[Belgium] Attempt to censor something on the WWW, and there’s a pretty good chance your efforts will backfire and more attention will be diverted to whatever you wanted to see removed from the digital highways. It’s a phenomenon well known under the moniker Streisand effect, coined in reference to an incident in which actress/singer Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and the website where it was hosted for $50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photograph of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Of course, more people saw the photo of the house than would be the case if she hadn’t sued.
It wasn’t the first time something like that happened, but somehow it stuck and now Barbra’s name will forever remain attached to the phenomenon. And a Belgian jeweler is learning about the inevitable truth of the existence of the Streisand effect today.
[Apologies for the brevity, I'm posting via the WiFi on a train in the UK] It looks UK-based TVCatchup has launched a new service which has the Twittersphere chattering today. Accessing iphone.tvcatchup.com on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) lets the user tap into live UK TV channels, with a delay of about one minute. Quite some feat to pull off. And the Brighton-based outfit is claiming it’s all legit. TVCatchup ran into pretty serious trouble last year with broadcast.
[Germany] The iPhone’s App Store Bonanza is over. Not only have most sellers failed to turn a profit, many come nowhere near recouping their investment at all. And for non US companies it’s even more difficult to make a buck since they have to wait even longer to get their iPhone software approved for the strong-selling US App Store.
That’s why the small startup Mobilinga, from Bremen, which already took the number 1 spot for the most downloaded software in the German App Store, is happy that their programs can now be downloaded in the US and Canada too. For $2.99 the Germans teach how to speak Latin-American Spanish, French, German and Italian with their “mobilinga for Your Trip” line.
Kudos to the Finnish government, which has just introduced laws guaranteeing broadband access to every person living in Finland (5.5 million people, give or take).
This is reportedly a first worldwide.
Starting July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection as an intermediate step, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. By the end of 2015, the legal right will be extended to an impressive 100 Mb broadband connection for everyone.
TechCrunch Europe has learnt that the startup, famously co-founded by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, put its UK subsidiary into liquidation at the beginning of this month. The reasons that are given are not all too surprising: the liquidator says the company has “failed to sustain a significant share of the internet video industry and was unable to address this effectively through a re-positioning of its services.”
We’ve also learnt that the office furniture of Joost UK Limited, registered in England and Wales with number 05821718, has apparently already found its way to another startup, namely Songkick (also based in London).
Whoa! Easyvoyage, the European travel site, has announced a second leveraged buyout of €31.6 million. That makes it the largest financial transaction in France and the 5th largest in Europe for this year, apparently.
The two new financial investors are UFG and GIMV. The initial shareholders Frederic Chevalier, Jacques Maillot, Francis Reverse, and Mogador Participations will maintain their position. Jean-Pierre Nadir, Founder and CEO now holds 40 per cent of the shares.
This second LBO follows an LBO of €9 million in December 2006. Easyvoyage has doubled revenue year-on-year.
[UK] Shazam’s funding today from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers could put it onto a path to IPO. The very cool way to find out the name of that track you like in a noisy bar, has reached 50m users. It’s aiming for 100 million by the end of next year.
The amount of funding has been undisclosed, so what size of that IPO would be is anyone’s guest. The cash for Shazam’s fourth fundraising is coming out of KPCB’s $100m iFund, which was launched in March last year aiming at mobile companies. Shazam also has investors DN Capital and Acacia Capital Partners. Shazam has raised about $20m to date.
[Berlin] Seedcamp Berlin winner PaperC has secured its first round of funding. Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen (TGFS), a state run venture fund by the German state of Saxony, has invested a six digit Euro sum with the option to also take part in a second round in 18 months. PaperC will use the funding to invest in its platform and to scale up marketing. They are also backed by business angels like entrepreneurship professor Günter Faltin and Christophe Maire, founder of Gate5 (now Nokia Maps), and now Saxony’s venture fund.
PaperC is a platform where users can read academic books in full text, free of charge. If users purchase a page for a nominal fee of €0.10, the text can also be downloaded and printed, or worked on online. Furthermore, PaperC retails print books via the publisher’s online shop. “Looks useful for scientific/academic papers. Could well do with partnering with someone like Mendeley or Academia”, was Mike Butcher’s take after their five minute pitch at the TechCrunch Berlin event in June, 2009.
Monday night was a dark time for Internet users in Sweden. For about an hour the Swedish Internet failed, meaning it was impossible to access any websites with a domain name ending in .SE (that’s about 900,000 domains folks). No one seems to know how the problem occurred, except that it happened during routine maintenance work. It makes you wonder how easy it would be to shut down the whole Internet.
Even Danny Aerts, the CEO for .SE, told Swedish news agency TT that he wasn’t sure how the error occurred, but that the problem is being investigated.
So the background first: Giant oil business Trafigura is accused of dumping toxic waste off the Ivory coast of Africa, allegedly causing harm to the local population that frequents those shores. In most countries the legal system has not bothered to hear Trafigura’s claims that it’s been libeled. But the UK still has libel laws which were written over a hundred years ago. These are more than friendly to the “injured” party. Thus wealthy companies and individuals regularly mount actions there that other countries wouldn’t even give 5 minutes of court time because they are so blatantly self-seeking. In the last couple of days The Guardian newspaper was subject to a judge’s gagging order preventing it from even reporting the fact that a question about Trafigura had been asked in Parliament, traditionally outside the constraints of gagging orders and libel law. This potentially set a huge and backward precedent.
What happens next? The gagging order, links to Wikileaks and plenty of other information about the case was repeated on Twitter. Last night and today the entire issue trended on Twitter with hashtags including #guardiangag #guardian #carterruck (Carter Ruck was the law firm representing Trafigura) and of course #Trafigura.
With the traditional media gagged, the new media had kicked in. That created a story which plenty of trad media outlets and blogs outside the UK could not ignore and started reporting on.
In other words, this kind of censorship is over. And I hope that British Libel law will change as a result. It must now move into the 21st Century and reflect new technology. After all, there is now a new defence. Feel libelled? You can defend your case just as much as the other guy online. Except of course if you are dumb enough not to register @carterruck, for instance.
[Belgium] Attempt to censor something on the WWW, and there’s a pretty good chance your efforts will backfire and more attention will be diverted to whatever you wanted to see removed from the digital highways. It’s a phenomenon well known under the moniker Streisand effect, coined in reference to an incident in which actress/singer Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and the website where it was hosted for $50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photograph of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Of course, more people saw the photo of the house than would be the case if she hadn’t sued.
[Germany] The iPhone’s App Store Bonanza is over. Not only have most sellers failed to 
Whoa! 
[UK] 
[Berlin] Seedcamp Berlin winner 
Monday night was a dark time for Internet users in Sweden. For about an hour the Swedish Internet failed, meaning it was impossible to access any websites with a domain name ending in .SE (that’s about 900,000 domains folks). No one seems to know how the problem occurred, except that it happened during routine maintenance work. It makes you wonder how easy it would be to shut down the whole Internet.
