A new take on the group-buying bandwagon launches today, but this one will attempt to address the information overload about offers, known as “voucher fatigue”, while incentivising local businesses. Keynoir is described as a “private buying club meets Woot”, in reference to the tech site which made its name by having just one offer on one decent product a day. The startup even includes aspects of the old Letsbuyit.com.
But this is not a trivial play. Keynoir has already secured £1.3m of investment from PROFounders Capital, investor Jan Riem and Index Ventures (including Dominique Vidal). Serial entrepreneurs Paul Birch and Andrej Henkler participated. Vidal and Sean Seton-Rogers from PROfounders will be joining the board.
The founders are Philip Wilkinson (founder of the UK’s first price comparison engine which later became Kelkoo), Glen Drury (ex-MD Kelkoo Europe and VP Yahoo), and Jan Riem (technology deal maker). It launches in London this week , and plans to exand across the rest of the UK and Europe by the end of the year. → Read More
[Germany] Berlin-based mobile ad network madvertise has closed a series A round from Earlybird Venture Capital and the startup’s previous investor and co-founder Team Europe Ventures. The actual amount isn’t being disclosed but is said to be in the “medium single-digit million Euros” range.
The new funding will be used by madvertise to leverage its strong position in the growing mobile advertising market in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and for further international expansion, says the company. → Read More
Medialets, an advertising and analytics startup, bet big on the iPhone at the launch of the App Store two years ago, and has been riding the Apple wave ever since. The company is one of the most widely used ad platforms and counts NPR, CNN and Fox as clients. Today, the advertising platform is announcing a Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad, allowing publishers and developers to seamlessly switch between ad networks and first-party ad servers.
The Medialets Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad will allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. The new SDK works with any first or third party ad sever, network or mediator, including AdMob and Quattro Wireless tags. → Read More
There’s just one Android phone currently available in Japan, one of the biggest mobile markets in the world. But the HTC Magic, which Japan’s biggest telco, NTT Docomo, started distributing last summer, will soon be joined by the Sharp IS01 [JP] – which is not really a “smartphone”, but rather being marketed as an MID or “smartbook” instead. → Read More
This morning, eBay introduced two new iPhone applications, designed to make sellers’ lives easier when it comes to listing items on the giant online marketplace from their Apple phones. The ecommerce juggernaut also casually mentioned that it is on pace to reach a whopping $1.5 billion worth of goods sold via mobile phones in 2010 – more than double the mobile GMV (gross merchandise value) it registered in 2009 ($600 million).
The company claims its primary iPhone app, which is available in more than 190 countries and eight languages, has been downloaded 8 million times to date, and that 1 item is purchased using eBay mobile every 2 seconds. Also, eBay disclosed that it will have an iPad version of the eBay app ready at launch day (April 3). → Read More
It’s not the norm for a startup based in London’s Silicon Roundabout (yes, it’s our little bit of the Valley) to be in the hardware business, let alone the highly competitive world of consumer electronics. But that’s precisely the position that 3view find themselves in.
The company’s Internet connected set-top box, which marriages the worlds of over-the-air broadcast television and Internet TV (IPTV), is poised to compete directly with TVs and set-tops from the likes of Sony, Pioneer, Sharp, Humax, Pace and others, and to some degree, the online video and media playback capabilities of Microsoft’s XBox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 game consoles. → Read More
Although the iPad apparently lacks Flash, that doesn’t mean that rich media won’t be able to function on the device. Yesterday, we heard that Brightcove will stream video in an HTML5 video player as opposed to a Flash unit. And today, Greystripe is announcing that it will be bringing its rich media iFlash ad units to the iPad in May.
Greystripe has been allowing advertisers to use Flash-like technologies in their iPhone advertisements for some time now. The network essentially takes ads created using Flash and transcodes them to run on the iPhone and now the iPad. The technology changes the nature of the Flash ads on the front end but the rich media ad behaves the same way. Greystripe claims that its “iFlash” ads see higher clickthrough rates than even online campaigns, with average CTRs above 1%. And Greystripe says that its mobile iFlash ads increase awareness of a brand and intent to purchase, watch or recommend a particular brand. Brands using Greystripe’s mobile ads include HP, Burger King, Axe, Dunlop and LeapFrog. → Read More
Mobile augmented reality networks still have to prove they can live up to the hype, but that isn’t stopping companies from jumping on the bandwagon at increasing rates. Today, Tagwhat is doing just that by launching in private beta (we have invitation codes for readers) for iPhone and Android users.
Powered by Iryss, which also offers customized mobile and AR software integration solutions for enterprises, Tagwhat is a consumer-facing product that allows people to tag real-world locations and attach information, reviews, links, photos, videos, notes and so on to those particular spots, whether tied to their current location or not. → Read More
Whereas Sharp decided to cautiously embrace Android, Toshiba still seems to be firmly in the Windows camp. After releasing the “iPhone killer TG01” on WinMo 6.5 last year, the company announced another Windows Mobile-based cell phone in Japan today (Toshiba is one of Microsoft’s official “Mobile Partners”, after all). → Read More
Goomzee, a Missoula, MT-based developer of a mobile marketing solution that helps real estate professionals connect with potential buyers, announced this morning that it has secured a $1.5 million Series A round of funding led by Highway 12 Ventures along with additional, undisclosed investors in the US and Europe.
Goomzee’s text message marketing product, Realty Connect (warning, annoying auto-starting demo video on this page), enables real estate agents across the United States to connect to potential buyers who have shown an active interest in a property on sale. → Read More
Yellow Media, owner of Yellow Pages Group, is acquiring Canadian Phone Directories Holdings (aka Canpages), a national local search and directories publisher.
The seller is a consortium of investors led by PE firm HM Capital Partners, and the purchase price is approximately $225 million. → Read More
GOOD, the company behind the integrated media platform for “people who give a damn”, has added some serious weight to its leadership team with the addition of three high-profile advisors.
The company announced today that YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley, Chief Marketing Officer and President, Joint Ventures, PepsiCo Jill Beraud and founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org Charles Best have joined GOOD’s Advisory Board. → Read More
AllGoob, a French search engine publisher, has raised a €1 million first round with Newfund for its European development and new search engine, wiPikit.
The company is behind job search engine success JobiJoba - which was launched in 2007 and is now one of the largest job databases in France, uniting over 300,000 job offers with 700,000 candidates on the site per month. The site also launched in Belgium in 2008 along with the UK, the US and Spain in 2009. But the investment is curious as JobiJoba is definitely not a lone star in the French market. → Read More
AquaAntics Water Bomb Factory is genius, should win an international peace award DIY: Convert a disposable camera into a slave flash DIY: Get medieval with the Mini-Trebuchet SIMBox, the texting incontinence pants TomTom brings free lifetime traffic and maps to the XL and XXL GPS models → Read More
Billed as an iPad competitor, the WePad is not vaporware, but is in fact, The Chosen One. At least, that’s the view of some, who are hailing the WePad as the saviour of the German print publishing industry.
While Apple is still racing to the wire to secure enough media content partnerships for the iPad before its launch this week, the WePad has already bagged Europe’s biggest publisher, Gruner + Jahr. → Read More
Facebook has lately been ramping up efforts to obtain registered trademarks in the United States and other countries and regions for a number of products and services it offers or intends to offer in the future.
Fresh off the heels of applying for a trademark for Credits, its virtual payment system, the company is now attempting to gain exclusive rights to the use of the term “Facebook Developer Garage”. → Read More
Push Notifications on the iPhone are great, but they can be impossible to manage. That’s why Boxcar, a Push Notification management app, is brilliant, and has long been one of my favorite apps. Unfortunately, as great as it is, like Apple itself, it is also a closed system. But now, it’s opening up.
What I mean by closed system is that Boxcar only serves up notifications for a select few services, such as Twitter and Facebook. But with its new Provider feature (and API), anyone can tap into the Boxcar platform to enable Push Notifications through the service. → Read More
A new take on the group-buying bandwagon launches today, but this one will attempt to address the information overload about offers, known as “voucher fatigue”, while incentivising local businesses. Keynoir is described as a “private buying club meets Woot”, in reference to the tech site which made its name by having just one offer on one decent product a day. The startup even includes aspects of the old Letsbuyit.com.
But this is not a trivial play. Keynoir has already secured £1.3m of investment from PROFounders Capital, investor Jan Riem and Index Ventures (including Dominique Vidal). Serial entrepreneurs Paul Birch and Andrej Henkler participated. Vidal and Sean Seton-Rogers from PROfounders will be joining the board.
The founders are Philip Wilkinson (founder of the UK’s first price comparison engine which later became Kelkoo), Glen Drury (ex-MD Kelkoo Europe and VP Yahoo), and Jan Riem (technology deal maker). It launches in London this week , and plans to exand across the rest of the UK and Europe by the end of the year. → Read More
My bad — maybe.
Earlier today, I reported that Google Buzz, Google’s new social sharing service, was sending less traffic than FriendFeed, a service which has been a ghost town in recent months. It turns out there’s probably a good explanation for this. You see, in January, Google started defaulting all Gmail traffic to the HTTPS (secure) version of its domain. Previously, it was defaulting to the regular HTTP (unsecure) domain. As a result of this change, all traffic referrers are scrubbed before being picked up by services like Google Analytics. → Read More
[UK] A million dollars, baby. That’s the amount paid by UK price comparison site ‘Top 10 Broadband and Top 10 Mobile Phones‘ to purchase the Top10.com domain name from US-based investor Idealab in a cash plus equity deal. Apparently, this also makes it one of the most expensive domain names ever purchased by a British company.
Under the terms of the deal, Top 10 Broadband and Top 10 Mobile Phones will pay Idealab $200,000 and hand over a 7% share in the newly branded company Top10.com Media Ltd. Bill Gross, Idealab’s founder, will join Top 10′s advisory board.
To us, however, it feels just a little frothy. → Read More
