After six… Wait, let’s make that seven months of uncertainty, we might finally have something solid to work with. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said in an interview with CNET that the Droid Bionic will land in September.
Just so we’re clear, that’s nine months after the phone was announced at CES, five months after rumors circulated of its cancellation, and four months after Motorola promised it would arrive this summer via tweet. → Read More
The trend in VC over the last couple of years has been towards smaller sized funds which do several, faster investments. Now, new fund Hummingbird Ventures has raised a €30 million ($42 million) venture capital fund for investments in early stage ecommerce and cloud computing companies in the EMEA region, with plenty of emphasis on the “MEA” part of that acronym. Welcome to the party guys.
The investment team behind Hummingbird controlled the funds previously invested by Big Bang Ventures, which invested in DCT (later sold to Symantec) and Qlayer (sold to Sun/Oracle), among a number of other investments. In 2009, Hummingbird was one of the first VC funds to focus on the burgeoning Turkish market, completing four investments in Turkey and the Middle-East and North Africa region. → Read More
Startup business Ticket Tailor has launched in the UK from its Shoreditch HQ, waving two fingers at the more established event ticket intermediaries who they claim are overpriced and run an out-dated business model. The company is currently seeking funding.
What’s the beef? Founder Jonny White says it’s time for everyone to stop paying a fee per ticket bought, which is the standard pattern for all of the major ticketing companies at the moment. “This is the standard model amongst the main ticketing companies including TicketMaster, EventBrite, TicketLeap, and Amiando,” he says. “We charge a monthly subscription which ranges from free to £75 a month, similar to other SaaS business applications, Our system is free until someone sells their first ticket.” He believes his system has saved customers over £20,000 since its January launch. → Read More
A new health startup encouraging patients to “self-manage” their health has been launched with the backing of the UK’s National Health Service. NHS Consultant Dawson King, the healthcare entrepreneur behind the portal, now intends to take the idea global. Think Yammer for patients.
NHS.Info is designed to allow patients, healthcare professionals and providers to exchange and use health information and encourage patient self-management. It’s the first product from new start-up company Cambridge Healthcare, which is working in partnership with the NHS and NHS IT body Connecting for Health. → Read More
Managing local listings across the Web is a nightmare for small businesses, and a huge opportunity for local advertising startup Yext. The New York City company just closed a $10 million series D round, led by Michael Walrath through his WGI Group investment vehicle. Other existing investors IVP, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. Walrath is the founder of Right Media (which was sold to Yahoo for $850 million) and became chairman of Yext last March.
This was very much an internal round, but at a higher valuation than the $25 million C round two years ago (which it called a B at the time, but was technically a C). Yext’s main business is pay-per-call ads for local businesses. And that is a decent sized business that brings in revenues in the double-digit millions, and the company even entertained some acquisition offers. “We thought about whether or not to sell or do something that could be 100 times as big,” says CEO Howard Lerman, “and we chose the latter.”
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Hired in 1999, Doug Edwards was employee #59 at Google. Edward’s six year stint in Mountain View has been recorded in his highly readable new book I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59 where he reveals what life was really like at the plex in those early years.
Earlier this week, TechcrunchTV got lucky when Edwards came into our San Francisco studio to tell me what he really thinks about Google. He didn’t disappoint – confessing why Eric Schmidt is the “Joe Biden of tech”, why the “Don’t Be Evil” slogan could only hurt Google and why Larry Page can be a grown-up CEO. → Read More