Swiss publisher Tamedia has acquired a 49% stake in Doodle, the Zurich-based online service that enables users to schedule meetings and appointments.
Described as a “partial exit” by Doodle CEO Michael Näf, the deal also sees German VC firm Creathor Venture sell its share in the company, although terms are not being disclosed.
I have no idea if Lady Gaga, Jessica Alba or Cameron Diaz have good taste. But whoever is designing their fashion accessories is also selling pieces on Boticca.com. The London-based startup that launched it’s high-end designer marketplace in October 2010 has been getting quite a bit of attention from investors over the last few months. Finally, the team is announcing that it has closed a £1.5 million (or $2.5 million) round – primarily for developing editorial content, additional market channels and adding new people to the team.
This first round of funding for the company comes from a rather international bunch of investors – including France’s entrepreneur fund ISAI (who is also an investor in InstantLuxe, a luxury goods marketplace), Bobby Yazdani, the founders of Links of London and Japan’s Digital Garage.
“a friend in the US just told me that #DSK was arrested by the police in a NYC hotel one hour ago.”
It was the middle of the night in Paris when the news broke that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Chief of the IMF, had been pulled off an Air France flight and arrested for sexual assault. Coincidentally, he was also set to announce his candidacy for the 2012 French presidential elections next month – and could therefore become one of the strongest opponents of President Sarkozy. But now it looks like the Parti Socialiste may have to nominate someone else…
Facebook may have over 600 million users but there’s still one problem: all the info is online! How on earth are you supposed to know if that cutie you just met is single or married without access to his or her profile?! Ok, yes, you could just ask – but that’s not very tactful now, is it? So, rather than having to muster up any courage and attack the subject head on, we could all just wear our relationship status and make it easier for everyone. At least, that’s what Buump thinks we should do.
The company sells colorful plastic bracelets featuring the 5-different relationship status options in English for €5.99. There is also an additional pack with the 5 “looking for” options sold for the same price. And you can buy all 10 bracelets for €10.99 (the site also lets you buy in bulk and customize your own bracelets for orders of 1,000 or more).
Paris-based IJENKO provides a number of eco-friendly, smart energy solutions for the home – including its personal smart grid. The company founded in 2008 raised €2 million in January 2010 from Direct Energie, ISource and Bouygues Telecom Initiatives and has just scored another €3.5 million from the same investors.
Often compared to US-based OPower (who recently closed a $50 million round), IJENKO counts a number of smaller competitors in France – like Watteco. However, IJENKO’s solution works with Zigbee-based connected objects, which are all linked-up to the central Box.
This weekend finds me in London, whirling around in the eye of the book launch storm and with very little opportunity to keep track of what’s making news in the world of technology.
Fortunately here in the UK there’s one tech story that’s impossible to miss: an anonymous Twitter user has been posting details of legal injunctions, taken out by celebrities to keep their alleged misdeeds out of the public eye.
Inevitably, a debate is raging both in the traditional press and online: does Twitter render so-called “super injunctions” redundant? What’s the value in gagging a newspaper when the same allegations can be published anonymously online with impunity? Is there a place for secrecy in today’s open and connected world?
There are rumours of a new European seed fund being built out of London right now, billing itself as a sort of “500 Startups of Europe”. Admittedly Hipster Ventures is a Seppuku-inducing name, but stay with us…
The idea is to whisk the best of European consumer web and mobile companies off to San Francisco to launch them on the West coast. The guy behind it is high profile freelance journalist and Telegraph columnist Milo Yiannopoulos (and former TC Europe freelancer), who appears to be dialling down on the journalism and dialling up a desire to become a VC of sorts.
Smarkets, the London-based social gambling startup, is on something of a roll. Today it has closed a $1 million funding round led by Passion Capital, Stefan Glaenzer, Alex Zubillaga, Tom Hulme and others. The aim now is to build out the platform and hire a tonne more people.
CEO Jason Trost is out to effectively attack bookmakers and other exchanges which he says give consumers a rough deal because of poor odds and commissions. “We’re going to use the money to hire the best engineers in London. There’s billions of pounds flowing through bookmakers, but they offer consumers very bad value. We’re going to use our in-house technology to challenge the bookmaking business model,” he told TechCrunch.
Exclusive - Earlier this week, Microsoft dropped a bombshell on pretty much the entire technology industry, acquiring VoIP juggernaut Skype for a baffling $8.5 billion in cash.
One side-effect unrevealed up until today: TechCrunch has learned that Skype came extremely close to buying Swedish startup MyWidz right before negotiations with Microsoft were kicked into high gear, freezing said acquisition plans.
Online games publisher We R Interactive this morning announced that it has raised $5 million in second round funding from a slew of private investors, including Elio Leoni-Sceti, former CEO of EMI Music and Paul Fitzsimons, ex-media sector partner at Apax Partners. The company secured initial funding upon launch back in July 2010, although it’s unclear how much they raised then.
The proceeds of the financing round will be used to support the ongoing development and international roll-out of the startup’s first social game, I AM PLAYR, a point-of-view game that allow players to experience the life of football players through their eyes.
Navmii, maker of Navmii GPS Live, the low-cost Sat-Nav solution for iOS, along with the free OpenStreetMap-powered NavFree, has announced that it has garnered more than 2 million users in 12 months.
But more interesting is that Navmii users have contributed over 300,000 updates to the ‘Wikipedia of maps’ OpenStreetMap project, a trend that is on course to make NavFree “as accurate as most expensive Satellite Navigation system within a matter of months”, says Navmii CEO Peter Atalla. Of course, both Google and Nokia have a free offering too, the latter’s Ovi Maps being the most complete.
Well, TechCrunch readers, we thought we owed you an explanation as to why the hell we got onto the BBC TV show The Apprentice last night, and here it is.
Back in September last year I was contacted by TalkBack Thames TV, the independent production company that makes The Apprentice for the BBC. They said they were going to make the creation of a smartphone app a task on the show and would I be a judge. “Why the hell not?” I thought, and a date was set for filming.
There are two things we love to do on our Why Is This News? show on TCTV.
The first is to break news about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley. The second is to find excuses to promote our respective books (about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley).
Rare indeed though is the occasion when we’re able to combine both of those things and break news about one of our respective books, from outside Silicon Valley.
This week all of Paul’s Christmases have come at once as he calls in from the UK to share some exciting news about his new book, The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations. Not only has the book finally gone on sale in most of the world but the movie rights have just been optioned by production company Neon Park.
In the video below, we talk about the news, and also discuss why, in The Upgrade, Paul feels so comfortable sharing the most intimate details of his life with total strangers. Finally, we speculate on who might play the role of Mike Arrington if a movie version of the book ever makes it into production.
(UK and European readers can buy The Upgrade from Amazon in paperback or Kindle formats. US and international readers can get it with free global shipping here. )
Earlier this week, we announced the launch of yet another startup accelerator in Europe. Oxygen Accelerator joined the growing list of YCombinator-like programs in the UK, including Hackfwd, Springboard, Seedcamp and Startupbootcamp.
Yet, while each of these programs provides seed capital and mentoring to early-stage startups, they differ in the way that they operate and interact with the local ecosystem. Seedcamp, for example, hosts a number of “mini” Seedcamp or 1-day events in various countries in hunt of the best teams for its program. Now, Startupbootcamp – which recently announced that it would be launching in additional European cities - is taking a somewhat similar approach.
Kwaga, which offers a semantic toolkit to help manage email, has launched WriteThat.Name, a new product designed to help users keep their Gmail contacts up-to-date.
It does this by employing semantic technology to read the email signatures of incoming messages, noting any changes to included contact details. After all, if a contact changes their phone number or place of work, for example, their email signature is likely to be the first thing they update. Kwaga’s WriteThat.Name keeps an eye out for those changes and will either update a user’s Gmail address book automatically or, if in manual mode, will simply alert the user to a potential update.
Independent mobile ad network InMobi has signed a “multi-million dollar” partnership with Amobee, which provides “end-to-end mobile advertising solutions and services”.
The partnership will span three years, in which several million will pass hands as Amobee runs campaigns via InMobi’s ad network, giving a potential reach of 300 million consumers across 200 countries. The scale of the partnership is evidence, says the two companies, of the “massive growth occurring in the mobile advertising industry”, which is hard to argue with as a whole bunch of startups and major players such as Google, Apple and Microsoft are battling it out for a slice of the mobile advertising pie.
Hey, remember back in the old days when you could post a picture on Twitter and not have it ransacked by news organisations and picture agencies? Yeah, those days are gone. All these picture sharing apps are looking lovingly at the feed of images coming in and licking their lips. Whether you like it or not, one day these apps will have to monetize and there is gold in them there photos…
So there’s been a huge blow-up around the use of these images. Twitpic is being reported as claiming the copyright on your images. And entertainment news and photo group WENN has signed a deal with the photo app, ” to represent those images.” Oh really? How convenient for everyone. But what about the users?
The more time (and money) that you invest in a music streaming service like Spotify, building playlists, adding favourites and so forth, the more locked in to that service you potentially become. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Scandinavian competitor WiMP (operated by Aspiro), which today introduces import and export of playlists along with a call to the industry to settle on a standard file-format for playlists.
The Beta update to the music streaming service, which operates in Denmark, Norway and, Sweden, adds the ability to import playlists from Spotify to WiMP, and to export WiMP playlists in either RSS or XSPF format.
Microsoft’s purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion in cash is a massive bet for the tech giant.
Although it look like it may have over-paid by $4.5 billion, and bid against companies who weren’t seriously in the running (Google and Facebook), owning Skype means Microsoft has a much better positioning in mobile.
But that’s not all.
The implications of this deal for Facebook are actually far more interesting. Since Microsoft is an investor in Facebook, the latter will now have access to its investors assets.
With Microsoft having confirmed its acquisition of Skype, sources tell TechCrunch Europe that Redmond outbid its closest rival, Google, by almost two-to-one. Meanwhile, Facebook is said to have never been in the running.
According to a source who claims knowledge of talks held between all parties, Google came in second at a price of $4B, while Microsoft will be paying $8.5B. This suggests that Redmond is paying significantly over the odds for Skype, although only time will tell if it turns out to be a smart deal. What is known is that had Microsoft been aware of the price that Google was willing to pay it almost certainly would have come in lower.
