact, Skobbler’s own free offering for iPhone based on the do-it-yourself ‘OpenStreetMap’ (OSM) model is a perfect example of this. Never mind Google Maps or Nokia’s own free Ovi Maps voice-guided navigation.
Shazam, the mobile music discovery service, is adding integration with music streaming service Spotify, a feature request that I’m sure has been rampant among hardcore users.
Users of Shazam’s free and premium apps for iPhone, iPod and Android will now be able to access Spotify directly through a new ‘Play in Spotify’ feature, which upon Shazam recognising or recommending a song, takes them directly to Spotify where they can listen to the full track. That’s if they have a Spotify Premium subscription (mobile access is only available for paying customers), and if the track in question exists in Spotify’s, shall we say sometimes Spotty, music catalogue. You’ll also need to be in either the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain or the Netherlands.
In all fairness, Minics‘ vitual world for 7-13 year olds isn’t just about getting stranded on an island. In fact, it is more about teaching kids about survival and the bare necessities of life more than anything else. And the Paris-based company itself seems to be surviving just fine, especially now that it has €1 million in the bank.
With over 100K members, Minics was one of the 5 startup finalists at TechCrunch France’s Remix event in November. This recent round of funding comes primarily from Cap ISF, a French holding company that operates as a result of the wealth tax credit as individuals in France are able to reduce their wealth tax by investing in a startup. Minics says it will be looking to raise more funding in the near future as well.
Italian entrepreneur Marco Palladino is currently 22 years old – but he was only 19 when he first started looking for funding for his startup. For roughly 2 years, he and his cofounders met with every last investor on the Italian Peninsula and without any success. But despite their empty pockets, they weren’t ready to throw in the towel on their startup, an API marketplace for cloud-based services named Mashape.
RateSetter, the UK peer-to-peer lending site that competes with Zopa and, less directly, Funding Circle, has raised a further £600,000 in a new round of funding from existing and new undisclosed investors. This brings the total raised by the startup to £1.5m, while the new cash injection will be spent primarily on marketing.
RateSetter, which launched in October 2010 and saw £1m lent by users in its first two months, works along the lines of other P2P or so-called social lending sites. By cutting down the size of the ‘middle person’, lenders and borrowers are said to get a better deal.
Online fashion site Fashiolista.com, which was launched in The Netherlands last year at The Next Web conference, has secured over $500,000 in seed funding from Atomico Ventures. Basically, Fashiolista relies on its members to create a catalog of fashion items online.
Via a bookmarklet or browser extension, users can ‘like’ fashion items wherever they find them on the web, thus building a personal profile they can share with others.
This is a guest post by Duane Jackson. A self-taught programmer with no formal qualifications, he started his first company after his release from prison in 2003. KashFlow was born in 2005 out of his frustration at not being able to find any user friendly accounting software for his first start-up.
On Friday afternoon there was a rip in the fabric of space-time and we got a glimpse into a parallel universe. A universe where bootstrapped startups are as mythical as Santa and the Tooth Fairy.
TechCrunch Europe guest blogger, Iqbal Gandham, worked through the numbers involved with starting a business and concluded that it was impossible to do so without at least £50k of capital. The problem is in the numbers he started with – a small error here and a small error there are all compounded to create a very erroneous total.
Localstars, the geo-targeted online video advertising startup, has appointed a new managing director: Chris Bunyan, the former digital director at Trinity Mirror’s regional media division. Prior to that he was director of portal management at cable broadcaster Virgin Media. Bunyan will be replacing founder and former MD, George Dann, who now moves up to become CEO.
Localstars attempts to lower the barriers to entry for both publishers and brands wanting to utlilise video advertising online. It offers an online portal that publishers can use to sell and manage video ad campaigns on behalf of advertisers, letting them create a 15 second video ad for each customer by customising the video content – adding contact information, images and logos etc. – from the Localstars library. From there on in, ads can be geo-targeted via a map-based interface.
The fresh capital and relations will service to grow SmallRivers’ team, establish partnerships with global service and content providers and set up shop in the United States and Asia. For starters, SmallRivers is planning to move part of its team from Switzerland to California.
We7, the UK music streaming service, is launching in Ireland next Monday, reports MusicWeek and we can now confirm.
This is interesting not only because it’s the first time We7 has ventured beyond its native shores but also because Spotify, which until very recently was seen as a direct rival, has yet to launch in said country. The much hyped and well funded company is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands but, as noted, not Ireland. (Or the U.S. for that matter.)
