The Netherlands-based BoosterMedia has raised €1.75 million in funding from previous backers Truffle Capital and Solid Ventures to boost its HTML5 mobile games distribution network and expand it internationally. By providing mobile gaming destinations to online media and gaming brands, BoosterMedia aims to reach gamers beyond the traditional
channels (such as the many app stores).
Moscow-based Heverest.ru, an online retailer of sportswear, leisure and travel goods, has scored $4.3 million in financing from an unnamed “large” Russian investment fund and previous backer eVenture Capital Partners, bringing its total raised to $6.7 million.
Exclusive - Internet publishing company Populis is expanding its network operations to South America with the acquisition of Cidade Internet, a popular Brazilian Web portal.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Israeli startup Appoxee has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage investment firm Cyhawk Ventures.
The company offers a service that helps app developers and publishers increase user engagement through rich push notifications and helps them with things like audience segmentation, targeting, analytics and reporting.
Olery, an Amsterdam-based startup that offers reputation management and media monitoring tools for the leisure industry, has raised 750,000 euros ($1 million) to boost its international expansion and develop new products.
Founded in 2010, Olery offers simple online brand, reputation management and performance benchmarking tools for hotels that help turn online reviews and social media feedback into actionable business intelligence.
Exclusive - Yet another funding round for a Berlin-based tech startup. T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom’s venture arm, and IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft have co-invested in privately-held online video syndication and marketing company Clipkit.
The size of the round was not disclosed, but we’re told that it was a “mid-seven-digit euros” figure.
I don’t often get a chance to write about a startup from my home country (Belgium) that I’m super excited about, so consider me a happy camper. Meet CheckThis.com, a new micro-publishing service that lets you create and share a single, good-looking Web page in mere seconds.
CheckThis is designed for people who need a little more space than a tweet but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a new blog. In literally instants, you can use CheckThis to create a stand-alone page to sell your bike, hire a new developer for your startup, tell people what you’ve been up to today, set up a really quick poll, share an Instragram or Flickr photo, a party invitation with a map, a Vimeo video or whatever other casual need you might have. Quick, simple, beautiful.
Exclusive - Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm Point Nine Capital has become the first European investor in CouchSurfing, a site that helps travelers connect with locals worldwide to share accommodation, experiences and whatnot.
The investment is in fact an extension of the $7.6 million Series A round raised from Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network in August 2011.
Intelligent Apps, the Hamburg, Germany-based startup behind popular taxi ordering smartphone application myTaxi, has raised 10 million euros in growth funding from car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler, Germany’s third largest carmaker. XING and Hackfwd founder Lars Hinrichs also participated in the financing round, as did previous backers T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) and KfW Bankengruppe.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Daimler took a 15 percent stake in the mobile apps developer.
Peecho, a Dutch startup that enables anyone to sell professionally printed products from their website, mobile or desktop apps, has raised $750,000 in financing from Peak Capital and DHG Holding to boost development and marketing of its embeddable ‘cloud print button’ service.
Basically, their solution lets anyone sell digital content as physical products (think magazines, photo books, canvas prints and whatnot), by helping its customers hook into a network of professional print production facilities.
A European company by the name of Skype taught the world that enabling people to make free voice and video calls over the Internet would be an enticing offer to hundreds of millions of users, and make for a great business at the same time. Now, a Euro startup called Vox.io plans to challenge them by envisioning how digital telephony should work in 2012 and beyond.
They provide a simple tool that lets people make free calls to other vox.io users from their desktop browser, or their iPhone (app link). But vox.io is not your traditional VoIP service, and on the Web requires no downloads or installations of any kind.
Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors, advised by investment consultancy firm Financière Fonds Privés.
Kwaga aims to build semantic software that will make us love email again and turn it into a productivity enhancer rather than killer. The company’s flagship service, WriteThat.Name, for instance automatically updates a user’s address book based on the information contained in the messages received.
US-based desktop virtualization software maker DeskStream has acquired Northern Irish cloud start-up WorldDesk, the companies are set to announce today at CES in Las Vegas. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close this quarter, were not disclosed.
Interestingly, the acquisition will see DeskStream adopt the WorldDesk name and branding.
Just-Eat, the online food ordering giant of Europe, is continuing its rapid expansion, working out a partnership / acquisition deal with Alloresto.fr, the online food delivery leader in France. Just-Eat CEO Klaus Nyengaard, who blogged about the deal here, tells me it took over a year to work out the arrangement.
In an initial phase, Alloresto will be run as a joint-venture between the two companies, and after ‘a few years’ Just-Eat will acquire the remaining shares. Sebastien Forrest, founder and CEO of Alloresto, will continue to head the company as part of the deal terms.
One day after Netflix made its debut in the UK and Ireland, Roku has announced that two of its streaming players, the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS, are heading to Britain too and are already available for pre-order on Amazon.
The Roku LT, which is billed as the lowest-cost option for streaming video and music directly to a TV, over Wi-Fi and without a PC, retails at £49.99. The Roku 2 XS, which adds casual games like Angry Birds to the offering and also sports an Ethernet, a MicroSD and a USB port, costs £99.99.
Netflix has made its debut in the UK and Ireland in early 2012, just like they promised, having worked out video content licensing deals with the likes of BBC Worldwide and MGM.
Users in the UK and Ireland can now subscribe to Netflix to watch available content on their connected TVs, computers, tablets, game consoles and mobile devices. In the UK, Netflix will be bumping heads with Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, the well-established movie and TV series streaming service.
CBS Interactive is exiting the German IT publishing market, selling its stable of local sites – ZDNet.de, Silicon.de and CNET.de – to NetMediaEurope (which also owns Gizmodo.de, ITespresso.de and Channelbiz.de).
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Financial Times has acquired London-based application development firm Assanka, which built a nifty HTML5 web app – and other applications – for the publisher.
(Hat tip to Benedict Evans)
FT staffers such as Katie Morley and Jonathan Wheatley started spreading the news on Twitter, garnering retweets from FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw and PR rep Tom Glover, who confirmed the acquisition to me but declined to share more details.
Blippar, the UK startup behind an eponymous mobile image recognition and augmented reality platform, has landed seed funding – the size of the investment was not disclosed – from Qualcomm Ventures.
The startup, which is based in London, says the seed funding serves as a springboard for a bigger Series A funding round it expects to close in early 2012.
LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction.
Amazon has acquired a minority stake in Ciceksepeti, which operates an online flower and gifts store in Turkey. Founded by CEO Emre Aydin in 2006, the company delivers flowers, jewelry, gourmet products, toys and other gifts to customers across the country, including same-day deliveries in most metropolitan areas.
Headquartered in Istanbul, CicekSepeti currently employs 160 people.
Atomico, the venture capital firm founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, has invested 350,000 euros in Denmark-based Ge.tt, which offers an eponymous Web-based file sharing service.
Ge.tt is simple, clean, and useful. Like many file-sharing services, Ge.tt makes it easy for people to shoot files to the cloud so they can be shared with others, all from a browser-based application.
Starting in early 2012, when Netflix is set to make its debut in the UK and Ireland, registered members will be able to instantly stream available content on their television sets, tablets, game consoles, computers and mobile phones.
In the beginning of November, the video streaming giant signed up MGM as its first content provider for the regions, and this morning Netflix announced a new digital licensing agreement that will add a host of BBC series.
