EuroCrunch

Gift Ideas Blog

2011-06-10T11:58:00.002+02:00

LemonFund has started a blog on gift ideas with a number of new deals and partners.

There's also a section where people can request gift ideas or submit gift ideas.

Websites Providing Group Gifts

2011-04-18T10:17:00.004+02:00

LemonFund has just launched a new user interface and added a group gift service.

LemonFund is a free gift registry where people can share wish lists for any occasion (for example honeymoon registry, birthday registry, babyshower registry), browse gift ideas and exchange gifts.

Other companies providing similar group gift services are Gift Project and friendfund.

Tags: EuroCrunch,

LemonFund Enters Social Commerce Fray

2011-03-12T12:28:00.003+01:00

Social commerce space saw a new entrant in 2011 in LemonFund, a wish list service that makes it easy to send and receive gifts and donation to your friends' gift funds or "lemon funds".

Users can add gifts that they would like to receive to their private wish lists from the LemonFund site or from any internet site by using a bookmarklet.

Tags: EuroCrunch, social commerce

Dutch Sharewire Taking Mobile Content Off Deck (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-11T20:58:00.000+01:00

Dutch Sharewire Taking Mobile Content Off Deck - 3-year-old mobile payments company based in the Netherlands raises €1.2M from Main Capital.

Links: Sharewire, Main Capital

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sharewire, Main Capital, VC, Venture Capital

SMSConnect renames itself to Zong (Zong.com)

2007-02-10T19:18:00.000+01:00

SMSConnect renames itself to Zong - Premium SMS and mobile application platform SMSConnect run by Geneva-based Echovox decided to change brand into a more web-2.0-ish "Zong".

Tags: EuroCrunch, Zong, Echovox, SMSConnect

Fon and BT consider tie-up for Wi-Fi broadband sharing (ITPRO)

2007-02-09T21:36:00.000+01:00

Fon and BT consider tie-up for Wi-Fi broadband sharing - BT hopes to boost its BT Fusion customer base through a partnership with Spanish FON.

Tags: EuroCrunch, FON, BT, wifi

Telfish Seeded to Enable Mobile Churn (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-08T20:36:00.000+01:00

Telfish Seeded to Enable Mobile Churn - Tariff comparison engine for the mobile telecom industry in Germany raised an undisclosed amount of early stage capital.

Telfish

Tags: EuroCrunch, telfish

Thoughts on Music (Steve Jobs)

2007-02-07T06:21:00.000+01:00

Thoughts on Music - "Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard."

Tags: EuroCrunch, Apple, music, DRM, FairPlay

Plazes secures A-Round (Plazes Blog)

2007-02-05T20:52:00.000+01:00

Plazes secures A-Round - Social geo-networking company raises €2.7m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Plazes

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google (Telegraph)

2007-02-05T05:48:00.000+01:00

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google - European mobile carriers and Cingular claim their share of future advertising revenues from mobile search at the annual industry trade in Barcelona next week.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Google, Yahoo, mobile search, mobile, Vodafone, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Hutchison Whampoa

Sqoops Takes Investment From Computec Media (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-02T17:05:00.000+01:00

Sqoops Takes Investment From Computec Media - German casual online gaming company takes second round of financing.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sqoops, Computec Media, VC

MySQL prepares for IPO and reveals Oracle endorsement (Computer Business Review)

2007-02-01T17:33:00.000+01:00

MySQL prepares for IPO and reveals Oracle endorsement - With over 10,000 paying customers and an installed based of 10 million users, swedish MySQL AB is planning to go public before year end.

Tags: EuroCrunch, mysql, Oracle, InnoDB, ipo

Atomico From Zennstrom and Ljungman Part Of Founder Fund Trend (alarm:clock euro)

2007-01-30T15:40:00.000+01:00

Atomico From Zennstrom and Ljungman Part Of Founder Fund Trend - Skype founder's investment vehicle Atomico announced its first investment in Germany-based advertising tech company Wunderloop.

Tags: EuroCrunch, atomico, wunderloop, founder fund

Spanish start-up Whisher promises free Wi-Fi for all (CNET News.com)

2007-01-30T15:15:00.000+01:00

Spanish start-up Whisher promises free Wi-Fi for all - Whisher, financed by Swisscom and Benchmark Capital, encourages broadband sharing via WiFi. It competes among others with another Spain-based startup FON, backed by Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Whisher, fon, wifi

LinkedIn Connects to $12.8 Million (RedHerring)

2007-01-30T14:58:00.000+01:00

LinkedIn Connects to $12.8 Million - LinkedIn raises money from Bessemer Ventures and European Founders Fund to finance growth in Europe and compete with market leader Xing (formerly known as OpenBC).

Tags: EuroCrunch, linkedin, xing, openbc, social networking

Jajah dreams of a 2007 IPO (GigaOM)

2007-01-30T14:31:00.000+01:00

Jajah dreams of a 2007 IPO - Austrian-based VoIP company reported to be thinking about an IPO later this year.

Tags: EuroCrunch, jajah

Top 2006 M&As in Europe

2007-01-07T03:23:00.000+01:00

Max Bleyleben has an excellent round-up on top European M&A transactions in 2006. 8 were above $100 million.
An unusual transaction in the technology space was the leveraged buy-out of venture-backed eDreams by private equity firm TA Associates.

Tags: EuroCrunch, exit, vc, venture capital, private equity, eDreams, TA Associates

Desktop application Tag2Find to tag files

2006-12-31T14:25:00.000+01:00

Austria-based Tag2Find launched a technical overview of a desktop application for Windows XP and Windows Vista. It's a light application to tag files stored locally on a computer's hard drive à-la flickr or del.icio.us

Tags: EuroCrunch, tag2find, flickr, del.icio.us

Gmail massive outage

2006-12-14T07:58:00.000+01:00

I still can't access my Gmail account at 2am EST. It's been down for over 4 hours now.
A few other people are experiencing the same.
I just hope tomorrow morning my 800MB of emails are still there ...

Update: GMail is working fine. I had to do "Clear my private data" on Firefox to get it to work again, maybe a cached DNS problem.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Gmail, Google, Gmail outage, DNS

Le Web 3: the Aftermath

2006-12-14T02:43:00.000+01:00

What happened at LeWeb3, the conference organized by French blogger and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur ?
Last-minute panel with ex-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perezm and French Presidential candidates Nikolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou raised a wave of unrest across the blogosphere:

LeWeb3 Fallout. As A Speaker, I’m Not Happy
LeWeb3 is political propaganda
Loic Lemeur: Betraying 1000 attendees for his own political ambitions?
Why are they there?
Le Web 3 hacked by French politicians
Election campaign at LeWeb3
Le Web 3: The Sarkozy Show
Tom Raftery: Le Web 3 renamed Loic (pronounced Le Week)
leweb3: no politicians for the politics and blogging session
Le Web 3: old fashioned propaganda

Tom Morris is collecting more quotes on the conference.

Sam Sethi had to leave TechCrunch UK, as explained by Arrington.

Anyone has positive comments? Please send them to me.

Tags: EuroCrunch, LeWeb3

PagineGialle unveils amazing visual maps beta

2006-12-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

PagineGialle.it, the leading Italian yellow pages, recently launched a leading edge flash-powered map product online. It features 2D streets, satellite and hybrid maps à-la Google Maps, eye-bird imagery and a stunning, fast, browser-embedded 3D model complete with altitude information.

I was especially pleased by the 3D model that is faster and better than Microsoft's Live heavyweight Internet Explorer plug-in.

At the moment, only Italy is covered by high resolution satellite imagery.

Tags: EuroCrunch, pagine gialle, yellow pages, maps

Top 10 European Internet Startups to watch in 2007

2006-12-11T06:00:00.000+01:00

Here's my list of European startups to watch in 2007:

1. Sulake Corporation
Creator of the online community Habbo, it pioneered together with Linden Labs new monetization strategies for virtual worlds.

2. Last.fm
Community website for music fans that is growing into the ultimate post-filter in a long-tail media industry.

3. Blyk
Will launch in mid 2007 as the first free, ad-supported mobile carrier targeted to the youth market.

4. FON
Counting on investments from Skype, Google, Sequoia and Index, FON plans to blanket the world with user-contrubuted hotspots.

5. The Venice Project
Started by Zennstrom and Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa), brings peer-to-peer technology to video streaming to disrupt the television industry.

6. MX Telecom
A mobile application and service provider, has seen fast-growing revenues over the past years and is well positioned to provide the infrastructure to emerging mobile 2.0 businesses.

7. WAYN
Social networking website that plans to monetize its traffic in the travel and lifestyle markets.

8. Xing
Formerly known as OpenBC, the company is the main player in European business social networking space.

9. Quintura
A new player in the visual search space, Quintura recently closed a round of financing to find its way in this lucrative but crowded space.

10. Netvibes
Emerging as a category leader in AJAX desktops and startpages, Netvibes is well positioned to become a web 2.0 success story.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sulake, Habbo, last.fm, Blyk, FON, Google, Skype, Venice Project, MX Telecom, Quintura, Xing, OpenBC, Netvibes

Italian startup, did you mean "italian starter"?

2006-12-11T00:18:00.000+01:00

Today I read Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Ranking (pdf, 1237 kB). Companies from UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Turkey, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Denmark, Portugal are represented.

Right, Italy is not in the list. Surprised I went on to Google to search for "Italian startup" to find some exceptions to the rule. Ironically, Google thought I mispelled my query ...

Sadly, my home country is running late in the technology and entrepreneurship race of the 21st century. Being late now means being irrelevant in 2050. If I were prime minister, this would be my top priority.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Italy, entrepreneurship,

Netherlands-based security software Consul acquired by IBM

2006-12-05T19:30:00.000+01:00

IBM acquired security software Consul, based in the Netherlands.
See IBM press release.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Consul, IBM

European entrepreneurship role models

2006-12-05T18:49:00.000+01:00

I have just come across an interesting article on Internation Herald Tribune article on how German Samwer brothers sold $320M worth of companies in the last 4 years. Their most known successful companies were online auction site Alando.de (acquired by eBay for $50M in 1999) and Jamba (acquired by Verisign for $273M in 2004).
It is a good article on european entrepreneurship.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Alando, Jamba, Verisign, eBay, Samwer

Recipient-paid text messages and mobile innovation

2006-12-05T03:40:00.000+01:00

European mobile telecom carriers do not charge the recipient of a text message (SMS), but only the sender. They also charge an interconnection fee for internet-originated messages.

In the US, the message charge is usually split in half between sender (10 cents) and recipient (10 cents) and a fair number of active texters opt for a flat rate of about $5/month to get unlimited text messages. Since somebody is paying to receive a message, carriers do not charge any interconnection fee for internet-originated messages and have all incentives to keep the doors open to incoming messages. All American mobile carriers provide reliable SMTP gateways free of charge. In other words you can text say any Verizon phone sending a simple e-mail message to number@vtext.com. The recipient will pay for that message.

Even though this pricing policy has raised some discussions, I believe that the possibility to send text messages for free has spurred a number of startups to explore a variety of mobility services at a very low cost. I'm thinking about DodgeBall (acquired in 2005 by Google) and more recently Zemble, Pinger and other mobile application providers that could enter the mobile market simply developing an email application without incurring any interconnection costs.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Pinger, DodgeBall, Zemble, sms

UK ahead of US in online advertisement and broadband penetration

2006-12-05T01:22:00.000+01:00

Interesting article on the New York Times today, pointing out that it's not only in mobile penetration that the US is lagging behind. Both share of online advertisement of the overall ad spending and broadband penetration surged in the past five years, causing the UK to overtake the US in 2006.

Online advertising is racing ahead in Britain, growing at a roughly 40 percent annual rate, and is expected to account for as much as 14 percent of overall ad spending this year, according to media buying agencies. That is the highest level in the world, and more than double the percentage in the United States.

Similarly, broadband access in Britain at first lagged access in the United States, but has since surged. In 2002, 15.7 percent of American households had broadband compared with only 5.1 percent of British homes, according to eMarketer. This year, Britain is ahead, with 47.4 percent of homes having broadband, which is more than the 43.9 percent in the United States.

Tags: EuroCrunch, broadband, online advertising

EuroCrunch LiveChat

2006-12-03T01:50:00.000+01:00

Tags: EuroCrunch, LiveChat, InCircles

Musicovery re-launches a visual music discovery service

2006-12-02T23:43:00.000+01:00

After a preview few months ago that was temporarily closed down due to bandwidth (and maybe copyright) woes, I was happy to see through del.icio.us popular page that Musicovery re-launched its music visualization and discovery streaming service, both in English and French.

I couldn't find much information about the company; their beta1 preview was available in French only, so I guess they are based somewhere in France.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Musicovery

Car-sharing Zipcar raises $25M Round C and launches in London

2006-12-02T23:27:00.000+01:00

ZipCar, a car-sharing company started out of MIT in 1999, announced a $25M third round of equity financing to expand its operations to new geographies. In particular, they are deploying 25 cars in London, expecting to grow to 100 vehicles in 2007.

I am a very happy Zipcar customer here in Boston, I think they are bound for success in Europe as well.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Zipcar, car sharing

EU VC and PE fund raising slows down by over 40% in Q3 2006

2006-12-02T23:07:00.000+01:00

European venture capitals raised €451.65M in Q3, down from €903.81M in the same quarter last year. Private equity and buyout firms raised €3.13B in Q3 2006, down from €5.19B in Q3 2005.

That's what emerges from Dow Jones VentureOne's Q3 2006 European Funds Release (xls). Press release (pdf).

Tags: EuroCrunch, vc, private equity

RedHerring 100 Europe Nominations

2006-12-02T22:55:00.000+01:00

RedHerring is looking for nominations for the hottest 100 privately held tech companies in Europe. Here's the submission form.

Tags: EuroCrunch, RedHerring

Web analytics company WiredMinds gets funded

2006-12-02T00:48:00.000+01:00

WiredMinds, a company based in Stuttgart, Germany developing web analytics solutions, received an undisclosed amount of money from Creathor, a German venture capital firm.

Read Creathor's press release (pdf, in german).

Tags: EuroCrunch, WiredMinds, Creathor

Major reorg at Skype

2006-11-30T05:04:00.000+01:00

Om Malik reported that Skype is undergoing a major reorganization effort: 14 senior executive are leaving the company.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Skype

WAYN raises $11M from Esprit Capital Partners

2006-11-28T05:26:00.000+01:00

UK-based Where are you now (WAYN), a travel and lifestyle website with a social networking flavor to it, announced it raised $11M from Esprit Capital Partners.

The company experienced significant growth in the past 12 months leveraging on viral effects of its online community.

Tags: EuroCrunch, wayn, vc, social networking

Real Estate aggregator Igglo expands to the UK backed by Benchmark

2006-11-24T22:05:00.000+01:00

Finnish real estate aggregator website Igglo announced a €12.5M investment from Benchmark Europe to expand its business to the UK.

Igglo will face competition from local players Nestoria, Zoomf, OnOneMap and Extate.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Igglo, real estate, web2.0

European companies financed by VCs in 2006

2006-11-23T20:33:00.000+01:00

Paul Fisher, associate director at First Capital, posted a round-up on venture capital activity in european internet and media companies.
In particular he posted the list of all seed and round A investments so far, must read.

Companies mentioned so far:
Aggregator (IP TV), All Peers (private P2P file sharing), AutoQuake (sell cars online), Bebo (social networking), Daily Motion (online video), Eyeka (mobile video and image hosting), Fon (WiFi network), Igglo (real estate), last.fm (music recommendation and filter system), Mind Candy (gaming), MooPrint (custom printing), Netvibes (ajax desktop), Pageflake (ajax desktop), Quintura (visual search), Qype (local search and reviews), Skinkers (RSS), Soflow (enterprise networking), Spreadshirt (custom T-shirts), Stardoll (online community), Viagogo (online tickets), Wiggle (e-commerce), Yuuguu (enterprise collaboration).

Tags: EuroCrunch, vc, venture capital

Helipad Online Notepad

2006-11-23T04:03:00.000+01:00

Today I couldn't find a note I took on some of my paper notepads, so I thought how great it would be to have a web-based searchable taggable repository of notes.
So I went online and found out about Helipad, an online notepad service launched just 2 weeks ago by Helicoid, a two-person web company developing online applications.
It's very easy and fast to use. It has an open XML and JavaScript API for third-party developers to build extensions and plug-in. I am particularly interested in the Mac application that is coming out to write notes offline and sync them later with the online service.

Pitch announces ad-supported mobile social software

2006-11-23T01:58:00.000+01:00

Pitch launched a new mobile social networking site at uk.pitch.mobi providing free mobile content with an ad-based business model.

Company's press release.

Visual Search Quintura gets funded by Mangrove

2006-11-21T22:29:00.000+01:00

Russia-based Quintura Visual Search Engine received an undisclosed amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, an early investor in Skype, as well as ABRT Venture Fund, and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston.
See the company's blog entry.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Quintura, search, visual search

Blyk, free ad-supported mobile operator

2006-11-21T18:37:00.000+01:00

Today MobileCrunch wrote about Blyk, a mobile operator that plans to launch in the UK in mid-2007. The company wants to extend the ad-based business model to mobile telephony, providing free service to young people. Blyk was founded Blyk was co-founded by CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä, former president of Nokia Corporation, and Antti Öhrling, Chairman and CEO of Contra Group and can count on a high-flying team.
On the same line, two weeks ago I heard Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) proposing free ad-supported handsets at the Conference Roads to Innovation in Stanford.
How long is it going to take to get a free, Google-supported laptop?

Zamzar launches a web 2.0 file format conversion service

2006-11-21T07:13:00.000+01:00

Scobleizer reported that a new web-based file format conversion service was launched at Zamzar.

BoxUk launches ClickDensity

2006-11-21T00:38:00.000+01:00

BoxUK launched ClickDensity, a JavaScript tool that monitors how users interact with your site. It provides reports of click activity as "heat maps".
The system is totally invisible to users and can be installed by pasting few lines of code in your webpage.
ClickDensity is available on a free trial for 30 days and after that on monthly plans ranging from £2.50 to £200, mostly differentiated by log size and concurrent projects (pricing details).

Fewer, bigger deals in European VC investments

2006-11-19T22:09:00.000+01:00

The quarterly European Venture Capital Report (pdf) released by VentureOne pegs venture capital investment in Europe at €2.97 billion for the first 9 months of 2006. Despite a slow third quarter, total investment for 2006 is expected to surpass 2005 figures. The deal flow is down 26% at 631 financings with a higher median size of €2.5 million.

Benchmark Europe raised €430M

2006-11-19T21:54:00.000+01:00

Benchmark Capital announced it raised €430 million for its European fund. Their investment focus will be on capital-efficient open-source and web 2.0 companies (such as their portfolio company Bebo) as well as on later stage deals, especially in clean technology.

Coverage by Financial Times.

EuroCrunch launches

2006-11-17T21:35:00.000+01:00

There's a lot of activity in Europe in the internet space, but it is usually reported in several fragmented news sources. So today I decided to start this blog, where I will keep track of new European internet companies and their contribution to the Net.
Feel free to tip me off on new services and websites via email.