It’s my great pleasure to announce that I’m going to be joined by Steve O’Hear on TechCrunch Europe. Some of you may have noticed Steve’s work appear on the blog over the last month. Steve will be my Contributing Editor, and will be working closely with me on our continuing coverage of the tech scene in Europe and acting as my “wingman”. In fact, I did try to convince him that Wingman was a great title, but for some reason he preferred something with the word Editor in it. I can’t think why.
Steve has some awesome credentials. Aside from starting up the well-regarded independent gadget blog last100 (formerly a part of the ReadWriteWeb Blog Network) which he’ll continue to write, he’s written for some of the best titles out there including The Guardian, Macworld UK, Mobile Industry Review, TES, ZDNet and of course ReadWriteWeb. In particular he wrote the excellent ZDNet blog ‘The Social Web’ from 2006 to 2008. And to top it all off he previously wrote and directed the documentary film ‘In Search of the Valley’, which interviewed many leading Web 2.0 people in Silicon Valley and was released in September 2006. It was highly recommended by Mike Arrington, FYI.
[Germany] Today I should have received my first edition of Niuu, a personalised print newspaper comprised of articles taken from various blogs and newspapers. Delivery time should be between 4 AM and 6 AM so that people can read it over breakfast. Niiu has contracts with mostly German newspapers like Bild, Frankfurter Rundschau and Handelsblatt but also with the Washington Times and The International Herald Tribune.
Readers can use the Niiu website to customise which page of a newspaper they want to read in the morning. Local news from Berliner Morgenpost can easily be combined with Sports from Bild and the New York Times’ frontpage with just a few clicks.
[Germany] It must be great to be in the social games business. Apparently anyone can jump on the bandwagon, even latecomers and copycats. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, a $43 million investment at Playdom and €5 million ($7.5m) additional funding for Wooga, comes the fourth investment in the last week: The Samwer brothers’ copy of social games giant Zynga, called… wait for it folks… Plinga. Sound familiar? The clone has been funded with an undisclosed amount. Now that’s what I call an investment spree.
So Belle De Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCD.
From her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born.
Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her identity. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this week when Belle herself chose to out herself, granting an interview to Knight, one of her harshest critics.
A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.
There’s just one problem: it isn’t.
READ ON
As any industry analyst will tell you, since its two journalists were returned from North Korea, Current.tv has been woefully overstaffed. The company simply doesn’t require that many employees to edit YouTube clips for its audience of jobless hipster doucheballs who have fallen asleep in front of the television.
And so it wasn’t entirely surprising this week when TechCrunch reported on a ‘bloodbath‘ at the company, with 80 people being laid-off across all departments.
Current’s COO Joanna Drake Earl (who is herself three separate people) insisted to Leena that the layoffs aren’t a ‘cost-cutting measure’ but rather a ’shift in programming strategy’. In most other companies, this would be classic corporate bullshit, but in Current’s case Joanna, Drake and Earl might actually have a point. After all, by creating 80 new unemployed people – unemployed people who actually know what Current is – they’ve just doubled the target audience for their programming. How’s that for a convenient truth?
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[UK] Adfonic, a London-based global operator of what it refers to as a self-service mobile advertising marketplace, has raised $600,000 (£360k) in its first round of financing. The funding comes from cleantech entrepreneur Gordon Shields, founder of Shields Environmental.
In a statement, Adfonic says Shields will not only provide capital but also ‘leadership and mentoring’. It’s unclear if butter cookies were also part of the deal.
As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.
The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.
What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.
[Ireland] This is big news for people who experienced the dotcom crash, survived and brought home a t-shirt: Boo.com, once an online fashion retail outlet that went spectacularly bust in early 2000 after burning through approximately $135 million in VC money in about a year and a half, just got acquired (once again).
Actually, it’s Boo.com’s latest parent company Web Reservations International that was purchased by affiliates of private equity investment firm Hellman and Friedman for an undisclosed amount. But it’s Boo.com, people!
Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. He currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund. He is an advisor or investor for several companies including Mint, RichRelevance, Simply Hired, SlideShare and Twilio, among others. He’s also founder of Startup2Startup and GeeksOnAPlane, a tech tour that connects global tech entrepreneurs. I spoke to him at the recent global geek meetup, Rethink Hawaii about his impressions of the European startup scene following his recent travels here.
Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering.
At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com.
